I Don't Believe a Single Word Tom Friedman Writes

His recent essay on Trump and Ukraine is abysmal.

A couple weeks ago at work I received an email with the latest editorial piece by the NY Times’ foreign affairs opinion columnist Thomas Friedman titled, I Don’t Believe a Single Word Trump and Putin Say About Ukraine. It was shared with a large group of colleagues, signaling it as an important thought piece to read and consider. As soon as I saw it, my immediate response was an over-the-top eyeroll followed by a loud sigh and perhaps an expletive or two.

I fondly remembered reading

Matt Taibbi

’s recurring Rolling Stone Magazine column¹ where he would mercilessly ridicule Thomas Friedman’s writings, long held as a leading strategic thinker and voice of the liberal elite in his NY Times editorial page and in his seven (!) books on geopolitics, foreign affairs, and globalization. Taibbi’s humorous rebuttals and sharp criticisms often laid bare just how nonsensical Friedman’s writings, and by extension, his analysis and critical thinking were. And yet, Friedman was and is part of the elite intelligentsia class in America, influencing policy and decisionmakers across the world on critical issues.

Now, it is not my purpose to personally attack Friedman. I have no idea what kind of person he is. He could be a wonderful human being, husband, father, son — and I hope that he is. He also seems to have been an excellent journalist covering Israeli-Arab relations and Middle East geopolitics in the 1970s and 80s. The problem I have with him is not personal —it is with the fact that his writings show a serious lack of analysis and critical thinking but continues to be thought of as deep, thoughtful, and useful to the self-perceived elite and patrician class in America and to the broader liberal (in a political sense) population.

So with that in mind, I will take you through Friedman’s latest editorial piece about how Trump and Putin are essentially working together to carve up Ukraine. Here we go…

I Don’t Believe A Single Word Trump and Putin Say About Ukraine
by Thomas Friedman

The News York Times (March 18) - Ever since President Trump returned to office and began trying to make good on his boast about ending the Ukraine war in days, thanks to his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, I’ve had this gnawing concern that something was lost in translation in the bromance between Vlad and Don.

When the interpreter tells Trump that Putin says he’s ready to do anything for “peace” in Ukraine, I’m pretty sure what Putin really said was he’s ready to do anything for a “piece” of Ukraine.

You know those homophones — they can really get you in a lot of trouble if you’re not listening carefully. Or if you’re only hearing what you want to hear.

Friedman begins the piece by framing Trump’s relationship with Putin as a bromance, signaling to the average NYT reader the author remains firmly on their team. Orange man bad, he like Putin, he will destroy Ukraine because he is a Russian puppet! Then Friedman tries to explain through a “humorous” pun how Putin is going to pull a fast one on Trump by craftily taking pieces of Ukraine in a peace settlement, as if Putin hasn’t already made that objective abundantly clear for years.

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and has already claimed control over four eastern provinces in Ukraine, culminating in Russian “elections” in September 2022 which brought Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson under nominal Russian control. Much of those lands are under Russian military control now and it has been widely reported the Russian defense minister said he aims to militarily control all four of those provinces by the end of this year. The Russian objective to keep parts of Ukrainian territory is not a secret, and it is well understood by the Trump Administration.

If anyone wants to look at the Trump Administration’s approach to peace in Ukraine, go read the transcript of Secretary of State Rubio’s March 2 interview with George Stephanopoulos. Rubio says clearly:

The only way it ends is if Vladimir Putin comes to the negotiating table…Now, maybe their claims or what they want, their demands, will be unreasonable. We don’t know, but we have to bring them to the table…The Russians — and I’ve said this from the very beginning maybe they don’t want a deal either. We don’t know. But we haven’t talked to them in three years, but maybe they do.

Seems like a reasonable approach to me. Peace only comes through negotiation at this point — there will not be a military outcome that is preferable to Ukraine under the current circumstances. So diplomacy must be activated. This is basic international statecraft. Our leaders need to stop clinging to ideology and get on with the hard work of diplomacy and negotiations where actual hard decisions must be made, not tweets and empty expressions of solidarity and how they are saving democracy. Nowhere has Trump or his Administration said they will agree to a peace settlement at any cost. This will be difficult, and maybe impossible to bring about, but they are going to try. Makes sense to me.

Now back to Friedman.

The Times reported that in his two-and-a-half-hour phone call with Trump on Tuesday, Putin agreed to halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kremlin, but Putin made clear that he would not agree to the general 30-day cease-fire that the United States and Ukraine had agreed upon and proposed to Russia.

The Kremlin also said that Putin’s “key condition” for ending the conflict was a “complete cessation” of foreign military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv — in other words, stripping Ukraine naked of any ability to resist a full Russian takeover of Ukraine. More proof, if anyone needed it, that Putin is not, as Trump foolishly believed, looking for peace with Ukraine; he’s looking to own Ukraine.

Again, this should not come as a surprise to anyone with a pulse who has been following the conflict in Ukraine in any detail. Putin has made his objectives clear for years, and more so since full scale war started in February 2022. He also INVADED THE COUNTRY to achieve this goal, spending hundreds of billions in Russian treasure and costing hundreds of thousands in blood. Putin has laid out his key conditions, the United States has likely done the same in some form, and now the negotiations begin. As Secretary Rubio made abundantly clear, the outcome of these negotiations are uncertain, but they must be attempted to end the war. And just because Putin said what he wants, it doesn’t mean that is what he’ll get. Perhaps Putin is looking for peace, but its just not the peace Friedman wants and demands.

What is the alternative that Friedman puts forward? Keep funding Ukraine so tens of thousands more will die in an unending conflict? How does he see this ending in the world we all inhabit — not the world he wishes were real. Seems like Freidman hasn’t really thought this through in great detail. .

All that said, you will pardon me, but I do not trust a single word that Trump and Putin say about their private conversations on Ukraine — including the words “and” and “the,” as the writer Mary McCarthy famously said about the veracity of her rival Lillian Hellman. Because something has not smelled right from the start with this whole Trump-Putin deal-making on Ukraine.

I just have too many unanswered questions. Let me count the ways.

Ok, here is where we should be hit with some deep analysis from Friedman on the potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine and what he thinks the right path is.

For starters, it took Secretary of State Henry Kissinger over a month of intense shuttle diplomacy to produce the disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria that ended the 1973 war — and all of those parties wanted a deal. Are you telling me that two meetings between Trump’s pal Steve Witkoff and Putin in Moscow and a couple of phone calls between Putin and Trump are enough to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine on reasonable terms for Kyiv?

Trump couldn’t sell a hotel that quickly — unless he was giving it away.

Wait, wait — unless he was giving it away. …

Here Friedman compares Trump’s initial grasp at peace to the incremental shuttle diplomacy of Kissinger in January-March 1974 after the Arab states’ attack on Israel on October 6, 1973. Well, the West had a similar opportunity to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the spring of 2022, with a potential deal nearing by April, but as has been widely reported, the deal fell apart after Boris Johnson and Ukraine’s Western backers apparently told Zelensky to fight on. Perhaps if Tony Blinken had undertaken some shuttle diplomacy in the months after the Russian initial invasion then he would be hailed as a great statesman that ended a war just like Kissinger did.

Instead, we are now three years on with hundreds of billions spent and hundreds of thousands dead and wounded. It is not the same negotiating environment. Comparing the Kissinger shuttle diplomacy to what Trump is just starting now is not comparing apples to apples. I’ll again refer Friedman to Secretary Rubio’s comments to Stephanopoulos on March 2 — this is the start of negotiations; there is no expectation this will be easy or quick. But you have to start the dialogue somewhere.

Also, Kissinger was very close with President Nixon — perhaps even pals like Trump and Witkoff’s relationship? Kissinger was a proponent of detente with the Soviet Union and China, trying to reduce American tensions with both. Is Trump not trying to do the same with Russia in this instance? Trump views China (rightfully so) as the far greater threat to American power, so he will do what he can to reduce friction with Russia, bring about peace in Ukraine, and ensure the Europeans are picking up more of the security burden in Europe so the United States can focus its efforts at countering China. Not sure if Friedman has even thought about this, but the timeframe for China to try and bring Taiwan back into the national fold is shrinking every day.

When looking at the grand strategic chessboard of the world, Friedman needs to zoom out of Ukraine and look globally. Think, for just a second. United States foreign policy does not begin and end with Ukraine. Even Barack Obama knew this when he told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg (yes, of the Signalgate infamy) that Crimea was a core interest for Moscow, but not for the United States. Its as if the intelligentsia and mainstream media thought leaders today don’t have a memory beyond six months. Does anyone recall the past at all, or do they think we just arrived where we are without prior actions and consequences? Baffling. Everything happening today is in a vacuum, disconnected from any action in the past which may provide context and meaning today.

Ok, now back to Friedman again.

Lord, I hope that is not what we’re watching here. Message to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance: If you sell out Ukraine to Putin, you will forever carry a mark of Cain on your foreheads as traitors to a core value that has animated U.S. foreign policy for 250 years — the defense of liberty against tyranny.

First off, this is Ukraine we’re talking about, right? Liberty? FreedomHouse ranked Ukraine as “Partly Free” in 2021, achieving a 60/100 score (that was down two points from its 2020 ranking) with particularly poor ranking in rule of law. Here is a line from the report’s summary — “…corruption remains endemic, and the government’s initiatives to combat it have met resistance and experienced setbacks. Attacks against journalists, civil society activists, and members of minority groups are frequent, and police responses are often inadequate.” Ah yes, the bastion of liberty that was Ukraine before February 2022, and its only gotten better since!

Second, as a foreign policy “expert” Friedman would do well to study up on his history. Just look at his highly regarded Kissinger — he was the prime implementor of Realpolitik for the United States, aggressively supporting brutal and tyrannical governments in locations throughout Latin America and elsewhere which stamped out early democratic attempts that even hinted at a left/socialist leaning. Kissinger was an ultimate purveyor of national interests and not one to cling to ideologies to drive foreign policy. And yet Friedman holds him up as an example against Trump, who is actually following in Kissinger’s footsteps. Trump is not radically ideological — he has a perception of U.S. core interests and will doggedly pursue a path to enhance those core interests with little ideological underpinnings to his methods.

Friedman again…

Our nation has never so brazenly sold out a country struggling to be free, which we and our allies had been supporting for three years. If Trump and Vance do that, the mark of Cain will never wash off. They will go down in history as “Neville Trump” and “Benedict Vance.” Likewise Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz.

What the actual hell is Friedman talking about? Does he not recall the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021? I know, I know, Trump started that withdrawal at the end of his first term, but the Biden execution was abysmal and embarrassing. Yet no mention of it by Friedman. Or what if we actually look at history in the 20th century? The United States has often left allies they had been supporting high and dry. South Vietnam, anyone? Wasn’t Saddam Hussein an American ally in the 1980s? Or how about Cuban exiles, or the many coups instigated by the U.S. government over the last several decades. Does Friedman have the internet, or any of his books from college, or any of his own books that talk about foreign policy? The lack of context and history continues to astound.

Why else am I suspicious? Because Trump keeps saying that all he wants to do is end “the killing” in Ukraine. I am with that. But the easiest and quickest way to end the killing would be for the side that started the killing, the side whose army invaded Ukraine for utterly fabricated reasons, to get out of Ukraine. Presto — killing over.

This is by far the dumbest paragraph in the entire vapid Friedman essay. And he’s not alone. I keep hearing liberals and pundits make the argument that goes something like, “why is Trump trying to negotiate with Putin to find a solution to end all of the killing — its simple. Putin just needs to give up and send his troops back to Russia. Duh, its that simple! No more killing if Russia just leaves.” I can’t even explain the depths of stupidity of this reasoning. This is not serious thinking. It is just nonsense meant to prevent the need to give any real consideration to what a solution would look like that is different than what the Trump Administration is trying.

Russia can’t, and won’t, just up and leave Ukraine and give away all that its gained over the last decade plus of fighting. It has expended great amounts of treasure, blood, and honor in instigating this war. It has the upper hand on the battlefield. It views Ukraine as an existential issue for its national survival. It has been willing to kill for years to achieve what it has to date. It will not just pack up and walk away from Ukraine to stop the killing.

I just don’t understand how any critical thinker would utter these words with any seriousness. Or why anyone would hear these words and then say, yeah, that’s right. We don’t need to initiate difficult diplomatic outreach (a la Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy) to try and settle an intractable war with irreconcilable differences between war torn peoples. We’ll just tell Russia that they started it, they are bullies, and they should leave Ukraine alone. It works on the playground at elementary school, so it should work in geopolitics. So stupid. He’s not even trying.

Putin needs to enlist Trump’s help only if he wants something more than an end to the killing. I get that Ukraine will have to cede something to Putin. The question is how much. I also get that the only way for Putin to get the extra-large slice that he wants and the postwar restrictions that he wants imposed on Ukraine — without more warfighting — is by enlisting Trump to get them for him.

Nobody, especially Tom Friedman, knows exactly what the United States is willing to accept as part of a peace deal. The Trump Administration has signaled a willingness to discuss options for a negotiated settlement, but it has not said it would accept all of Putin’s demand carte blanche. Again, read the Rubio transcript or do just a bit of research on the topic to know this — its a negotiation. Each side lays out general demands and interests and then the horse-trading commences. Solutions will come if the diplomats and policymakers take a Realpolitik approach. If they remain tied to their ideology and moral virtue signaling, there will be no diplomatic resolution. Just battlefield defeat, which will undoubtedly be worse for Ukraine.

Why else am I suspicious? Because Trump has left all our European allies on the sidelines when he negotiates with Putin. Excuse me, but our European allies have contributed billions of dollars in military equipment, economic aid and refugee assistance to Ukraine — more combined than the United States, which Trump lies about — and they have made clear that they are now ready to do even more to prevent Putin from overrunning Ukraine and coming for them next.

Ok, so here Friedman is right about Europe providing more total financial support to Ukraine. But a lot of Europe’s financial support is in the form of loans, while the United States has provided mostly grants. The U.S. has also provided more military aid than Europe. And if anyone actually pays attention to the Trump Administration’s views on Europe (see JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech or the texts on Signal), it is not confident that Europe is on the same page as America. With that doubt of Europe imbedded in all the major players at the forefront of American foreign policy, why bring them in early to the negotiations? European leaders could barely hide their disdain for President Trump during the elections, and now he is just supposed to trust them with one of his Presidential priorities on an issue he has major disagreements with them on? No thanks.

And what, exactly, has Europe made clear they are willing to do to further support Ukraine as Friedman highlights? Supply European troops on the ground in Ukraine? Good luck convincing Spain and Italy and a slew of other European countries to support that. And what happens to that idea when the United States makes it clear that NATO Article 5 requirements will not apply to those European “peacekeepers” in Ukraine. Poof, that idea disappears. How about the much talked about €800 billion or so in new defense spending the EU has announced? Well, the devil, as always, is in the details. Its not as robust as advertised, and as

Doomberg

has astutely pointed out, European industry is not exactly on sound footing and capable of producing the necessary weapons Europe needs to rearm. Paper tiger, indeed.

So why would Trump enter negotiations with Putin and not bring our best leverage — our allies — with him? And why would he visibly turn U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine off and then on — after shamefully calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator”?

Simple, Trump does not view Europe as a reliable and strong ally. Its a liability to him. And why squeeze Ukraine? Because the White House meeting with Zelensky showed that he was not willing to come to the table to negotiate. Realpolitik in action. No ideology, just circumstances and levers of power. I don’t know if the Trump Administration will be successful in negotiating a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, but at least it is trying. When you have two intransigent parties unwilling to talk, you pressure and flatter them to get them to the table. Whatever it takes to try to achieve peace.

Sorry, that doesn’t smell right to me, either. What made Kissinger and Secretary of State James Baker particularly effective negotiators is that they knew how to leverage our allies to amplify U.S. power. Trump foolishly gives the back of his hand to our allies, while extending an open hand to Putin. That’s how you give up leverage.

Leveraging allies — the biggest asset that we have that Putin does not — “is what smart statecraft is all about,” Dennis Ross, the longtime Middle East adviser to U.S. presidents, told me.

“The key to good statecraft is knowing how to use the leverage that you have — how to marry your means to your objectives. The irony is that Trump believes in leverage — but has not used all the means that he has” in Ukraine, said Ross, the author of the timely, and just published, “Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World.”

To reiterate, Trump does not view Europe as particularly useful allies. In his view, Europe screws the United State economically on trade and doesn’t pay its fair share on defense. It has been two decades since President George W. Bush told NATO allies to pay up. Two decades and four American Presidents who have told Europe it needs to take on more of the defense burden. And what has Europe’s response been? The diplomatic equivalent of double middle fingers while laughing in America’s face while it implements more and more non-tariff trade barriers to American goods.

How do you leverage allies who have nominal military power, a shrinking industrial base who remain tied to the climate cult and net zero economic suicide, and who are committed to social and cultural suicide through unmitigated immigration from cultures that are openly hostile to the Western world? Where, exactly, is the leverage there? Sounds more like a liability. But of course Friedman is still stuck in his post-Cold War mindset and hasn’t updated his foreign policy software in a long time.

What also smells wrong to me is that Trump appears to have no clue why Putin is so nice to him. As a Russian foreign policy analyst in Moscow put it to me recently: “Trump does not get that Putin is merely manipulating him to score Putin’s principal goal: diminish the U.S. international position, destroy its network of security alliances — most importantly in Europe — and destabilize the U.S. internally, thus making the world safe for Putin and Xi.”

Trump refuses to understand, this analyst added, that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both want to see America boxed in to the Western Hemisphere rather than messing around with either of them in Europe or Asia/Pacific — and they see Trump as their pawn to deliver that.

Friedman and the U.S. foreign policy blob can’t see the irony here. The very reason Russia and China have a much closer strategic relationship now is because of the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The massive economic sanctions and the threat of confiscating hundreds of billions of Russian sovereign assets has smashed the confidence of many international stakeholders in the U.S.-led global financial system. The American-led coalition meant to bleed Russia through its war with Ukraine really got China’s attention, especially as it hopes to bring Taiwan back into the Chinese nation once and for all. China and Russia approached the Biden Administration with the same objectives Friedman lays out above, except the Biden Administration policy was simply an unending war in Ukraine that would have bled the West dry and put it at a much more disadvantageous position to counter Chinese actions against Taiwan.

Trump also doesn’t need Putin to reorder the international foreign policy environment. He can do that, and is, all on his own. Trump could very well want the same thing that Friedman claims Putin and Xi want — America to hearken back to the Monroe Doctrine focus of dominating the Western Hemisphere, supporting Europe where it makes sense, instigating a stronger Europe militarily, supporting Asian and other allies when convenient, and letting the rest of the world figure things out on their own. Why should America waste untold amounts of treasure and blood policing the world when the return is often not what was promised?

Finally, and pretty much summing up all of the above, it smells to me that Trump has never made clear what concessions, sacrifices and guarantees he is demanding from Russia to get a peace deal on Ukraine. And who goes into a negotiation without a very clear, unwavering bottom line in terms of core American interests?

Hey Tom, maybe Trump doesn’t want to give away all of his leverage, as you claim he was doing earlier, by telling media, Russia, Ukraine, and everyone else what all of his redlines and objectives are. C’mon, man! This is just lazy writing. Friedman has just given up. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just prompted an AI model to cobble together a bunch of his previous writings about Ukraine, Russia, and Trump and spit out something at the level of reading a NY Times editorial reader could understand.

It is pretty clear that Trump doesn’t believe Ukraine is a core interest to the United States (again, just as Obama judged). I’ll reiterate — Trump wants to shift the entire set of capabilities of American power to face the threat posed by China. That is his perceived number one threat. Not Russia. This is basic understanding of Trump’s foreign policy approach that Friedman and others like him cannot grasp, and at this point, never will.

Friedman continues.

There are sustainable ways to end a war and keep it ended and there are unsustainable ways. It all depends on the bottom line — and if our bottom line departs fundamentally from that of Ukraine’s and our allies’, I don’t think they are going to just roll over for the Trump-Putin bromance.

Hey Tom, newsflash! Wars rarely ever end up like either side wants it to. Nearly all ends to wars are unsustainable — its why war has, and always will, continue. The only time an end to a war is possibly sustainable is when one side completely defeats the other and is able to impose its will on the defeated nation and ideally, like the United States did with Japan after WWII, eventually craft a strong alliance with shared goals under a new government. Has Tom ever read a history book in his life?

Putin wants a Ukraine with a government that is basically the same as his neighboring vassal Belarus, not a Ukraine that is independent like neighboring Poland — a free-market democracy anchored in the European Union.

No shit.

What kind of Ukraine does Trump want? The Belorussian version or the Polish version?

I have absolutely no doubt which one is in Ukraine’s interest, America’s interest and our European allies’ interest. The thing that gnaws at me is that I don’t know what Donald Trump thinks is in his personal interest — and that is all that matters now in Trump’s Washington.

According to Friedman, it is in America’s interest to maintain a constant thorn in Russia’s side, heavily armed, and right on its border feeding into Russian historical fears. Any other perspective is just Trump being selfish and if he doesn’t want Ukraine to be like Poland than that is somehow enhancing his personal interest.

Tell me Tom, how would America respond if Mexico was a strong Russian ally with heavily armed Russian trained troops fitted with capable warfighting platforms? What is Russia instigated a coup in Mexico and installed a President of its choice in Mexico City? Would the United States just suck it up? I am not justifying what Russia did, nor am I sympathetic to their plight, but I do try and have empathy and place myself in other’s shoes to gain a better understanding of their perspectives. Tom, you should try this once and a while. It may help develop better analytical and critical thinking skills.

Until it’s clear that Trump’s bottom line is what should be America’s bottom line — no formal surrendering of Ukrainian territory to Putin, but simply a cease-fire; no membership for Ukraine in NATO, but membership in the European Union; and an international peacekeeping force on the ground, backed up with intelligence and material support from the U.S. — color me very, very skeptical of every word Trump and Putin say on Ukraine — including “and” and “the.”

An intractable and unending conflict is what Freidman lays out above. No formal surrendering of Ukrainian territory means no sustainable way to end the war. He lays out the very things that Putin has said are his red lines. How do you solve that dilemma, Tom? I guess you just yell loud enough that its time for Russia to go home since they started it and they are the bad guys. Simple as that, hey Tom?

His writings continue to confound me. Is he one of the greatest trolls of all time, or is he serious in his writings and believe he is making coherent points and implementable recommendations? I can’t figure it out.

I just saw Friedman came out with another banger piece on the Trump trade and tariff actions. I may have to write another one of these, if I can stomach it.

Please like “🖤” this piece (assuming you do!) and let me know what you think in the comments section. Let me also know if there are current issues you’d like me to address in subsequent posts. Thanks!

1. Yes, I know Taibbi was doing this Friedman schtick before Rolling Stone, but its where I remember it most.