Different Drummer
James Gustave Speth
Dean and Professor
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
September 17, 2001
Many Yale students with whom I have spoken want to look beyond a war on terrorism, as important as that is. They are seeking something more positive and constructive to rise from the ashes in New York and Virginia.
It is already possible to envision the broad outlines of a positive agenda - one that befits a great nation and a caring people, and one that differs in many respects from the call to arms now being repeated like a drumbeat. Beyond the overt and covert anti-terrorist operations that will, and should, be mounted lie a range of more difficult and subtle challenges that must be addressed if we are serious about confronting terrorism and its roots. Understanding and meeting these challenges can be an enormous contribution of your generation. No generation will be more affected by the events of last week than yours, and no generation can do more to help our country draw the right conclusions from Tuesdayís tragedy and take the right steps in light of them.
1. Principled and intelligent conduct in the war on terrorism. In our effort to eliminate terrorist cells around the world, we should not abandon the current US ban on state-sponsored assassinations. We have found this practice abhorrent, and the principle was not changed by last week's tragedy. Similarly, whether we are operating at home or abroad, we cannot abandon our commitment to human rights and civil liberties, our tolerance of differing viewpoints, or our acceptance of religious and ethnic diversity.
Also important is a measured and careful approach to anti-terrorist operations. Columnist Thomas Friedman has correctly observed that those who attacked us are in fact hoping to trigger a massive US retaliation that makes no distinction between Muslim terrorists and other Muslims, thus inciting the entire Islamic world against us. We must not become "Osama bin Laden's chief recruiter," Friedman noted.
2. Goodbye to American unilateralism. The Bush Administration has walked away from international agreements and out of international meetings; it has shown disdain for the views of our closest allies on issues such as missile defense; it has proceeded as if the only country worth wooing was Mexico. Yet success in the war on terrorism will depend totally on international cooperation, and not just from OECD countries. The positive agenda here is to shift American policy away from the go-it-alone mentality that has guided the Administration's policy both in defense and energy and towards collaborative engagement and cooperation with the rest of the world. More broadly, it is past time for the American public to outgrow its self-centered and isolationists tendencies and to become more aware of and sophisticated about international affairs.
3. Superpower with humility. In a thoughtful piece in Sunday's New York Times, John Burns wrote from Islamabad that "America, with its daunting economic, political and military power, its pervasive popular culture, and its instinct to spread the freewheeling, secularist ways of American life - even to those who may prefer to shun them - has an impact on people's lives to the farthest corners of the earth. Just how great this impact is, and how, in many places, it is resented, may be more than many Americans can graspÖ To be free, rich and powerful in a world that is mostly none of these things is, inevitably, to engender resentments. Freedom itself can be considered deeply disturbing in many of the world's poorer societies that are anchored to the old pillars of faith, tradition and submission.
Professor Ronald Steel recently made a similar point: "We proudly declare that we are the world's undisputed Number One. Then we are surprised that others might hold us responsible for all that they find threatening in the modern world."
There is much that can be done in the face of this. We can find a hundred ways - in government, in business and in our personal contacts - to show our respect for other cultures, especially Islamic ones; we can take seriously claims that economic globalization is proceeding too fast and without regard to local communities or social and cultural values; and we can conduct ourselves in all spheres with less arrogance and more humility and with new interest in non-economic values and objectives.
4. Dialogue on Islam and Islamic governments. Terrorists exist in American, East Asia, Europe and, indeed, almost everywhere, but radical Islam obviously poses a special challenge. A two-pronged effort at dialogue is needed. In one, responsible Islamic leaders and people of good will everywhere should seek to isolate and delegitimize those who would cynically pervert Islam to justify and motivate terrorist behavior. As Friedman has noted, there is a civil war within Islam between the modernists and the medievalists, and we should do everything possible to strengthen the hand of the former.
In the other dialogue, we must challenge the governments of the Arab states and predominantly Islamic countries to move to greater openness and democracy and to opt for greater investments in the human development of their own people. We can support these goals with real assistance, as indicated below.
5. Reconsideration of specific US policies. A major source of Arab-Islamic animosity toward the US is a reinforcing set of specific policies that should be reassessed: a seeming insensitivity to the Palestinian perspective, uncritical support of autocratic Arab governments, the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and the US-sponsored economic sanctions against Iraq and the attendant consequences for children and vulnerable populations there. The question in each case is to see if a new balance can be found which addresses the offending policies while still protecting essential US interests, including our commitment to the security of Israel.
6. Focus on development and democracy. Dealing with terrorism requires identifying and addressing underlying conditions that can constantly replenish the supply of bin Ladens and suicide bombers. Among these conditions are the poverty and hopelessness in which recruits are found. Widespread hopelessness in a world of extraordinary wealth and luxury leads easily to bitterness, anger, and the capacity for violence. In the Arab States today, levels of human deprivation are even higher than one would predict from income levels.
Hopelessness can be overcome, for example, by measures that invest in the United Nations' Millennium Goals, which seek major improvements in global health and education and access of the world's poor to assets that can empower them economically, socially and politically. Eliminating mass poverty in the lifetimes of todayís undergraduates is an achievable objective. Yet the US has turned away from its historic commitment to helping the world's poor and is now dead last in the OECD in providing development assistance in comparison with its GDP. In my six years in the United Nations, I found that America is now known for lecturing the world, not for its generosity.
If we have something to give to the world, other than democracy and the Bill of Rights, it is the opportunity for the half of humanity that lives on less than $2 a day to have a better life and participate in increasing prosperity. That will require new policies and new generosity on debt relief, development assistance, trade access, and foreign investments - policies which are well-understood by those interested in conquering world poverty but thus far largely ignored by the US.
Columnist Paul Krugman recently decried the penny-pinching that drained the capacity out of our security system, and he then made a more general point worth remembering: "I hope we bring the perpetrators of last week's attack to justice. But I also hope that once the rage has died down, Americans will be willing to learn one of the key lessons of last weekís horror: there are some things on which the government must spend money, and not all of them involve soldiers." Development assistance and the United Nations are two of these things.
The above agenda is by no means complete; nor is it free of risks and conflicting objectives. But it does help point us towards a different role for America in the world. The caring and generosity and selflessness so evident in America in the wake of last weekís attacks must not be confined to the homefront but must be extended abroad. Somehow out of all the sorrow and loss must come discovery of a new national identity ñ an identity that seeks the great things for which our country has always stood ñdemocracy, opportunity, equality before the law ñ not only for ourselves but for all the world's citizens.