It is this idea that lies at the center of President Clinton's economic policy. These ideas shape what we have done over the last four years and what we will continue to do. After World War II, the primary concern was with the economic development of a war-ravaged Europe and Japan. Now our challenge is to integrate the 5 billion people of the developed world into a truly global economy. A half century ago, there were only a small number of nations able to inflict casualties at a distance.
Today there are many.
New problems of narcotics, greenhouse gases, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction have raised our stake in enlarging the circle of cooperation. But as the examples of economies like Korea, Taiwan and Argentina illustrate, economic improvement brings democratization in its wake. And yet despite the force of these arguments and the convictions of almost everyone of the kind of people that participate in Brookings conferences, American internationalism is under siege. The critics of the Bretton Woods Washington Consensus form a wide and growing school of what might be called separatists. I have purposely avoided choosing the term isolationists because of its pejorative connotation.