DEADLY:
A lack of sanitation in many parts of Africa forces families, like this one in Zambia, to drink dirty water
What The World Needs Now
Since Sept. 11, America's war on terrorism has dominated the global agenda. But as the world's business and political leaders gather in Davos this week, smaller nations have the chance to put poverty, AIDS and the environment back on the table. The search for new priorities
Posted Sunday, January 18, 2004; 13.35GMT The war against terrorism wasn't on the working agenda last week at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, but it popped up most everywhere you looked. The Brazilians complained about Washington's new rules for screening passengers on flights to the U.S., and Mexican commentators were outraged over plans to station American security personnel at Mexico's airports. "The U.S. concentration on terrorism undermines the whole process of developing better relations inside the Americas," said Annette Hester, director of the Latin American Research Center in Calgary, Canada, who was an observer at the summit. "Some felt the Americans have little appetite for anything else."
That may not be entirely fair. As Mexico's President Vicente Fox recently told TIME, George W. Bush's new immigration policies — which may grant temporary legal status to migrant workers — reflect a new U.S. willingness to pick up issues that had "fallen behind" in the two years since Sept. 11, 2001. But even so, Monterrey showed that Americans continue to have a different set of priorities from most other nations — and in that it was part of a trend. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Thailand last October, Hu Jintao, the President of China, walked into a room of CEOs and gave a measured, thoughtful speech on economic integration in the region, followed by unscripted questions from the floor. President Bush, by contrast, didn't make it to the CEO gathering, and throughout the APEC meeting there was an undertone of grumbling about the U.S. The main focus of the high-powered American delegation was security and the continued threat of terrorism in Asia. But most of the Asians present wanted to talk about economics and the spaghetti-like network of free-trade agreements being negotiated in the region. Something similar had been evident a few weeks earlier at the off-the-record parties and dinners that, as usual, enlivened the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City. In private, there was a plain sense that many non-Americans no longer felt that the atrocities of Sept. 11 should define international politics forever. They wanted to talk about something other than terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.
The "one-prism syndrome" — former U.N. Under Secretary General Brian Urquhart's description of the American tendency to evaluate every question in terms of its impact on the war against terrorism — has become a problem. As Urquhart wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, other threats to global security and stability — disease and poverty in the developing world, and the dwindling supply of natural resources such as fresh water — command "far less attention than the policies and actions of the world's single superpower and the ferocity and ingenuity of its terrorist enemies." The question is: Can the rest of the world get the Bush Administration to focus on these other threats?
What you see depends on where you stand. If your vantage point is in or around the centers of the U.S.-led alliance, America's recent behavior can seem benign and helpful. Such an outlook would focus on the amazing recent performance of the American economy. As Ed Balls, chief economic adviser to Britain's Treasury, pointed out in a recent speech, "Between 1991 and 2002 the U.S. economy grew by more than 40% — double the growth in the euro zone and almost four times the growth of Japan." Whenever global economic hot spots erupted in the 1990s, as at the time of the Mexican currency crisis or the Asian financial meltdown, American government largesse and the willingness of the American consumer to buy the world's goods cushioned potentially devastating shocks. When security challenges presented themselves — for example, in North Korea in 1994 or in the Balkans throughout the '90s — American diplomacy and muscle were vital to resolving them. The U.S., in the phrase of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, became "the indispensable nation."
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The war against terrorism wasn't on the working agenda last week at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, but it popped up most everywhere you looked. The Brazilians complained about Washington's new rules for screening passengers on flights to the U.S., and Mexican commentators were outraged over plans to station American security personnel at Mexico's airports. "The U.S. concentration on terrorism undermines the whole process of developing better relations inside the Americas," said Annette Hester, director of the Latin American Research Center in Calgary, Canada, who was an observer at the summit. "Some felt the Americans have little appetite for anything else."
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