"The World Is Flat" Revisited

Did Russia's invasion prove Thomas Friedman's bestseller wrong?

“The Dell Theory [of Conflict Prevention] stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain. Because people embedded in major global supply chains don’t want to fight old-time wars anymore. They want to make just-in-time deliveries of goods and services – and enjoy the rising standards of living that come with that.” -- Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat, 2005

The curious thing about books with Big Ideas on current affairs is that they often dominate the public forum for years, shaping discussions and policies, but then are quietly forgotten. The ideas they promoted may live on in the collective mind. But the books themselves are seldom mentioned again. The World Is Flat by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is a case in point.

It was huge all over the world when it was released in 2005. And no wonder. The renowned columnist not only purported to reveal the present state of the world. He would, as the subtitle immodestly put it, deliver “a brief history of the 21st century.” Imagine publishing a book in 1905 that promised to reveal what was to come in the 20th century. That’s bold stuff. It’s particularly bold when you realize that people like Friedman have been publishing books like The World Is Flat at least since the 19th century, and with no exceptions that I am aware of, they all look shabby with the passage of time. (One of my favourites is a book called The World In 2030, published in 1930. The British aristocrat who wrote it produced many gems, including this confident declaration: “British rule in India will endure. By 2030, whatever means of self-government India has achieved, she will still remain a loyal and integral part of the British Empire.”)

We’re still only a little way into the 21st century, so a full appraisal of Friedman’s opus will have to wait for a few decades, at least. With one possible exception.

Last month, Russia invaded Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine were deeply integrated in global supply chains, to such an extent that Russians whose LinkedIn profiles noted their employment with global firms have fled the country by the thousands -- while the normal boosterism on LinkedIn is now punctuated with occasional announcements that Ukrainians with similar LinkedIn profiles have been killed in the war.

This is not the future predicted by Friedman’s “Dell Theory,” quoted above.

It would seem Friedman has been categorically proved wrong. At least based on that one, emphatic, no-exceptions-are-possible paragraph.

But “Dell Theory” is a whole chapter in Friedman’s book (“The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention: Old-Time versus Just-In-Time.”) Let me quote some other passages, in order.

“To all the forces mentioned in the previous chapter that are still holding back the flattening of the world [that’s globalization in Friedman-speak], or could actually reverse the process, one has to add a more traditional threat, and that is an outbreak of a good, old-fashioned, world-shaking, economy-destroying war. It could be China deciding once and for all to eliminate Taiwan as an independent state; or North Korea, out of fear of insanity, using one of its nuclear weapons against South Korea or japan; or Israel and a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran going at each other; or Indian and Pakistan finally nuking it out. These and other classic geopolitical conflicts could erupt at any time and either slow the flattening of the world or seriously unflatten it.”

But Friedman notes that he has argued for some time that when countries tie together their economies with trade, it restrains the impulse to go to war. (Friedman doesn’t note that smart people have been making that argument, and debating it, for, oh, two centuries. But they’re not New York Times columnists so they don’t warrant a mention, I suppose.) Friedman then sets out the Dell Theory, as quoted above. It is emphatic: “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other….”

“Ever.” Strong word, that.

Then Friedman goes on to quote Dell executives at length. No more wars, they say. Countries make too much money working with us. Friedman goes on:

“The most important test case of the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention is the situation between China and Taiwan – since both are deeply embedded in several of the world’s most important computer, consumer, electronics, and, increasingly, software supply chains.”

Friedman looks closely at relations between China and Taiwan and concludes it’s remarkable that China hasn’t invaded. The explanation? The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, of course.

But then he drops the following truth bomb:

“[The Dell Theory] does not make wars obsolete. And it does not guarantee that governments will not engage in wars of choice, even governments that are part of major supply chains. To suggest so would be naïve. It guarantees only that governments whose countries are still enmeshed in global supply chains will have to think three times, not just twice, about engaging in anything but a war of self-defence. And if they choose to go to war anyway, the price they will pay will be ten times higher than it was a decade ago and probably ten times higher than whatever the leaders of that country think. It is one thing to lose your McDonald’s. It’s quite another to fight a war that costs you your place in a twenty-first-century supply chain that may not come back around for a long time.”

It’s a classic performance. Friedman coins a portentous name (“The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention”.) He states it with iron-clad language that makes the phenomenon sound as irresistible as a law of physics (“No two countries… will ever…”) He claims to show the Theory bending nations to its awesome gravity. And then, buried in the chapter, is fine print that takes all that back and says something so much simpler: Economic integration increases a nation’s cost of going to war with a similarly integrated nation, giving integrated nations stronger incentives to avoid war … but war could still happen.  

Stated like that, it’s a perfectly reasonable claim. A little obvious. But perfectly reasonable.

What it is not is a Big Idea. It doesn’t sound cool. It will never go viral, sell a million books, and convince corporations to shell out six figures for a canned speech. No TED talk. No Davos invitation. No one calling you a 21st-century visionary. So Friedman pumps up a modest little claim into The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention. And what happens if some future war breaks out in apparent violation of the Theory? Friedman’s fine print is right there and it’s clear: He’s still not wrong. No matter what happens, he’s not wrong.

Variations on this technique are depressingly common in the genre. One of my favourite illustrations comes in Future Shock, a monster 1970 bestseller by Alvin Toffler. It’s stuffed with declarations of absolute certainty. “This will happen.” “That will happen.” And it’s all cool stuff so even reading it today it gives the reader the sense that the future is going to turn you upside down, hang you from a bridge, and shake you by the ankles. But there’s a funny little note buried in the introduction:

“Every statement about the future ought, by rights, to be accompanied by a string of qualifiers – ifs, ands, buts, and on the other hands. Yet to enter every appropriate qualification in a book of this kind would be to bury the reader under an avalanche of maybes. Rather than do this, I have taken the liberty of speaking firmly, without hesitation, trusting that the intelligent reader will understand the stylistic problem. The word ‘will’ should always be read as though it was preceded by ‘probably’ or ‘in my opinion.’ Similarly, all dates applied to future events need to be taken with a grain of judgement.”

By adding this fine print, Toffler licenses himself to take what would otherwise be modest claims and turn them into the thunderous, I-have-seen-the-future proclamations of a modern-day Moses. That’s good for someone in the prophet business. And there’s a happy bonus: This fine print means that no matter what happens in the future, none of his seemingly emphatic statements can ever be proved wrong.

In honour of Thomas Friedman, I hereby dub this technique the Friedman Theory of Embarrassment Prevention.