He calls it "The First Law of Petropolitics." It states:
According to the First Law of Petropolitics, the higher the price of global crude oil, the more erosion we see in petro-ist nations in the right to free speech, a free press, free elections, freedom of assembly, government transparency, an independent judiciary and the rule of law, and in the freedom to form independent political parties and nongovernmental organizations. Such erosion does not occur in healthy democracies with oil.
Basically, he argues that the governments of oil-producing nations don't need to give their people rights and freedoms if the government can get money from oil instead of taxes - "tapping oil" instead of "tapping the people."
It's a good argument, though not necessarily a Friedman original (SuperJournalists are very good at putting their names on ideas that have been floating around out there for a while). But is it true? Friedman notes some good examples of where high oil prices have emboldened dictators in recent years:
Iran, awash in oil money, thumbs its nose at U.N. demands for it to desist in its nuclear adventures and daily threatens to wipe Israel off the map. President Vladimir Putin of Russia, awash in oil money, jails his opponents at home and cozies up to America’s opponents, like Iran and Hamas, abroad. Sudan, awash in oil money, ignores the world’s pleas to halt its genocide in Darfur. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, awash in oil money, regularly tells America and his domestic opponents to take a hike. And Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Angola, Saudi Arabia, Chad and Syria, all flush with oil or gas, are comfortably retreating from even baby steps of democratization.
Allow me to pick this apart for a moment:
1) First of all, I don't recall any "baby steps of democratization" being taken in Syria, Chad, Angola, or Uzbekistan.
2) Second, contrary to what Friedman says, Saudi Arabia has been continuing to make those baby steps, even as the oil price rises. He tries to stick Saudi Arabia in the middle of a long list, where we won't notice it, but the world's top oil producer clearly bucks the trend.
3) Friedman omits some other glaring exceptions, as this this list of the world's top oil producers can attest. Besides Saudi Arabia at #1, we have Mexico at #5, where multiparty democracy shows no sign of reversing its relatively recent advance. At #10 we have the UAE, which includes Dubai, which Friedman himself recently praised as a model of progress in the Arab world. At #11 we have Kuwait, where women are being given equal rights. And the world's 11th biggest oil exporter is Libya, which has just dropped off the U.S.'s terror sponsors list. So the "Law" of Petropolitics looks more like a loose guideline.
4) Friedman doesn't really make a convincing case that high oil prices are the cause of the wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe. The hand of the state is tightening in China, a net oil importer with a manufacturing-based economy. Argentina and Peru, not petrostates by any measure, are drifting toward Venezuela-style "populism." Oil-poor Burma, North Korea, and Egypt show no signs of moving toward democracy. Friedman is a reporter, not a scientist, and it shows - if authoritarianism is increasing in oil-producing and non-oil-producing countries, how can we be sure that it's the oil that's responsible for the former (answer: we can't).
My guess is that the true Law of Petropolitics is a little simpler and a little more morally ambiguous than what Friedman states. Countries with oil wealth are better able to resist the influence of the United States. This is why China, whose manufacturing prowess also has allowed it to escape from the U.S. orbit, is joining the petrostates on the road to greater authoritarianism. And China's rise may be as important a factor as oil prices in petrostates' behavior; oil producers still need oil consumers, and China's consumption is basically propping up the governments of Sudan and Iran.
Freedom mostly spread in the 1990s because the U.S. was strong. Now that alternative power centers are rising (yes, some because of oil prices), the dictatorships of the third world don't need to listen to the U.S. as much as they used to. And the U.S. continues to weaken itself with Bush-inspired misadventures; Iran's belligerence was made possible not just by high oil prices, but by America's quagmire in Iraq.
Thomas Friedman is perhaps the most respected journalist of our time, and I'm a nobody blogger, so his readership is literally about five million times mine. But here I think he's confused a journalist's ability to tell a good story with a scientist's ability to separate cause and effect. Yes, reducing oil prices would be a great thing, for both our economy and for the economies of petrostates (which would then have to shift to labor-intensive industries). I'm not disputing that. But if you think that reducing oil prices will magically wipe out dictatorship, be prepared for disappointment.
If we're really going to set the march of freedom back on course, we've got to fix our own broken foreign policy. And that's an issue that, so far, Friedman hasn't been willing to touch with a ten-foot pole.
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