Capturing Tom Friedman: the Times columnist does foreign policy punditry by cliche.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century - Book Review

ON MAY 11, THOMAS Friedman, America's most influential foreign affairs columnist, began his twice-weekly New York Times op-ed this way:

"In his book 'The Ideas That Conquered the World,' Michael Mandelbaum tells a story about a young girl who is eating dinner at a friend's house and her friend's mother asks her if she likes brussels sprouts. 'Yes, of course,' the girl says. 'I like brussels sprouts.' After dinner, though, the mother notices that the girl hasn't eaten a single sprout. 'I thought you liked brussels sprouts,' the mother said. 'I do,' answered the girl, 'but not enough to actually eat them.'"

What on earth does this third-hand domestic anecdote have to do with development of nuclear weapons by North Korea and Iran, the ostensible subject of Friedman's column? A bit further down, he reveals all: "'Like that girl with the brussels sprouts,' Mr. Mandelbaum said, 'the Chinese and the Europeans are all for combating nuclear proliferation--just not enough actually to do something about it.'"

This piece--and Friedman's newest book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century--epitomize everything that is initially captivating yet ultimately disappointing about his Pulitzer-winning punditry. The man has fashioned a career out of locating or inventing a crude symbolic shorthand to explain and even popularize complex international phenomena while relying on a small cast of elites from politics, academia, and business to agree with his global cliches. But what started out as a clever decoding device has, in Friedman's 10th year on the country's most coveted op-ed real estate, become the crutch of a self-caricaturing hack.

In his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem, which synthesized a decade's worth of reporting from the two capitals, Friedman used his metaphor-hunting skill to cut a bewilderingly complex region into digestible chunks. "Hama Rules," the name he gave to the mind-set behind then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad's February 1982 massacre of more than 10,000 Sunnis in the town of Hama, became his shorthand for all tribal displays of retributive authoritarian brutality, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, or Yemen. And he was memorably shrewd in observing that Israel's purportedly divided Labor and Likud parties had actually forged an unacknowledged consensus to maintain the status quo regarding settlements.

As a foreign correspondent drilling down into the political substrata of two countries and then extrapolating to...