JIMMY CARTER AND THE WORLD'S HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS

by Jim Wright
Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas
October 2, 1999

Jim Wright of Fort Worth is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who marked his 75th birthday Friday, was gazing at the world through a wide lens last week. He described a prophetic view at disturbing variance with conventional spoken wisdom among today's political power elite.

What Carter sees on the horizon of the new millennium -- a rapidly widening chasm between the world's haves and have-nots -- shakes him to the depth of his philosophical being. The former president is disturbed by what this portends for both rich and poor, for a complacent America as well as for the hopeless lands whose millions seem destined for slow starvation.

It is a combustible mixture, says the man who made peace between Egypt and Israel, salvaged the tattered infant democracy of Haiti, shepherded Latin American countries toward honest elections, and made respect for basic human rights a genuine international goal. Making matters worse, he worries, is that the gulf between the richest and the poorest is widening every year. In 1900, citizens of the 10 richest countries made nine times as much money, on average, as those in the 10 poorest. That ratio today, says Carter, is 65 to 1.

America, the former president senses, is losing its appeal to the world's underdogs as we lose our own taste for taking the moral high ground in international disputes. Once the acknowledged world leader in the fight against poverty and hunger, we now are shirking even our share of global humanitarian responsibilities, Carter asserts. In constant dollars, Japan gives more than we to helping downtrodden peoples escape the coils of economic desperation. While spending close to $300 billion every year on military weaponry, we've shrunk our contributions to world economic recovery to only $6.8 billion. As a percentage of our gross national product, U.S. appropriations for nonmilitary foreign assistance rank dead last among 21 developed countries.

Each of the Scandinavian countries, for example, currently devotes almost 1 percent of its total gross national product annually to fostering economic development in poorer nations. By contrast, we are contributing less than 0.1 percent of ours. By these measurements, the former president stresses, America -- once the very symbol of generosity -- has become "the stingiest nation on earth" in promoting the conditions that lead to peace, order and justice. What a difference, as poet Robert Burns observed, between the way we see ourselves and how we're seen by others. America once was the synonym of opportunity for common people everywhere and the world's unconscious moral inspiration. The Marshall Plan to help war-ravaged Europe regain its feet in the 1940s and '50s was hailed by Winston Churchill as history's "most unsordid act."

Our Alliance for Progress under President Kennedy inspired hope and accomplishment toward economic growth and social justice throughout Latin America. The average American probably still considers ours the world's greatest benefactor nation. We're the Mecca to which desperate outcasts migrate, legally and not. And we do break in with impressive shows of punishing force when things get out of hand -- as in Iraq and Kosovo. We can rain a lot of bombs on an errant despot's country in brief days. That, however, may be an ingenuous part of the problem. We're seen by many, Carter fears, not as the foremost champion of peace but as the nation "always ready to send troops or bomb people." On every day of the year 2000, American society will spend at least a billion dollars on military hardware, handguns and illegal narcotics. And every day 40,000 people will die somewhere in the world from preventable starvation and malnutrition. A mere fraction of what we spend on the former could prevent most of the latter. Yet a relic of the Cold War mentality lingers. President Eisenhower once observed in the 1950s that the American people would support foreign aid whenever it were posited as a brake against communism, but not necessarily when presented as the means to halt starvation. So he labeled it "Security Assistance."

Working with Latin American countries years ago, I discovered that I could persuade their leaders to a common endeavor much more effectively if I first took the time to learn their viewpoint -- to see the problem through their eyes. Many U.S. citizens feel quite harshly toward Mexico and other countries to our south because their efforts to stop the flow of drugs through their lands into ours have been only partially availing. Would it surprise us to discover that many of them have felt a growing hostility toward us for the very same reason?

By their reckoning, it is the greedy, self-indulgent appetite for drugs in our country that brings the ugly, crime-infested but lucrative traffic coursing through their countries in search of quick riches here. They blame us, moreover, as the international source of illegal handguns and assault weapons -- equally as deadly as narcotics -- now being imported by lawless elements into their countries. What particularly disturbs Carter is the historic truth that poverty and despair provide the soil of revolution. That, in turn, most often leads to military dictatorships. They inexorably lead to attempts at territorial expansion and to wars. It's a vicious circle that only enlightened vision and persistent leadership in the 21st century can break.

Unfortunately, as Jimmy Carter views the problem from his unique vantage point as the premier peacemaker among our former presidents, we don't seem to be headed that way. Can we turn it around? And do we care enough to try?

Jim Wright of Fort Worth is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. You can contact him at P.O. Box 1413, Fort Worth, TX 76101 or at j.wright@tcu.edu.

© 1999 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas