Thomas Friedman has made a career out of knowing just enough about a topic to come up with a plausible analysis. Unfortunately he rarely shows a deep enough understanding about anything to justify the broad pronouncements that he makes. Last week in China apparently some officials called him out when he tried to lecture them on having an insufficiently engaged foreign policy. While he makes a valid point, his track record of being wrong, particularly when telling China to be more internationally active, makes him a horrible spokesman for the cause.

His most recent pronouncement, lecturing Beijing about Iran and Sudan, looks strangely like a false argument that he has been persistently making over the years. According to RConversation he lectured Chinese officials that the country is "a freeloader" on the diplomatic front. He argues that they let the US work to solve the world's problems while China does nothing, and that Beijing will live to rue the day they made this choice.

This sounds just like an argument that he was making just before the Iraq invasion: "China is behaving as if the Iraq crisis were for America to resolve. That is a serious mistake."

Four and a half years later the Chinese have a growing foothold in Africa, strong relations with Iran, and North Korea remains a headache, but has not become a crisis. At the same time the US is so bogged down in Iraq that it can do nothing to promote its interests in the rest of the world, nor has it made any progress in finding Osama bin Laden. Remember, he ostensibly is the reason that they went to Iraq, you know, because everything changed on September 11th and all. (I lived through it, so I am not being glib. My point is that I would have preferred if changing everything meant fighting terrorists.)

What do you think the odds are that China regrets its decision not to get more involved in the war? Basically the US has been weakened, and every time the White House talks about the moral course of action Beijing says, "Who the hell are you to lecture us?" Which is exactly what officials told Friedman.

So while Thomas Friedman goes around lecturing people about what they should do, he might remember that people can still read the archives of his columns. As the saying goes, "Ignore Thomas Friedman once...actually that worked out pretty well."

It is interesting to consider if he really would want an assertive and aggressive Beijing. After all, there is this assumption that China has the same interests as the West. How does that one work again? China might not want the US to become economically or otherwise damaged because they like trade, but they are more than happy to see a weakened country with less sway over Chinese foreign and domestic policies.

Finally, let's consider this quotation from China's U.N. Undersecretary-General Sha Zukang made at the conference in Dalian, "There is the impression that China is [in Sudan] for oil only - that is the biggest lie I’ve ever heard." (True, they are there to make money off gun sales as well.) If the US were not involved in Iraq, do you think the it might be able to apply some pressure in Darfur, and you know, stop a genocide?

Of course this quotation reminds me of another one by the Australian Prime Minister: "We are not [in Iraq] because of oil and we didn't go there because of oil. We don't remain there because of oil. Oil is not the reason.''

See? China is just trying to spread democracy to Sudan.