In his first year in office, there has been growing a sense of President Bush’s administration as leading a kind of new Roman Empire (military might but not heart), or as attempting to create a new world order but without anything resembling a Marshall Plan.
“We’re better about taking down countries than putting them together,” a leading policy thinker mused recently at a session at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, reflecting the predominant mood.
As any idea of “nation-building” has become a term of derision among the more conservative Bushies, the world has responded in kind. From the elaborate courts of Arabia to the utilitarian offices of Brussels, an angry anti- Americanism is saying that, even where we share values, we no longer share interests.
But now, this very week, there is an important breakthrough in what has appeared to be the cold-hearted policies of the administration. As President Bush visits Latin America for a whirlwind but substantive four-day tour, he is inaugurating new development policies that both have heart and make sense.
“The basic idea here is the notion of a new compact for development,” is the way one White House policymaker explained the approach to me. “We will link our contributions to sound policies on the part of the countries being given aid. We’re attacking three essential elements for real growth.”
This means palpably that the United States is now offering $5 billion (and maybe up to $15 billion) for aid to selected countries over the next three years, targeted to drive productivity growth through improvement in health care, information technology and good governance.
The results will be constantly monitored, which is a great difference from earlier aid programs that were the darlings of certain rich Nordic countries, and/or designed to bankroll individual programs in Third World countries that were totally unlinked to any integrated plans.
My first thought when I heard of the president’s welcome new emphasis was a grateful, “Thanks be to God, we’re returning finally to the Alliance for Progress!” Other Latin Americanists saw the same resemblance to President John F. Kennedy’s dramatic breakthrough program of the early 1960s in Latin America. Back then, for the first time in history, the sleepy and too-often-corrupt Latin American governments put up $2 billion of their own money to try to develop their own countries and to help their own poor.
In fact, President Bush stopped in Monterrey, Mexico, Thursday for the kickoff of a passel of new programs at the United Nations Conference on Financing for Development. These will include a new U.S.-Mexican “Partnership for Prosperity” in which the two countries will steer private investment to “migrant-producing” areas of Mexico.
“This approach could become the most important development mechanism since the Alliance for Progress,” Delal Baer, a Latin American scholar at CSIS, told me. “What distinguishes it is that it is not public spending in the European style, but spending to get free enterprise to work. European techniques are not necessarily right for this hemisphere, and this is an important debate over how to address poverty.”
In only four days, President Bush will travel from Monterrey to Lima, Peru, to San Salvador, El Salvador. These three countries were chosen as representative of the new democracies in the hemisphere. Issues that only six months ago would have led the lineup–for instance, an amnesty for Mexicans in the U.S. illegally–have been sidestepped because of American sensitivities over Sept. 11, but only temporarily.
By far the most important part of the new approach is its focus on supporting the countries that have leadership and governance that work. This kind of approach, applied individually to certain chosen countries over the years–Taiwan, Tunisia and South Korea come to mind–has worked wonders in development victories. In contrast, aid monies given to crony governments, to programs unrelated to any integrated overall vision or to favored programs of the donor governments have been largely abysmal failures.
Once you have success stories like those three countries–once you have models that the less successful can look to for principles to apply themselves–you have the beginnings of a new era.
The hopeful thing is that everybody in the aid or development “business” is tired of all those years of failure. It is to the president’s credit that he is listening to his more thoughtful advisers in this field and acting upon their findings.
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E-mail: gigi-geyer@juno.com
