■"The Wealth of Yet More Nations," book review ofThe World is Flat (Thomas L. Friedman) by Fareed Zakaria, New York Times Book Review, 1 May 2005, p. 10.

I honestly believe that Tom Friedman, as brilliant as he is, couldn't get an honest review in the Times if he wanted. Simply too valuable a product.

Fareed's review (schoolmate from Harvard) is a good one, but it has that scratch-my-back-next-please feel to it. All the journalist/strategists of the world unite!

But Zakaria's biggest point is a huge one: Friedman's now back to "tech rules all," and has abandoned a sense of what we, in my business, call the "pol-mil" (my wife, for years, thought I worked for a guy called Paul Mill, because I kept babbling on about "him" at the dinner table every night). Pol-mil refers to political-military, and it's a term of art to remind the economic world that security is the "everything else" they (the business types) tend to forget, just like the Pentagon tends to ignore the "everything else" beyond war.

So Friedman, who wrote the classic economic determinist track of globalization (Lexus and Olive Tree), then dived into pol-mil with Longitudes and Attitudes, now has gone back to his first love. I say Friedman's like Meg Ryan after one of her "serious" films: she always found the audience didn't believe her in those roles, so she tended to follow them up with a classic romantic comedy (paging Tom Hanks!). I think Friedman felt like a fish out of water on pol-mil, so he's returned to his "romantic comedy," which is economic determinism. Hence his three-year Rip Van Winkle excuse of now finally acknowledging the rise of India and China (World is Flat).

But what I wait for is the honest review that says, "Come on, Tom, how can you pass that off as new analysis after the Times and Journal have been running those stories for . . . oh . . . about two years now!

That, plus the whole "flat" thing seems terribly old in a world where things move fast. Friedman's column had said he was writing on a book of geo-politics, but alas, he's written just a book on geo-economics, so back to the cheerleading role.

Is he a brilliant describer of new economic and technological trends? Absolutely. But pretending that you can figure out the future of the world by quoting the Bill Gateses of the world is a bit myopic. Sure, you could push that stuff before 9/11, but not after.

Plus, Friedman disappoints me terribly with the underlying message of this book: don't obsess with threat of terrorism, instead obsess with the economic threat of India and China!

Come on! Is that the only way to get attention nowadays? Swapping security fears for economic ones? This is geo-strategic?