JNS.org..
20 September '18..
When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offers up a Middle East peace plan, the world stops and listens. Or at least it used to. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner has been opining about the region for decades, and the shopworn feel to his advice is beginning to feel about as tired as a prose style that remains as awash in clichés today as it ever was.
In 2002, when Friedman sought to play midwife to a peace initiative from Saudi Arabia, the result was a public-relations coup for the columnist/author, even if it turned out that there was less to the idea than met the eye. But it isn’t likely that his latest set of suggestions for Middle East peace—in which he offers the Palestinians a plan for putting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a pickle—will cause much of a splash. Friedman still writes as if he was uniquely positioned to speak truth to both sides and the world is hanging on his every word.
It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that his writing is insignificant—and that’s not only because he retains his influential perch at the Times. Friedman has evolved over the years into a pitch-perfect indicator of conventional wisdom. If you want to know what is wrong with the thinking that dominated U.S. foreign policy until the Trump administration—and what the people who believe they will run things again after they hope U.S President Donald Trump is swept out of Washington—then you should read Friedman’s columns.
(Continue to Full Column)
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