Tony Jones speaks to columnist Thomas L Friedman

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 01/05/2007

Reporter: Tony Jones

Tony Jones talks to columnist and author Thomas L Friedman about the major changes facing the world.

Transcript

TONY JONES: Now to our guest and as you saw earlier, Thomas Friedman is a passionate advocate for climate change solutions. He regards global warming as the greatest threat facing the world but he believes the way out will open endless opportunities for smart individuals, smart businesses and smart countries to invent and market “clean tech”.

He’s written extensively about globalisation. His latest book is called /The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century/. It’s an account of how globalisation erases borders, enabling the spread of technology communication and wealth. Well this phenomenon he argues has spawned global terrorism and fuelled the economic growth of China and India. But rapid expansion comes at a cost and now that they consume energy like we do, the rising Asian powers threaten to take global warming past the tipping point.

Well it sounds grim, but Friedman remains an optimist. As well as being a prolific author, Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning /New York Times/ columnist. He’s in Australia as a guest of the Sydney Institute where he’ll be addressing their annual dinner tomorrow night. I spoke to him earlier this evening.

TONY JONES: Tom Friedman, thanks for joining us.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Great to be here.

TONY JONES: In /The World is Flat/ you pose the question, what will historians regard as the most crucial events of the early part of the 21st century? Will it be the 9/11 attacks on the United States or the rise of India and China as economic superpowers? But in fact they are two sides of the same coin.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: They’re both aspects of this flattening of the world and when it’s flat, it’s flat for Al Qaeda and it’s flat for IBM. It’s flat for Islamic Jihad and it’s flat for Microsoft. But I think the thing that historians will really look back on is the most seminal event, one of what I call the mother of all inflection points, is what happened when we got this convergence of the personal computer, the Internet and what I call “work-flow software”, which made everyone’s computer inter-operable.

What those three things did was create this kind of flat world platform which has allowed more people to plug and play, compete, connect and collaborate for less money than ever before in the history of the world. And it’s that new platform which Al Qaeda plays on and IBM plays on that I think is the big seminal event we’re living through now.

TONY JONES: I’m going to come to exactly how that happened, how it developed but I want to – let’s stick with Al Qaeda for a moment, and you actually talk about Osama bin Laden at one point as if he’s running a virtual business.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: He is. In fact you know, at central command, the American Military command that actually manages the war in the Middle East, they refer to it as the “virtual Caliphate” because basically, you know, bin Laden is running a supply chain. Wal-Mart runs a supply chain that gets products from all over the world to your neighbourhood, “Wal-Mart at every day low prices”. Bin Laden unfortunately runs a supply chain of suicide bombers that gets suicide bombers from all over the Muslim world to targets, you know, in Europe, in the Middle East, not only at “every day low prices” but at a huge and dangerous impact to the world and everything we stand for.

TONY JONES: And to a large degree he’s able to use the tools of globalisation against the globalisation or the cultural effects of globalisation.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. And more and more every day. What’s really dangerous about what’s going on today is when we first attacked Al Qaeda after 9/11, what do we do, we attack them in Afghanistan. They had bases, they had headquarters and we attacked it. Unfortunately we didn’t get him but we could really see the target there. We’ve gone from Afghanistan to the virtual Afghanistan. The virtual Afghanistan is the Internet.

There’s now thousands of ‘jihadist’ websites where young Muslims from around the Arab Muslim world can go to be stimulated or inspired to follow the jihadist call. They don’t need Afghanistan anymore. They’ve got the virtual Afghanistan which is this Internet platform.

TONY JONES: It sounds like Donald Rumsfeld was right when he said this is a war that’s going to last generations, and it’s going to last certainly into the digital generation if you’re correct.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well Donald Rumsfeld hasn’t been right about a lot of things but he may have been right about that. But definitely, the flat world also plays into it in another way. One of the things that’s really, I think, driven the jihadist movement, if you talk to these young jihadists, is humiliation. The sense of really falling behind and the flat world, when the world is flat you get your humiliation fibre optically. You get it 100 megabits per second because when the world is flat you can see where the caravan is and just how far behind you are and that also really is intensifying. I think this anger and humiliation.

TONY JONES: It’s interesting you make that point because in reviewing your book, Fareed Zakaria wrote this, “The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalisation, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade and democratic politics”.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: And that I think is one of the things really driving this jihadist backlash because these young men are raised with a view – it’s not a criticism – that Islam is the most perfect and complete expression of God’s monotheistic message and that they’ve got the superior operating system. But yet they live in a world where they see their countries are the least democratic, the least economically advanced and that creates a dissonance. “Wait a minute, how can that be? If I have the superior operating system, why am I behind?” And that I believe is a source of a lot of their rage and frustration.

TONY JONES: In that regard you talk about the curse of oil.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well oil is a huge curse for all of these countries because when you have oil, I mean my favourite country in the world is Taiwan. Why Taiwan? Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with 20 million-some people and the fourth largest financial reserves in the world. Why is that? Taiwan has only one choice. To drill its people, to unlock their creativity, energy, entrepreneurship, men and women. When you have oil, though, all you just have to drill is an oil well. You don’t have to tap your people, nurture their creativity, empower them to invent, compete and collaborate in the world. That’s why oil is such a curse.

TONY JONES: What’s the layout of this, because clearly what you have is a divided world, particularly when it comes to the Middle East and the rest, in the regard that you’ve been just talking about. And this was the problem, of course, during the Cold War where the Soviet bloc actually divided the world between the democracies and others, those exploited countries as well, but divided them up between those and the communist bloc who didn’t believe in these things you’re talking about. Free markets, democracies and freedom of ideas.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: I think the only way to respond is to change the context. We in the United States, I would argue, dealt with the Arab world for 50 years as if it were just a collection of gas stations and we basically – there was the Saudi station, the Libya station, the Algeria station and our message to them, Republican and Democrats, was “guys,” because there were only guys we were talking to, “here’s the deal. Just keep your pumps open, your prices low, be nice to Israel, don’t bother Israel too much and you can do whatever you want out back. You can treat your women however you like, you can preach whatever patriot or opposition that you like, you can write whatever conspiracy theories in the newspapers you like, you can educate your kids however you want, you can deprive your people of whatever civil right you want. Just keep your pumps open, your prices low and don’t bother the Israelis too much”. And on 9/11 – it’s my view – we got hit with the distilled essence of everything going on out back, and therefore if we don’t find a way to collaborate with people in that part of the world to change the context of what’s going on out back, we have a real problem.

What’s the second largest Muslim country in the world? Not Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan. Indonesia’s the biggest, what’s the second largest? It’s a country called India. Well here’s something interesting; there are no Indians in Guantanamo Bay. No Indian Muslims in Guantanamo Bay. How could that be? Guantanamo Bay is a Noah’s ark from every Muslim country. But no Indian Muslims. Could it be because India’s a free market democracy? And the richest man in India today is a Muslim software entrepreneur?

Context matters, and unless we can work together with people in the Arab Muslim world to change the context of what’s been going on out back, the absence of free markets, the absence of freedom that allows young people to realise their full potential, we’re going to have a real problem.

TONY JONES: There are, of course, Indians from Kashmir blowing up things in major cities in India, so it’s not as if they don’t have a problem.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Right, but they – those [people] aren’t necessarily attacking the rest of the world. That’s an internal problem. These aren’t people reaching out to knock down the twin towers in New York City.

TONY JONES: Okay, it’s time to pause and I want to go back through your thesis about the flat world, how it actually arose, because I think we’re speaking about India, I think you got the idea from an Indian software expert, the entrepreneur.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well basically, I went to India in February of 2004 to do a documentary for the /Discovery Channel/ about outsourcing and I shot about 60 hours of film over the 11 days we were there. And across those 11 days I got progressively sicker and sicker and it wasn’t the Indian food. It was somewhere between the Indian software entrepreneur who wanted to do my tax returns from Bangalore, and the Indian software entrepreneur who wanted to write my new software from Bangalore, and the one that wanted to read my X-rays from Bangalore, and the Indian software entrepreneur who wanted to trace my lost luggage on Delta airlines from Bangalore, that I began to realise, “Oh my God, while I’d been sleeping, while I’d been off covering the 9/11 wars, something really big had happened here”.

And the last interview was with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, the Microsoft of India in many ways, and we were talking, we’re actually doing the pre-interview I was telling him about my trip. Nandan’s an old friend, and at one point Nandan said to me, “Tom, I’ve got to tell you, the global economic playing field is being levelled. The global economic playing field is being levelled and you Americans are not ready”. Tony, I wrote down that in my little laptop, “The global economic playing field is being levelled”. After the interview, [I] got into my jeep, went back to the hotel, rolling around in my head what he said: “The global economic playing field’s been levelled”. What he’s really saying is that it’s being flattened and then in a crazy, chemical way these things happen, it just popped into my head, that what he’s really telling me is the world is flat.

TONY JONES: And the phenomenon you’re talking about, or the phenomena you’re talking about are extraordinary. I mean, we’re talking about 400,000 Americans getting their tax returns done by Indians, legions of Indian accountants in places like Bangalore.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: And X-rays being done, anything that can be digitised now, any process, any service, means it can be outsourced and it will go, eventually, to the most efficient place. It’s why when I tell my girls, when I was growing up in the 1950s my parents used to say to me, “Tom, finish your dinner. Don’t you understand people in China and India are starving!” And I tell my girls, “Girls finish your homework because people in China and India are starving for your jobs”. And in a flat world, they can have them.

TONY JONES: Let’s look at how historically this was made possible. It all happened very quickly and it all happened very recently, or much of it did. The infrastructure for the flat world, as you see it, was built during the dot-com boom.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Right. Three things came together, as I said, the one is the PC. What did the PC allow? It allowed us all to become authors of our own content in digital form. Authors of words, photos, data, spreadsheet, music in digital form, in bits and bytes. Why is that important? Because right after that came along this thing called the Internet, which suddenly allowed me to send my digital content, words, photos, data, spreadsheets, pictures, anywhere in the world virtually for free. Third revolution, the work-flow revolution, which made everyone software and computer inter-operable. So now I can create my own content, send it anywhere for free and collaborate with you here in Australia, no matter what computer and software you were on. Those three things together created this flat world platform.

TONY JONES: Using infrastructure built by telcos, many of which actually went bankrupt.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. I mean this was a great thing about the dot-com bubble. It was like the railroad bubble in America in the 1800s. We completely over-invested in railroads, people lost tonnes of money, but by accident we knitted America together with railroads. Difference is, we knitted the world together this time with fibre optic cable. When we knitted America together with railroads we got to ride for free, great fun, when we knitted the world together with fibre optic cable, India, China, Russia and Brazil got to ride for free.

TONY JONES: But the irony is, it actually took the dot-com bust to make people start using it.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well what the dot-com bust did was people said, “Whoa, I can’t afford like this remediation of my computer for Y2K,” or “I can’t afford now to invest in innovation”.

“Remember Sonia, she used to work here in the IT department, we laid her off, somebody said she went to Bangalore. Hey Sonia, can you do this from Bangalore what you were doing here for, you know, 50 per cent cheaper?”

“I sure can”.

And suddenly the dot-com bust, which made us look for cheaper solutions right at a time when the world went flat, suddenly connected us with all the Sonias and you know, Rajivs over in India who were working in the United States and we were off to the races.

TONY JONES: You’ve talked about having dinner and what you say to your kids, and of course when you were over in India and you’re looking at these legions of highly educated, eager to work specialists coming out of colleges and moving into the software companies, you suddenly thought –

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well it’s a wonderful thing –

TONY JONES: There’s wave upon wave of them –

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Absolutely.

TONY JONES: How are our own children going to compete against them?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well it is an issue because these people come from a culture that really prizes education and discipline around education, but the most fundamental change is that they can now innovate without having to immigrate. You know, 30 years ago if you were an educated Indian, IT, you know, specialist, you prayed to win the lottery, to get a green card to the United States and if you didn’t, you might be driving, you know, a taxi, that your skills would rot on the dock of Bombay. Not when the world is flat. Now you can innovate at the very highest level with an Australian company or American company without having to emigrate. But that’s actually a good thing because it just means more people are inventing more things and that means they’re going to be more jobs and nor niches, for Australia, for America. The only question is, can you keep educating your people so they will be able to take one of those niches. If you’re doing that, that’s a good thing. You remember – remember something. After World War II we stood astride the world. We, America, we dominated the whole industrial world. Europe was on its back, what did we do? We did the craziest thing in the world. We did the Marshall Plan. We built Europe into a competitor and what happened? Our standard of living rose six times over six decades. The same thing will happen, I believe, with India and China. We’re not only creating more workers, we’re creating more ideas, more products, more demands, more specialties. It will be good for you if you have the educational skill to claim one of those specialties.

TONY JONES: And we spoke about terrorism before but in reality, the biggest threat actually facing the world is – due to this very expansion you’re talking about, and this threat of global warming due to what China needs, what India needs to do all of this – and that is masses of energy.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well, what’s happened of course by the flattening of the world is that we’ve suddenly created and empowered and enabled 3 billion new consumers to come, compete, plug and play and they’re all coming with their own version of the American dream, or the Australian dream. The house, the car, a toaster, a microwave and refrigerator. If we don’t find a way to fuel their dreams in a cleaner, greener way, we’re going to smoke up, burn up and choke up this planet far faster than even Al Gore predicts, because 3 billion people are moving from low impact environmental life style to high impact environmental life style. That’s why this global warming issue has become so acute.

TONY JONES: Yes, you talk about the United States, China and India having to have something like using the old Bush term, “the axis”. In this case, the “axis of energy”. It’s required, who’s going to do it?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well we need to be taking the lead – we the developed world – that’s Australia and that’s the United States, but by the way, this is a huge economic opportunity. Clean tech, clean technology is going to be the growth industry of the 21st century. Mum, dad, tell your kids there’s going to be a huge number of jobs. That I know for sure. The question is, is Australia going to be a player in that clean tech industry? Is America? It’s going to be an industry. Who’s going to dominate it? That’s still open.

TONY JONES: Here’s one story that seems to reflect the Bush administration’s attitude to this issue. You wrote a column recently about a White House official whose job was to edit government climate change reports. His name is Philip A Cooney, can you tell us about him?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well this was a guy who came, he was actually the chief climate guy for the American Petroleum Institute, the big oil lobby institute in Washington. He was hired by the Bush Administration to edit their climate reports, in which he sort of edited out anything that suggested climate change was real and an imminent threat, and when that was exposed he got a job with Exxon Mobile.

Never underestimate how bad these guys are. Big mistake when you’re talking about the Bush people. And on this issue in particular. They are just really, really brain dead on this and I mean brain dead, I mean beep, not even a bip, okay. But they’re going to be gone in a couple of years and the great thing about America is we have this federal system. So who is leading in America? Our governors and mayors.

Arnold Schwarzenegger today, if he were American born – you can’t be a president of the United States unless you’re born in the United States – would be the Republican candidate for president if he were American born. He can’t run for president. Why? Because he’s actually chartered a path on green that’s brought Republican and Democrats together in his own state that is the envy of every other governor today.

TONY JONES: Do you think that’s going to be one of the leading issues in the American presidential campaign, as it is here one of the leading issues in the Australian election?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: No question. What I’m really trying to do in my journals is redefine green because I’m a big believer that in what I do as a commentator, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue you can own an issue. The world is flat. Same with green. The problem with green is that, in America at least, the term green was actually named by its opponents, very subtly. They named it liberal, tree hugging, sissy, girlie-man, unpatriotic, vaguely French. And they sort of de-legitimised it.

What I’m trying to do is reclaim that term. I’m trying to rename green geo-political, geo-strategic, geo-economic, patriotic. Green, being green, thinking green, designing green, is the most patriotic, capitalistic, strategic thing you can do and be today. Why do I want to do that? Because you can’t make an impact on climate change, on green economics, unless you have scale, unless you have not red states and blue states, but 50 green states. And that’s what I’m hoping to see in America.

TONY JONES: Does that mean that you inevitably are going to end up supporting a Democratic candidate for the presidency?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Not necessarily because everyone now, on running for president, both on the Republican side and Democratic side, has a green platform today. You cannot get elected – I think – [as] president. What I’ve been basically arguing is that we don’t need just the first black president in the United States, we need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president, we need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has toughened up by being a prison of war in Vietnam. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the American people the truth about climate and what we need to do to actually reverse this and take advantage of the opportunity.

TONY JONES: Tom Friedman, I know you’ve put it this way – green is the new red, white and blue.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Absolutely.

TONY JONES: We thank you very much for coming in to talk to us tonight. It’s been a pleasure and fascinating as always. We have to do it again some time.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Any time. Thanks so much

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1911784.htm