"America
will be paramount, but not omnipotent," declared
former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
at a high powered session of global affairs experts
at the WEF yesterday. Brzezinski went on to say
that the gap--political, military, economic--between
the US and the rest of the world will widen over
the next couple of decades.
The
concentration of power in the US, Brzezinski explained,
coincides with the emergence of well-organized groups
seething with resentment which, as the attacks of September
11 show, are capable of causing mass destruction. Further
aggravating the situation, Brzezinski believes, is
the growing disparity in living conditions between
the wealthiest countries, with the US in the lead,
and those left behind.
Brzezinski's assessment of America's predominance
was echoed by international investor George
Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management.
Soros noted that the US faces no threats
from any states, but rather from terrorist
groups ready, willing, and able to strike
when conditions permit. Brzezinski and Soros
were joined by other panelists in rejecting
the fashionable idea that poverty is the
root cause of terrorism.
Francis Fukuyama, professor of international
political economy at Johns Hopkins University,
pointed out that, if poverty were the key,
then today's terrorists would be coming from
sub-Saharan Africa. The witch's brew of terrorism
contains many elements, including resentments
based on religion, culture, ethnicity, envy,
and race, he added. Fukuyama's assessment
is confirmed by a look at recent history.
Of the twentieth century's greatest practitioners
of mass murder--Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and
Pol Pot, just to name a few--none was a child
of poverty. In the case of terrorism perpetrated
by Muslims, Samuel P. Huntington observed,
the anger is a reaction against modernization.
Even after his devastating defeat at the
hands of the Americans, Osama bin Laden is
still a hero in certain quarters, Huntington
added. Mohammed Atta, a key player in the
September 11 attacks, grew up in comfortable
middle-class circumstances in Egypt, Brzezinski
observed. In this regard, he was not unlike
the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution in
Russia, including Lenin and Trotsky, who
were disaffected intellectuals, he added.
Like the early communists, today's terrorists
are self-appointed representatives of their
cause, Brzezinski said.
"Terrorists begin by terrorizing their
own people," commented Shimon Peres,
deputy prime minster and minister of foreign
affairs of Israel. The Taliban's first acts
of violence were directed against Afghan
citizens, he said. Peres, whose country has
been locked in a seemingly endless conflict
with the Palestinians for over half a century,
showed little optimism over reaching an enduring
peace in the Middle East. "Yasser Arafat
says the right things," Peres noted, "but
he doesn't do the right things." "He
is steadily losing support among his fellow
Palestinians," Peres said.
Fukuyama
took issue with another opinion which has
gained currency at the WEF. Without
naming rock star Bono by name, Fukuyama showed
little enthusiasm for debt forgiveness in
developing countries, a cause championed
by Bono. "This creates a moral hazard," he
pointed out. "Poorly-run countries will
have no incentive to fix their economic problems," Fukuyama
remarked. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton,
Democrat of New York, agreed with Fukuyama
and suggested that debt forgiveness conditioned
on countries using the money saved from not
paying off their loans for more useful purposes.
The
prospects for post-Taliban Afghanistan
were also
discussed. Soros noted that the
experience in Bosnia was not encouraging.
Much of the aid money that flowed to Bosnia
wound up in the hands of local war lords
who used it to expand their fiefdoms. Given
Afghanistan's long history of ethnic divisions,
the same could happen there, but on a much
larger scale. Clinton said that a resurgence
of "warlordism" in Afghanistan
could hasten the departure of countries willing
to help rebuild that nation, including the
US. This could create a vacuum and allow
terrorists to reassert themselves.
According to Fukuyama, there are certain
things money can't buy. Money can help feed
starving people and build roads and bridges.
But it can't create the political and economic
institutions necessary for long-lasting development.
This is true of Afghanistan and sub-Saharan
Africa, he pointed out.
Bonner R. Cohen is a senior fellow at the
Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
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