Checking In on Thomas Friedman

For the past four decades, Thomas L. Friedman has been writing about Israel and the broader Middle East for the New York Times. As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, much of educated America got its view of happenings in the Middle East through Friedman’s opinionated reportage. Having done a lot of shoe-leather journalism in Beirut and Jerusalem in the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman knew the personages, issues, and social dynamics that defined the region at that time. In those days he told stories from the region fairly well—filtered, of course, through his own liberal internationalist perspective.

The days when Americans got their news about the Middle East from just a few sources is long gone. Fraying, too, is the liberal internationalist consensus that defined American foreign-policy thinking for decades, even as Russia’s war in Ukraine revealed that it has deeper roots in the American character than one might have thought. Friedman continues to represent an important strand of that thinking.

Checking in on his work is thus a way to gauge the temperature of conventional American opinion on the Middle East. A reading of Friedman certainly confirms what others have noticed for some time: if “mainstream liberal opinion” has not yet abandoned support for Israel, it is certainly moving in that direction. The sources of this movement have been less well understood. One reason may be that like many other commentators, Friedman still views Israel and its neighbors through the assumptions and intellectual categories that dominated American Middle East discourse in the 1990s. But Israel has changed dramatically just over the last decade, to say nothing of the last two or three. And the failure to keep up with those changes is producing a healthy degree of cognitive dissonance.