TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/062292/0622990.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 3.6 KB | 78 lines

                                                                                THE WEEK, Page 24

NATION

The Rest of the World Had a Great Time


Bush gets hot flashes in Panama and a cool reception in Rio


    Perhaps George Bush should have known better than to think a
brief stop in Panama on his way to an uncomfortable appearance
at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de
Janeiro would remind Americans of the foreign policy successes
that have otherwise marked his Administration. Panama City is
notoriously prone to ugly street demonstrations, and on the eve
of Bush's hastily arranged visit, an American G.I. was killed
and another wounded in a drive-by shooting.

    Panama was, it turned out, the wrong place to look for
some upbeat coverage. As a rally for Bush -- dubbed "A Meeting
of Friends" -- was getting under way, anti-American protesters
edged too close to the downtown park for Panama's fledgling
police force, which responded by firing their weapons into the
air and lobbing tear-gas canisters nearby. Bush's Secret
Service detail had no choice but to hastily surround the
President and his wife, hurry them off the platform and into the
armored limousine and, with guns drawn, beat a hasty retreat
from the ensuing chaos.

    After that calamity, the Rio conference turned out to be
comparatively free of controversy. For weeks Bush had acted more
like a latter-day James Watt than "the environmental President,"
at first uncertain about attending the conference and then
blocking a variety of proposals from major allies, developing
countries and even William Reilly, his own Environmental
Protection Agency director, that were designed to improve the
environment into the 21st century. Bush seemed to be caught
between two constituencies he holds dear -- on one side
conservatives and business leaders who oppose spending on the
environment, and on the other conservationists whose support he
courted in 1988 -- and the trip loomed as a potential failure.
Bush would neither get credit at home for attending the summit
nor win points for quashing the pro-green proposals that were
anathema to business. As of early last week, many inside the
White House couldn't explain why he was bothering to make the
trip.

    By the time he departed on Thursday, Bush had decided it
was better to cast his lot with his party's conservative base
than to try to be all things to all people. "For the past
half-century," said Bush, "the U.S. has been the great engine
of global economic growth, and it's going to stay that way."
Once in Rio, Bush signed a climate-change treaty calling on all
nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and provide
specific plans for meeting that goal -- something the U.S. has
already begun. Bush was criticized by some environmentalists for
pledging less in new aid to developing nations than did Japan,
which announced plans to boost its spending by $400 million a
year. But most of the financing promises from other governments
were murky and highly conditional. "The money is really
wishy-washy right now," said Liz Barratt-Brown, an attorney with
the Natural Resources Defense Council. "There are a lot of vague
statements being made."

    Bush refused to join other industrialized nations in a
biodiversity pact to protect plant and animal life from possible
extinction. He argued that the treaty failed to protect
intellectual property rights in biotechnology and imposed
unnecessary obstacles for researchers. "America's record on
environmental protection is second to none," said Bush. "So I
did not come here to apologize."