December 5, 2004

The New York Times

R IO DE JANEIRO — The United States has a strategic problem: its war on terror, unlike its long fight against Communism, is not universally seen as the pivotal global struggle of the age.

Rather, it is often portrayed abroad as a distraction from more critical issues - as an American attempt to impose a bellicose culture, driven by the cultivation of fear, on a world still taken with the notion that the cold war's end and technology's advance have opened unprecedented possibilities for dialogue and peace.

Here in Brazil, plagued by problems of poverty and development, the policies of the International Monetary Fund arouse more interest than Al Qaeda's. The violence that is debated is not that of Islamic holy warriors but of drug barons and their private militias occupying the favelas, or slums, of Rio and São Paulo.

In South Africa, the issues of the day are 40 percent unemployment, crime, disease and addressing the problems of a continent that is home to many of the 1.3 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a day. Terrorism is not the theme of the hour.

The cold war was refracted through Latin America and Africa in the form of countless battles between surrogates of Washington and Moscow. But the war on terror has neither divided nor engaged these continents in the same way. That, on balance, is a good thing: the American-Soviet struggle took a huge toll on societies from Argentina to Angola that still bear the scars.

What is less good, from the American perspective, is that these continents are more or less united in a critical view of an American power routinely described as hegemonic and intent on using the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to impose what Candido Mendes, a Brazilian political analyst, called "a civilization of fear."

Mr. Mendes, who has written several books about Brazil's left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said: "The exploitation of fear is a highly developed and refined science, but Brazil is not convinced by this culture that triumphed in the American election. What concerns us in Latin America is that, in the name of defending its security, the United States will escalate the wars it has begun."

The cold war world adhered to a simple paradigm: free societies, led by the United States, confronting Communism, with its headquarters in the Kremlin. But for all of President Bush's attempts to frame the current conflict against Islamic terrorism as one of equally epochal and all-enveloping proportions, it is now clear that the world has resisted such a single, overarching framework.

In wide swaths of the southern hemisphere, including Africa and Latin America, the central preoccupation is economic development and trade. In Asia, the main focus i s on China rising, with India not far behind . In Europe, the bulk of political energy is still absorbed by the vast experiment in transnational governance and the banishment of war that is the European Union.

Because America's central preoccupation - the war on terror - is not widely shared, it tends to isolate the United States, a country whose power is now so overwhelming as to invite dissent and countervailing currents. Mr. Bush seems aware of his problems. On a visi t to Canada last week, he described his second term as "an important opportunity to reach out to our friends," and expressed gratitude to those Canadians who waved at him "with all five fingers."

Many Americans might be tempted to use four fewer fingers in response to the world's hostility. They might be tempted to retort to a restive global community: Your memories are short, and if a bunch of crazed Islamic jihadists get their hands on loose nukes, you'll understand why we are fighting this war. They might care to use a quotation often attributed to George Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

But for now, the image of rough Americans ready to do violence is more alienating than comforting to Latin Americans and Africans.

"Anti-Americanism is generalized and growing," said Luiz Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. "The whole Iraq situation has brought back memories of the big stick - American power as used in Nicaragu a or Chile during the cold war. The problem is the perception that Bush uses immense power in an egotistical way."

The animosity engendered was evident during President Bush's recent visit to Santiago, Chile, where he confronted angry crowds who were not waving. This situation has its paradoxes: the Bush administration's policies toward Latin America have been generally pragmatic and restrained.

Trade differences with Brazil, once acute over steel, have been quietly patched up, although Brazil's push to fight subsidies to farmers in rich countries continues. Mr. da Silva and Mr. Bush get along well, two straight-talking guys who like to brush past details, not least the fact that they come from opposing political camps. In theory, this could be a time marked more by harmony than hostility.

A similar situation prevails in South Africa. The United States is pouring more money into tackling the AIDS epidemic than any other country. Mr. Bush has made this fight a priority of his administration.

The personal relations between Mr. Bush and Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, are good. The African Growth and Opportunity Act, strongly supported by Mr. Bush, has provided important new trade openings by removing tariffs in several sectors, including automobiles.

Yet the president is routinely dismissed in the South African press as the Texas Twit and gets no credit for any of the policies that are helping the country or Africa as a whole. Dr. Jendayi E. Frazer, the American ambassador to South Africa, said that government-to-government relations were excellent, but that the prevailing atmosphere meant that "people who support the United States cannot come out and say it."

Here lies part of the price of the war on terror, and particularly the war in Iraq, for the United States and Mr. Bush: the good done quietly on other fronts gains scant recognition because war against a constant terrorist threat is seen to be the overriding message from the administration.

If Condoleezza Rice, nominated by Mr. Bush to be the next secretary of state, is to change this negative impression, she may have to concede that the war on terror is not, like the cold war, a label for an era. It describes the focus of America, a new principle and project guiding national policy, but it describes no more than that, because other countries have other agendas. What these countries want, above all, is to sense that the Bush administration, in its second term, hears them.

Roger Cohen writes the "Globalist" column in The International Herald Tribune.