It’s Not President Trump but Thomas Friedman Who Should Be Ashamed

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warns President Trump that if he continues with the diesel deal with Russia he “will enter the history books in the chapter on leaders who sold out their country’s democratic values to appease a dictator.” Friedman then compares Trump to, who else, Neville Chamberlain, who also, according to Friedman, was a “traitor to his country’s core values.” But, Friedman writes, Trump is worse because Chamberlain was trying to avert a world war whereas Trump is doing the diesel deal supposedly to avoid Republicans losing the midterm elections. The headline for the column says that Trump’s deal “shames us all,” but it’s Thomas Friedman who should be ashamed.

Friedman apparently cares more about Ukrainian “democracy” (in a country under martial law, with elections suspended, where Zelensky rules by decree, referenda are dismissed, opposition parties are banned, and media is nationalized) than with providing some economic relief to American consumers. In his view, making an energy deal with Russia in an effort to lower diesel prices in the United States and thereby lower the costs of goods that are transported by trucks and other diesel vehicles is to be against American “values.” Placing the interests of American consumers ahead of the interests of Ukraine, in Friedman’s world, is to be a “traitor” to America’s core values.

Friedman hasn’t always been so consistent about promoting democratic values abroad. He doesn’t promote democracy in China, for example. In fact, in 2009, he wrote a column extolling the virtues of the Chinese Communist leaders, calling them a “reasonably enlightened group.”

In 2011, he told an Asia Society audience how much he admired China’s “Reaganism” and “capitalism.” Historian Arthur Herman called Friedman “our latter-day Walter Duranty,” the New York Times reporter who praised Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s. David Harsanyi accused Friedman of suffering from “an acute case of authoritarian envy.”

Friedman last year said he wants the United States to collaborate with China on artificial intelligence.