Word: self-interest
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...community and making a lie of its principles. But having been left behind by a decade of political shortcuts, child advocates have < adopted a more practical strategy. "If compassion were not enough to encourage our attention to the plight of our children," declares New York Governor Mario Cuomo, "self-interest should be." Marian Wright Edelman, the crusading founder of the Children's Defense Fund, goes further. "The inattention to children by our society," she warns, "poses a greater threat to our safety, harmony and productivity than any external enemy...
...absolute. But, as the leading example, the European Community is founded on economic principles. A succession of terrible wars has sharply reduced the nationalist-tribal and militarist instincts in Western Europe. The Community is trying to build a supranational order based on economic cooperation and competition, on material self-interest, ultimately on reason. Japan is also pouring most of its once militaristic energies into economic channels...
There are two reasons why the U.S. and other nations have sent soldiers to the Middle East. The first is self-interest. The economies of the West are very much dependent on imported oil from the Middle East. When disruptions in the supply of oil take place, shock waves ripple through the American economy. Economists differ on how much higher oil prices will hurt our country, but our leaders in Washington recognize the threat to our well-being as serious enough to justify the deployment of troops...
...never been clear-minded about our national self-interest in cheap oil. Republican administrations, ostensibly devoted to the free market, have tolerated or even subtly promoted the oil price-fixing cartel. As part of the Nixon Doctrine in the early 1970s, the U.S. looked the other way as Saudi Arabia and Iran raised oil prices, hoping they would spend the money on military equipment and become the "twin pillars" of Middle East stability. (What a laugh! The Middle East military machines financed by high oil prices have been those of Ayatullah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein.) In 1986 Vice President George...
...join the boycott of Iraqi crude. "People are always giving Bush guff for his first-name strategy with world leaders," says an Administration official. "But then he calls Tokyo and gets Kaifu to go along with the oil embargo, a step that may not be in Japan's self-interest. To say we were surprised is to put it mildly." Equally impressive was the President's engineering of United Nations sanctions against Iraq -- a delicious irony given Bush's repeated swipes at Dukakis for naively believing in the U.N.'s usefulness...