The Presidency: An Opposing View

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Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address was a gigantic production featuring fleets of black limousines, sirens, the glowing Capitol dome, trench-coated TV stars, champagne and prime television time. When Les Brown's annual State of the World report was launched one morning last week, the stage props included a glass of grapefruit juice, a bowl of All Bran and a banana, a worn corduroy suit with an outlandish bow tie, and a solitary walk on snow- soaked Hush Puppies down Washington's 19th Street to the offices of Worldwatch Institute. Nary a TV anchorman found his way to the proceedings.

Yet before the year is out, Brown's presumptuous 263-page volume may be studied more intently by more people in more countries than Reagan's address. And it is arguably a more accurate and provocative picture of the globe than the one sketched by the President.

Brown contends that the meaning of "national security" has changed in the past few years and the superpowers were so busy building weapons they did not notice. "Global geopolitics is being reshaped in a way that defines security more in economic than in traditional military terms," he writes.

And because of those changes, he goes on, a new world heavyweight champion may be emerging. Almost inevitably, it will be Japan.

"Without an imposing military sector to sap investment capital and scientific and managerial talent, Japan is moving toward a position of global economic supremacy," declares the author. "Japan's exports are nearly double those of the Soviet Union . . . U.S. exports of $217 billion and net foreign assets of minus $120 billion yielded a total of $97 billion, just one-third that of Japan."

Brown's unassailable logic: if the U.S. and the Soviet Union don't stop the arms race, they will 1) blow the world up or 2) simply sink below the Rising Sun from the burden of their arsenals. And even as huge forces grow less practical, many other nations are dragged into the arms competition. In 25 years the annual global outlay for arms has gone from $400 billion to $940 billion. The cost now exceeds the entire income of the poorer half of humanity.

Brown has an imposing record as a prophet. He foresaw the food crisis in India when he worked for John Kennedy's Department of Agriculture. Worldwatch, founded ten years ago with the help of the Rockefeller brothers, predicted the current African famines. Brown and his dozen diligent helpers claim no special powers, only a willingness to mine other people's statistics. Worldwatch is plugged into 70 research institutes around the globe and has access to computer data from the United Nations, World Bank and the U.S. Government.

Most impressive is Brown's growing audience, estimated in the hundreds of millions. The report is sold, not given away (in the U.S., the tab is $9.95), the income from it and other publications paying more than half of Worldwatch's expenses. State of the World will be printed in nine languages, total 150,000 copies by year's end and find its way into 122 nations. The Chinese produce three different versions (John Naisbitt's Megatrends rates only two versions). Interestingly, China has mounted a campaign to shrink the percentage of its budget spent on defense and spur economic development.