Gerald Seib's has one of his more interesting columns in today's Wall Street Journal. Tekboy's favorite foreign policy type and Qualcomm board member, Brent Scowcroft, is the focus. The point is that US interests are threatened by the growing international gap between the haves and havenots. Nothing new. Just good to hear it repeated.
One surprising mention, though only slightly so, is that Scowcroft thinks GWB gets it but the Republican Party does not. Can't argue with the latter but I've seen precious little evidence of the former. And S advances none.
CAPITAL JOURNAL
By GERALD F. SEIB
America Faces Task of Dealing
With the New World Disorder
Gee, the world seemed so nice just a decade ago. The Soviet Union was gone, the Cold War was over, democracy was ascendant, market forces were all the rage, and America stood astride a world uniting behind economic globalization.
And today? Americans feel physically threatened as they haven't since World War II. The possibility of global conflict between Islamic militants and the worlds of Christendom and Judaism feels very real. Economic globalization is under attack in general from bands of protesters and unionists, and in particular from the new government of financially prone Argentina. Rich countries are racing ahead of poor nations at an alarming rate, sowing the seeds of discontent and trouble down the line.
What happened? The temptation is to say Sept. 11 happened, but that misses a much more important reality.
What's really happened is that the world has entered a very messy new phase: There was the Cold War, and then the happy post-Cold War decade when some went so far as to proclaim that history had ended, and now this new reality. (A contest should be held to figure out what to call it. I nominate The New World Disorder.) Last year's attacks were a wake-up call, but they aren't the beginning or the end of this much broader story.
Nobody grasps this all better than Brent Scowcroft, one of Washington's genuine wise men. Many suggest they have seen it all, but Mr. Scowcroft can make the claim legitimately. He's a former Air Force general who has advised presidents for 30 years, and who served as national-security adviser to two -- Gerald Ford and the first George Bush. He endured the white-knuckle crises of the Cold War and Persian Gulf War, and helped engineer the peaceful end of the Soviet empire.
Now Mr. Scowcroft sees -- well, problems, of a kind the U.S. isn't fully prepared to deal with, psychologically or bureaucratically. "It's a messy world and it isn't getting better," he says. "It's probably getting worse." More than that, he adds, "we're just beginning to realize now that we can't prosper in a world like this."
In sum, America's prosperity depends not merely on defending against threats symbolized by the 9/11 attacks, but on working to change some trend lines that could produce more of the same.
The dangers transcend the obvious problem of tensions between Islam and the West. More broadly, the world has grown more fractured, not less, in recent years, and the tensions among its various pieces may well be on the rise.
When the United Nations was born in 1945, Mr. Scowcroft notes, it had 51 member states. Today, it has 189. It's impossible to divide those states into the neat old camps of First World, Communist World and Third World. Instead, there are ethnic and religious distinctions that defy categorization, and confound expectations that technology and communications would unite the world.
Right now, economics and technology actually are exacerbating tensions in some respects. "For 20 or 30 countries, globalization offers the promise of greater integration and greater prosperity and so on," Mr. Scowcroft says. "For the rest, it means the approach of a world that is just beyond their belief. They don't even know how to cope with it. One of our most huge tasks is to help those other 150 countries or so to cope with that."
Some simple statistics make the point. Forty years ago, the world's 20 richest nations had a per-capita gross domestic product 18 times greater than that in the world's 20 poorest countries. The most recent statistics indicate the rich countries' GDP now is 37 times higher. About 1.2 billion people around the world live on less than $1 a day, the World Bank reports, including more than 200 million in China, arguably America's premier rival for world power.
This situation doesn't really explain the attacks of 9/11, of course, but it can breed the same kinds of resentments that spurred them. The situation also carries a more subtle risk: Expectations for American prosperity in the 21st century are predicated largely on a world in which economic globalization knocks down barriers to commerce and allows technology to pull markets together. Those trends can't be considered automatic.
So what's the U.S. to do? In the Scowcroft view, it needs to do more than defend itself; it needs to become actively engaged, along with its allies, in helping the world develop in a more healthy way. Retreat into a fortress won't get it done, though the temptation to do that has been real since Sept. 11. "The president personally has got the right feeling about it," says Mr. Scowcroft, adviser to four Republican presidents. "His party isn't there yet." But Republicans, and the rest of the country, have little choice. |
