Redefining Self-Interest

...After all, it is well within the capabilities of the small nations to harm our environment through reckless crash industrialization programs, to extend unilaterally their land and sea boundaries and thereby monopolize desired natural resources, to encourage terrorist activities such as sky-jackings, and to foster revolutions or wars...

...In his latest book, however, Lester Brown of the Overseas Development Council remorselessly demonstrates that the greatest threat to America's safety actually lies less in the strength of the opponents we have been courting than in the weaknesses of the neutral nonpowers we have been neglecting...

...For we certainly cannot continue to ignore the central message of World Without Borders: We should not be concentrating the bulk of our brains and budgets on the traditional political relationship of man to man (resulting in a global military expenditure of $204 billion annually), but rather on the increasingly significant relationship of man to nature...

...Reviewed by Lorna Hahn Executive Director, Association on Third World A ffairs National security, so runs the familiar fable, is virtually synonymous with military security in an international system based upon a balance of the superpowers...

...Brown, a noted authority on world agricultural problems, points out that even as the economic growth rate of nations and the per capita income of their citizens have both been rising in recent years, the overall quality of life around the globe has been sadly deteriorating...

...Brown recasts them with refreshing insight and offers several constructive ways to avert catastrophe...

...Instead, "the dominant issue becomes not how to expand the [economic] pie, but how to divide it...

...He then goes on to propose a thorough revaluation of our national interests and goals, followed by a restructuring of the U.S.'s international commitments and priorities...

...Although in themselves such warnings are hardly new...

...Thus, after noting that the economic growth rate of the richest nations may soon begin to decline, while population growth in most poorer countries will doubtlessly continue to mount, he argues that the rich nations may no longer be able to tell the poor to wait patiently for economic benefits to trickle down to them...

...This can be done, he says, if the rich will only curb their extravagant appetites, accept international controls over truly global activities like those of the multinational corporations, and share their various resources with the foreign poor in an attempt to achieve "world social justice" in a "world without borders...

...Despite its idealistic concern for humanity, Brown's plea is really in our own selfish interest...

...as the inevitable reality towards which we must move...

...Brown's book can be faulted for its occasional repetitiveness and some excessive exhortations reminiscent of the old World Federalists: "A unified global society must now be regarded...

...And since there is a limit to the amount of economic and population growth the planet can sustain, these trends indicate that we are headed for either global ecological disaster or serious social and political upheavals instigated by the increasing numbers of discontented poor throughout the world...

...For another, they have been accompanied by a disturbing decrease in such natural amenities as arable land, fresh water, fuels and recreation areas, as well as by the pollution of the environment and the destruction of much of the earth's animal and plant life...

...What we must aim for is recognition in the minds of all responsible statesmen that they are really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one...

...For one thing, the recent economic gains have mainly benefited those nations that are already rich and the wealthier cliques within the developing countries...

...Yet considering the gravity of the problems he addresses, perhaps some rhetorical overkill is not out of place...