https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/opinion/iran-israel-attack-global-struggle.html
In his recent column, Thomas Friedman casts the U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities as part of a sweeping global drama—a clash between the forces of “inclusion” and those of “resistance.” It’s a compelling narrative, but a dangerously simplistic one. By flattening complex regional dynamics into a binary struggle between the liberal West and reactionary autocracies, Friedman indulges in a kind of moral imperialism that misrepresents reality and justifies deeply problematic alliances and interventions.
Friedman’s inclusion-resistance dichotomy offers a false choice. The so-called “forces of inclusion” include a U.S.-led order that has backed military occupations, propped up authoritarian regimes, and used economic coercion to discipline entire populations. What Friedman calls “integration” is often little more than forced compliance with American strategic and economic interests. In the Middle East, this has translated into arms sales to dictators, support for Israel’s indefinite control over millions of Palestinians, and the sidelining of legitimate demands for justice in the name of stability and trade.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Friedman’s framing of the Hamas attacks of October 7. He claims they were launched to sabotage an impending peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a “Middle East Camp David.” But there was no real peace process to interrupt. The Abraham Accords and the subsequent normalization efforts explicitly bypassed Palestinian sovereignty. For years, Israel expanded settlements, entrenched the Gaza blockade, and refused to negotiate in good faith—while Western leaders praised the mirage of peace built on business deals with Gulf monarchies. Hamas’s war crimes were inexcusable, but they did not emerge in a vacuum. To frame their assault as a reactionary strike against “integration” is to ignore the deeper reality: there was nothing integrative about the status quo except for elite cooperation at the expense of stateless Palestinians.
Friedman is right to call out Iranian imperialism, but he ignores the conditions that enabled it. Iran did not expand its influence in a vacuum—it exploited chaos created first by American invasions and second by the collapse of Arab state legitimacy. In Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, Iran filled power vacuums left by failed U.S. policy or regional neglect. Its rise is not only ideological; it is reactive. U.S. hubris created the terrain for Iranian expansionism just as Israeli occupation created the context for Hamas’s rise.
Perhaps the most jarring part of Friedman’s piece is his uncritical praise of Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudi crown prince is lauded as an “engine of regional inclusion,” reversing the puritanism of 1979 and driving modernization. This is revisionist at best. MBS is not a reformer but a ruthless autocrat who jailed activists, bombed Yemen into humanitarian collapse, and ordered the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. His “reforms” are top-down economic rebranding strategies designed to attract capital, not genuine moves toward liberal democracy. If this is the leader of the “inclusion” camp, then the term has lost all moral meaning.
Friedman acknowledges the extremism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, even calling it “messianic,” but treats this as a footnote—an unfortunate wrinkle in an otherwise integrative Israeli vision. This is not just a contradiction; it’s a fatal flaw. You cannot defeat Iranian theocracy while empowering Israeli Jewish supremacism. You cannot build a new regional order based on justice and stability while entrenching an Israeli regime that seeks permanent control over another people. Netanyahu’s efforts to neuter Israel’s judiciary, expand settlements, and thwart any two-state solution do not represent a glitch in the system—they are the system.
The most dangerous claim Friedman makes is that “it’s all the same war”—that Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea are all fronts in one unified struggle between freedom and tyranny. This kind of grand narrative has historically been used to justify disastrous wars, from Vietnam to Iraq. It erases local histories, flattens real grievances, and licenses perpetual conflict. The occupation of Donbas is not the occupation of Hebron. Ukraine is not Gaza. Hamas is not Putin. The people of the Middle East are not chess pieces in America’s moral crusade.
If we want a Middle East that truly embodies inclusion—of peoples, not just markets—then the starting point is not airstrikes or normalization pacts. It is justice. Justice for Palestinians who have lived under occupation for over half a century. Justice for Yemenis, Syrians, and Iraqis whose lands became battlegrounds in proxy wars. Justice that begins with acknowledging that peace cannot be built on erasure, and that real integration demands equal dignity, not just open trade routes.
Friedman’s vision is seductive, even hopeful. But by reducing geopolitics to a battle of good versus evil, inclusion versus resistance, he masks the uncomfortable truth: that sometimes the forces we call “inclusive” are themselves the source of violent exclusion. True peace will not be brokered by autocrats in Riyadh or air raids over Isfahan. It will come when we reject the moral simplicity of these narratives and begin the harder work of facing the region as it is, not as we wish to imagine it.