Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times Foreign Affairs columnist and author of e.g. The World Is Flat, talks to SPIEGEL about why America has lost its groove, why Obama needs to hang out more with Bill Ayers and why the German approach to combatting climate change is insane.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...

SPIEGEL: Mr. Friedman, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his inauguration speech amid the crisis of 1933: "This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and bold." What is the whole truth about America today?

Friedman: I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear. The second reason we lost our groove is that we lost our competitor. We lost the Soviet Union. If you lose your competitor you get a little fat, dumb and happy. We fell into that mode of we will get to it when we get to it, because we are America. We can take our time. Adding to that, our government does not work anymore. It cannot solve any big multi-generational problem -- whether it is climate, health care, immigration or social security.

SPIEGEL: What happened to America's proverbial optimism?

Friedman: Here it is: When I am on a book tour, as I have been for months now, I can feel the pervasive innovative energy everywhere. People are constantly coming up to me with their alternative energy ideas. Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators. This country is exploding with innovation from the bottom up -- but right now not enough of it is really getting off the ground.

SPIEGEL: Is it a case of good America, bad government?

Friedman: We do not have a government today that can really take advantage of that innovation at the speed, scope and scale we need. America today is somewhat like a space shuttle: There is a huge amount of thrust coming from below, but in our case, the booster rocket is cracked and leaking energy and the pilots in the cockpit are fighting over the flight plan. As a result, we as a country have not been able to achieve an escape velocity needed to propel ourselves into the next orbit.

SPIEGEL: Where is the next orbit to be found?

Friedman: In the next great industrial revolution: ET -- energy technology.

SPIEGEL: Is Barack Obama the man capable of lifting this country out of self-pity and contrition?

Friedman: He won the election because he understood that what Americans wanted most was nation building at home, not nation building in Iraq, not nation building in Afghanistan. America needs rebooting.

SPIEGEL: Can this expectation be fulfilled or is it just a precursor to the next disappointment?

Friedman: Nobody today knows whether Obama will be able to deliver. But there is a lot of good raw material for a successful presidency. The ability to communicate, the ability to inspire -- that is not a small thing. The last American president with the ability to pull people together on a bipartisan scale was John F. Kennedy.

SPIEGEL: Obama's enormous rhetorical talent stands alongside his lack of government experience. But is that not so important?

Friedman: Experience is important, judgment is important, but most of all we need a president who is ready to take radical departures from business as usual -- and be able to bring the country along with him. That is why I say, I hope he has been hanging around with Bill Ayers, because he needs to be as radical as this moment.

SPIEGEL: You are referring to his acquaintance from Chicago who was part of the Weather Underground and who is said to have been a terrorist.

Friedman: This is a radical moment for America, and the time has come where a radical is needed. If Obama is not as radical as the present moment requires, our country will be in trouble.

SPIEGEL: Is Obama not more of a compromise-oriented bridge builder and in fact quite the opposite of radical?

Friedman: You never know, and I do not think that he really knows. Presidents grow up in the White House. The times shape the man.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean by "radical?"

Friedman: Take energy politics. Right now our energy bills are the sum of all lobbies. We have energy politics, not energy policy. We can no longer afford to do that. It would be radical if we were going to send two wise men away for six months, they would come back with a national energy policy, and we were going to bring it before Congress with an up or down vote. No amendments, no earmarks, no nothing. Just vote for the right policy or shut up.

SPIEGEL: That sounds like a longing for the end of politics.

Friedman: Well, we need a little bit because we have been overwhelmed by politics and money and nobody thought of the long term national interest.

SPIEGEL: But is the "American Way" not about just this kind of short-term thinking, ready fun and fast money?

Friedman: We should bid farewell to this past. We can no longer afford a future that resembles it. Another decade of this and we will be a Third World country.

SPIEGEL: The economic crisis is hitting America and the rest of the world hard. Someone who read nothing but your book "The World Is Flat" would be very surprised. The nice, flat, liberal world economy is slipping.

Friedman: There were three major books after the end of the Cold War that made big claims: "The End of History" by Francis Fukuyama, "The Clash of Civilizations" by Samuel Huntington and "The World Is Flat." I would say that the latter two are still standing.

SPIEGEL: You would actually write it like that again?

Friedman: If you followed this economic crisis and you do not think that the world is getting flatter, you are not paying attention. We saw the entire global economy at one time acting totally in sync. The real truth is the world is even flatter than I thought. Our mortgage crisis is killing Deutsche Bank. You still don't think the world is flat?

SPIEGEL: Increasing global imbalance, rising social tensions in America and the global economic crisis are of no consequence to you?

Friedman: Gentlemen, you are compelling me to do a dramatic reading from "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," published in 1999. (Stands up, takes the book from the shelf and reads aloud.) "The other type of global economic crisis that can threaten the whole system is the crisis of bad lenders, from banks to mutual funds to hedge funds, which are now able to lend so much money to so many people and so many places, that when they engage in reckless lending on a massive scale and then suddenly try to get their money back, they have the potential to inflict serious damage on both good economies and bad ones." As banks do not want to lose their share of the market, they shove money out the door, just like drug dealers. "Come on, kid, just try a little of this cash. The first one is free".

SPIEGEL: All right, but this world is anything but flat. Some sit on a sunny hill and others in a shadowy valley.

Friedman: By "flat" I did not mean that the world is getting equal. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. That's why an Indian in Bangalore can take care of the office work of American doctors or read the X-rays of German hospitals.

'The US Is Giving Birth to a Pig or a Gazelle'

SPIEGEL: In your new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" you plead for the necessity of a green revolution and American leadership. Will the economic crisis impede this leadership?

Friedman: Yes and no. It is going to cut two ways. On the one hand, under Obama's leadership we are going to get huge infrastructure spending, for mass transit and for transmission lines, for wind- and solar energy. So the money will be spent and appropriated in a way we until recently probably never could have dreamed of. There will an enormous stimulation, and that is important, because the climate crisis is not a regulatory problem. It is an innovation problem. If you Europeans want to regulate your way out of this crisis, good luck to you. In a world with such population growth, you Germans want to set emission standards for 190 countries to stop climate change? May God help you. What we need are engineers, people in garages working on a thousand different ideas and innovations. The green Google, the green Microsoft. We will now have more of these initiatives in the United States. That is the good news.

SPIEGEL: And the bad news?

Friedman: Without price signals that make clean energy from heaven -- like wind and solar -- cheaper, and dirty fuels from hell -- coal, oil and gas -- more expensive, you cannot sustain a green revolution. All you will have are hobbies -- little wind, solar and climate hobbies. I like hobbies, I just don't try to change the climate as a hobby. We can tell Detroit to make more energy efficient cars, but if gasoline is still cheap, who will buy them? As a General Motors executive said the other day, it would be like ordering all shirt companies to only make size small shirts, but never ordering Americans to go on diets.

SPIEGEL: Do you mean that in an economic crisis such as this, Barack Obama will not have the power to substantially raise gasoline taxes?

Friedman: I say that he needs to. But other economists will tell you that you do not raise taxes during a recession. I think a higher gasoline tax is an exception, because it would drive so much innovation. With this $1 trillion stimulus the United States is going to give birth to a pig or a gazelle. If it is a pig, we will be feeding it for the rest of our lives. It will be the burden of a generation for my children. If it is a gazelle, it will be the opportunity of a generation for my kids.

SPIEGEL: You sound skeptical. The world will not get a handle on climate change?

Friedman: That is what I am afraid of. We are now entering the era of climate change. For the first time in ages we are not dealing with something out of the past. This is not a post-war or post-communist problem. We are dealing with something ahead of us. We are pre-something and what we are pre is this new energy-climate era, where the biggest problems and the biggest opportunities will flow from energy and climate issues. That is why I believe that ET -- energy technology -- will be the biggest thing and if you want to be big in this world, you need to be big in big things.

SPIEGEL: But there is not enough enthusiasm for such an initiative.

Friedman: America has to lead. Otherwise the effect is too minimal -- regardless of how seriously Europe tackles the problem. Are we strong enough? Stimulation without regulations and binding standards means -- it's all a green party, nothing more. The green revolution will be successful only when the word "green" has disappeared, because everything is green, because you cannot build a house, a factory or a car that isn't at the highest energy efficiency standards. So there won't be a green car, there will just be a car and you will know it is energy efficient -- green.

SPIEGEL: But a revolution …

Friedman: … cannot be had without pain -- real pain. You will know we are having a revolution when companies have only one choice: change or die. That is what's happening in the information revolution.

SPIEGEL: You are fighting with your pen on the side of the revolutionaries, through your columns. When do you view a column as truly successful?

Friedman: For me, there are basically five kinds of columns, and if your column falls into one of these boxes, if it produces one of these five reactions, you know it is working. Number One: "Tom, I did not know that" -- tell people something they never knew. Number two: "I never looked at it that way'' -- give people a new perspective. The third is my favorite. You live for this as a journalist: "You said exactly what I feel, but I did not know how to say it. Thank you." That you love. The fourth is: "I want to kill you, you and all your children. Your column stands for everything I am opposed to." You need to make enemies in this business. Category five is the hardest and you can do this at most once a year: "Tom, you made me laugh. You made me cry."

SPIEGEL: When your op-ed colleague, the Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman, was awarded the Nobel Prize, the corridors of The New York Times were allegedly full of whispered comments: "How will Tom take it?" That is how The New Yorker quoted your colleagues.

Friedman: Anonymous colleagues, naturally. This is total nonsense. I was the one who recommended Paul to The New York Times and now I was the one who congratulated him first by e-mail. He is a wonderful colleague. I have a very relaxed view of my place in the world. I try to keep my distance from politicians. I do not write an SMS to the secretary of state, I only met Obama once and Hillary Clinton not at all. I am now 55 so I do not fall in love any more. Distance is healthy, and a fair degree of humility. I do not stand in front of the mirror in the mornings and think I am powerful. If a journalist never leaves his office, at some point he will think that he is Zeus sitting on Olympus and feels entitled to throw thunderbolts on to the world down there. That is when you get in trouble.

SPIEGEL: Is that one of the reasons why you constantly travel?

Friedman: I can sit here and just call people, and my phone calls will be answered, and I can pretend that I have done work. There are always really great parties here in Washington -- but I push myself out of the door. My writing can only be as good as it is researched. My motto is: If you don't go, you don't know.

SPIEGEL: Could it be part of the American dilemma that the media is not tough enough? That they do not tell readers why the American way of life has led to a dead end?

Friedman: The media? Quite possibly. Myself? No. You can accuse me of whatever you want, but for years I have written about small cars, gasoline taxes and sustainability. Have we lost our way? Excuse me, but that is my topic. I need a visa to set foot in the state of Michigan, where General Motors is located.

SPIEGEL: America is facing grim times, but our business, the media business, is also not doing well at all. Do you believe in the educational mission, the future of newspapers and magazines?

Friedman: I am not sure where the future will take us. I had always thought that I would retire at The New York Times but it is no longer that certain, unfortunately.

SPIEGEL: You do not need that paper any longer?

Friedman: I absolutely need The New York Times. Many people say to me: You can go out and start TomFriedman.com or blog at Yahoo. But these people do not understand anything. I am old school. I search for the voices of quality in the cacophony of the Internet. You can be good out there in the blogosphere, but I think your goodness will be enhanced if it is framed by a New York Times or a DER SPIEGEL. These frameworks of traditional news institutions provide important quality controls that I think many readers still value. Therefore I desperately hope that we survive and that you survive. The editorial page editor recently called me and said: "Tom, you are not going to get a raise this year." I said: "No problem, do what is necessary. I will still be able to eat." But it is a bad sign. I have been here since 1981, and this was the first time.

SPIEGEL: What are the mistakes of the "old" media? Was it a good idea to put all those expensively researched texts on the Internet free of charge? Google is not much more than a gigantic recycling container.

Friedman: Right. A second after my column has appeared at The New York Times, it can be found at Google. Some readers pay for it and are considered old fashioned, others do not pay and are hailed as the future. What could we have done differently? Did we miss an opportunity to be able to charge for our content? I do not know.

SPIEGEL: How will the media crisis end?

Friedman: We are stepping on terra incognita. Soon we will have fewer newspapers. The local papers are all shrinking rapidly. It is possible that the national papers will be able to keep their readers. Perhaps we need partners such as Google, Bloomberg or Microsoft who will give us the capital. If that happens, it could go well.

SPIEGEL: Will there still be printed newspapers around in 30 years' time?

Friedman: No. We will have Kindles, reading devices like we have for books, unless someone finances a printed newspaper. Maybe that is our future -- as foundations or NGOs, funded by donors. We will all be like Doctors without Borders or Amnesty International. We will be called Journalists without Borders.

SPIEGEL: Print journalists are dinosaurs?

Friedman: Not exactly. We are dinosaurs but we will survive Jurassic Park. I have no doubt that we will find readers, but I very much doubt that enough people are willing to pay for what we write. The key thing is that we must maintain enough resources and independence to do our jobs. If I say today that I need to travel to China, my assistant books a flight and The New York Times will know that I am in China when I file my first story. That sort of freedom and independence is critical for my job, but it is very unusual.

SPIEGEL: And if the bean counters take over the paper …

Friedman: … they will say that I could also do my research on the Internet -- or just call someone in Beijing.

SPIEGEL: After all, the world is flat.

Friedman: Precisely. I am afraid of the next two calls. The first will inform me that salaries have to be cut by 25 percent and the second will tell me that I can no longer travel. As I said: If you do not go, you do not know.

SPIEGEL: So the reporter's role as a witness is disappearing?

Friedman: Right. Everything I get will have gone through a filter. And then everything my readers will get will have gone through two filters. Is that still journalism? I don't think so.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Friedman, we thank you for this conversation.