THE United States has not recognized the radical changes taking place in the world and is not prepared to deal effectively with them. The dilemma that confronts the Obama administration is how to avoid being so narrowly occupied with multiple near-term emergencies that strategies capable of meeting long-term challenges even more dangerous to US prospects are lost.
While the United States is wrestling with immediate specific priorities - Iraq, Afghanistan,and Pakistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, and the likes of the Congo, Darfur,and Somalia - larger global forces undefined and unconfined by political geography are coming at us from the future with increasing speed and convergence. These forces are ubiquitous, uncontrolled, intensifying,and especially threatening in their aggregate impact.
They include climate change and environmental degradation, continent-and ocean-hopping disease, widening regional conflicts rooted in ethnic/religious splits and resource competition, and the rise of networks of criminal activity generating traffic in narcotics, arms, and humans. International terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the instant contagion of economic and financial upheavals are also phenomena not receiving long-term, strategic attention whose harmful impact on the near-term agenda is already hard at work.
But the problem with the greatest impact is the growing rich-poor gap. The income difference between the top fifth and the bottom fifth of the world was 74-to-1 in 1998, and the disparity in per capita GDP between the 20 richest and the 20 poorest countries more than doubled between 1960 and 1995. It's gotten worse. Three billion people now live on less than $2 per day; one and a half billion lack access to clean water. The future physical, political, psychological, and moral consequences of this disparity are enormous. Moreover, the gap reinforces and exacerbates all the other crises on both near-term and long-term inventories.
The best way for the new administration to avoid failure in both its immediate and long-term international challenges is to deal with the former within strategies encompassing the latter.
Creating such a radically new paradigm for American foreign policy will require an elevated imagination, discipline, sacrifice, and perseverance in political behavior driven by three fundamental maxims: perception, synergism, and reform.
Perception. The United States must perceive the threats clearly - what the long-term growing and converging forces mean, their power, complexity, rate of speed, and danger - so that we do not take refuge in either illusion or futility. Without correcting our myopia and comprehending the true reality we face, we will never be able to mobilize on a global scale.
Synergism. We need a revolutionary connectedness with the rest of the world, a transforming attitude whereby we define our own interests in terms of the common interests of everyone else in the shared assumption of survival. We must ourselves recognize and persuade the other world actors that problems can't be confronted and solutions negotiated that do not calculate the stakes of all. Strong national policies must be designed and pursued, but so that they seek to serve the requirements and benefits of the whole global community. This means putting a premium on collaboration rather than superiority.
Of course this approach cannot to be applied naively or dogmatically. It would require caution as well as courage, flexibility along with compromise, applying real muscle when required, and prepared to confront obstacles and absorb setbacks over protracted time. But our common destiny is now palpable; we are so tightly and dangerously tied to one another across the globe that it would turn out to be suicide to advance one's own survival at the expense of others.
Reform. As we work to strengthen our own domestic institutions and policies, we must in concert radically restructure our international political, economic, and financial institutions - the United Nations, the World Bank and IMF, the World Trade Organization, etc. - and invent new ones when warranted, so that they are explicitly capable of exerting long-term strategies to confront these advancing global afflictions, particularly the rich-poor gap since it infects everything else. Such a radically new construct for foreign policy could only succeed painfully
and painstakingly over generations.
But it would embody moral authority and generate moral energy absent from contemporary models, valuable assets for transcending the challenges ahead. It is the ruthlessness of global interdependence which dictates that our interests cannot survive and global cataclysms be avoided unless the interests of the others are protected as well.
Jonathan Moore, formerly a US ambassador to the United Nations, is an associate at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.
