U.S. Security: Wider View Needed

President-elect George W. Bush and his advisors say U.S. foreign aid should flow only to “proven interventions” that benefit America’s vital national interest. Two recent reports strongly suggest the need for Bush to arrive at a broader definition of the national interest. In the global economy, the reports conclude, the United States faces not only immediate security threats like missile strikes and the Middle East conflict but subtler dangers as well, like the spread of infectious disease and shortages of drinkable water among the world’s growing populations of poor.

The first report, by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, concludes that the biggest threat to the United States in the coming decade is likely to be the growth of an information technology economy that fragments the world into haves and have-nots, fueling “frustrated expectations, inequities, and heightened communal tensions.”

Despite that bleak note, the intelligence report points out that the United States could significantly reduce tensions by backing economic development projects like the regional water board that Mideast leaders have been planning to reduce inequalities in mutual water distribution. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has helped broker water-sharing deals aimed at replenishing some of the water that Israel has drawn for decades from the disputed Golan Heights and West Bank.

But many security analysts are rightly frustrated that the United States, while quick to supply arms to the region, has balked at financing new aqueducts that could offer peace dividends.

A separate report issued last month by the World Bank and five U.N. agencies details interventions that have proved their ability to tackle many of the problems identified in the intelligence report. These include simple, cheap strategies like the use of insecticide-treated mosquito netting to prevent malaria in pregnant women and children in Africa.

The link between netting and U.S national security may not be obvious, but it was established as early as 1995, when a previous CIA report studied 31 variables connected to the collapse of nations in the late 20th century and concluded that the best predictor of all was a high infant death rate.

During the presidential campaign, Bush national security aides questioned Al Gore’s view that the United States must “shape, step by step, a future of liberty and opportunity across the world.” But rejecting unfocused global moralism does not require accepting narrow isolationism. As the two new reports show, there are plenty of ways in which the United States can help itself and others by actively encouraging--if not shaping--global opportunity.