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Thomas L. Friedman

Articles written by the author

Opinion
6 Aug 2024
The year 2019 will be remembered for a lot of things, but in foreign policy it may well be remembered as the year our luck ran out.
Opinion
6 Aug 2024
Although my day job is writing the foreign affairs column for The New York Times — more Persian Gulf than fairway golf — thinking about golf and playing as often as I can is my all-consuming hobby. So like millions of others, I was awed by Tiger Woods’ comeback for the ages by his winning the Masters at 43 years old. What can be learned from it?
Opinion
6 Aug 2024
Although my day job is writing the foreign affairs column for The New York Times — more Persian Gulf than fairway golf — thinking about golf and playing as often as I can is my all-consuming hobby. So like millions of others, I was awed by Tiger Woods’ comeback for the ages by his winning the Masters at 43 years old. What can be learned from it?
Opinion
6 Aug 2024
There are two countries that I’ve been professionally, emotionally and intellectually involved with my entire journalism career — the United States and Israel. I’ve never been more worried about both, because President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are essentially the same person, and they pose the same threat to their respective nations.
Opinion
6 Aug 2024
Here’s some news you may have missed. Southeastern Africa got hit in March with a cyclone that United Nations officials say was one of the worst weather disasters to ever strike the Southern Hemisphere. “Ever” is a long time.
Opinion
6 Aug 2024
I’ve been watching with more than a little interest the controversial statements about Israel and the Israel lobby by Ilhan Omar, a freshman Democratic congresswoman from the 5th District of Minnesota, because it turns out that we have a lot in common — up to a point.
Opinion
1 Aug 2024
Up to now I have not favored removing President Donald Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came in, through the ballot box. But last week was a watershed moment for me, and I think for many Americans, including some Republicans.
Opinion
26 May 2024
JERUSALEM — Amos Yadlin, the former head of military intelligence in Israel, likes to say that Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy faces two existential threats: a nuclear-armed Iran and turning itself into a binational state by permanently occupying the West Bank with its 2.5 million Palestinians. And while Israel has a strategy for addressing the first threat, it has none for the second.
Opinion
26 Jun 2019
If you’re keeping score at home on the Trump foreign policy, let me try to put it in a nutshell: The president has engaged America in a grand struggle to reshape the modern behavior of two of the world’s oldest civilizations — Persia and China — at the same time.
Trump takes on China and Persia at once, what's to worry about?
Opinion
15 May 2019
WILLMAR, Minn. — In 1949 my aunt and uncle moved from Minneapolis to this town in west-central Minnesota, where they started a small steel distribution company. I visited them regularly for 50 years. About 40 years ago, my aunt whispered to me one day that she had been in her local grocery store and had heard someone ... “speaking Spanish.”
President Trump, come to Willmar
Opinion
8 May 2019
Growing up, I was always fascinated with the magician-psychic Uri Geller, who was famous for bending spoons with his supposed supernatural powers. How did he do that? I wondered. I’ve been thinking about him lately as I’ve watched an even more profound magic trick playing out in our politics. We have a president who can bend people.
How to defeat Trump
Opinion
24 Apr 2019
SAN DIEGO — On April 12, I toured the busiest border crossing between America and Mexico — the San Ysidro Port of Entry, in San Diego — and the walls being built around it. Guided by a U.S. Border Patrol team, I also traveled along the border right down to where the newest 18-foot-high slatted steel barrier ends and the wide-open hills and craggy valleys beckoning drug smugglers, asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants begin.
Trump is wasting our immigration crisis
Opinion
26 Mar 2019
JERUSALEM — Amos Yadlin, the former head of military intelligence in Israel, likes to say that Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy faces two existential threats — a nuclear-armed Iran and turning itself into a binational state by permanently occupying the West Bank with its 2.5 million Palestinians.
Trump and Congress: Loving Israel to death
Opinion
7 Mar 2019
The first thing we have in common is that I was raised in the 5th District of Minnesota, specifically the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park.
Ilhan Omar, AIPAC and me
Opinion
27 Feb 2019
The beating heart of 24/7 back then was a vast floor of young phone operators, most with only high school diplomas, save for a small pool of techies who provided “help desk” advice.
AI still needs HI (Human Intelligence)