As the shadows close in on 2003, this year of nameless terror seems likely to be remembered not for threats that were vanquished but for those that still haunt the future.
The excitement of Saddam Hussein's capture and jubilation over Libya's disclosure of its nuclear plans did not make the world a better place for the 1.2 billion people who languish in conditions of extreme poverty. Their anger fuels the other discontents of the age. This core problem belied the optimistic predictions of the UN Millennium Summit held in September 2000.
According to the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 44 per cent of the world's poorest people are in South Asia, 24 per cent each in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and 6.5 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
They pose the most dangerous threat to the security that is America's primary concern. The US preoccupation with terrorism is understandable in the context of a faceless adversary who is everywhere and nowhere. What is less explicable is the apparent conviction that sending the marines, fingerprinting tourists and barricading the US in a fortress will guarantee security.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Michael Mandelbaum, director of the American Foreign Policy Programme and author of The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets, compared American policy after the cold war to a doughnut with 'lots of peripheral interests, but nothing at the centre'. The return to military orthodoxy by US President George W. Bush's neo-conservative advisers continues and aggravates that imbalance. Power has not been redefined, as a former defence secretary, James Schlesinger, advised, to include economic competitiveness, productivity and industrial investment.
No one accuses the US of indifference to the concerns of the bulk of humanity. No nation in history has transferred as much money and technical expertise to the less fortunate. No nation has provided as much support for the ideals of democratic governance and multilateral institutions. But the humanitarian impulse becomes suspect when it is subordinated to political purpose.
Three years on, the eight Millennium Development Goals are as distant as ever. Only 10 million people escape the poverty net annually instead of the anticipated 30 million. There is no question of making the promised dent in poverty by 2015. Some areas are worse off than in 2000.
