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|  | JANUARY 27, 2005
By Bruce Nussbaum Davos' Best, Worst, and Surprising Tony Blair makes U.S. policy sound reasonable. Jacques Chirac wants to tax the world. And actor Richard Gere delivers in an AIDS speech As usual, opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos ended with a series of fancy parties (yes, I attended three) after many speeches (yes, I heard them all). Let me handicap them for you. The very best, by far, was British Prime Minister Tony Blair's brilliant defense of President Bush's inaugural call to end tyranny and spread democracy around the world. The worst was from French President Jacques Chirac, who called for a global tax to help the global poor. And the biggest surprise was the speech given by Richard Gere (yes, the actor) congratulating corporate CEOs for being a lot faster than slow, bureaucratic governments to respond to the problem of HIV infection in India and elsewhere. GOLDEN TOUCH. Blair has always had the talent of taking U.S. foreign policy statements that sound harsh and unredeeming to European ears, and making them sound reasonable and right for a global audience. His speech on why preemptive action without the blessing of the U.N. was the right thing to do in Serbia and Kosovo was terrific. So, too, were his remarks about Bush's call for global democracy. Blair posed a rhetorically powerful question: When did progressives on the left become opposed to democracy? In framing the issue that way, he was shaming the many Europeans who reacted in horror to Bush's call for freedom around the world. He cautioned that U.S. policy was evolving -- even Bush admitted in his speech that military power alone cannot spread freedom. Clearly, he added, the European emphasis on poverty (voted as the world's most important problem at a town hall meeting at Davos on the first day) and the American emphasis on terrorism were two sides of the same problem. ABSURD CHOICE. The more people live under freedom, the less they will support terrorism, Blair argued. And the more people live without poverty, the less they'll support terrorism. "It's absurd to choose between an agenda on terrorism and one on poverty," Blair said, bridging the Atlantic in one fell swoop. Amazing. President Bush should really hire Blair's speechwriter. But not Chirac's. The French President presides over a country with an unemployment rate approaching 10%, due in no small part to the heavy government taxation and regulation. Yet, via a videolink from Paris, he used the Davos venue to call for a global levy to increase aid to the poor. In my judgment, France could help the world's poor a lot more by ending its subsidies of cotton and agricultural production, but that's another matter. AIDS WARRIOR. As for Gere, he helped to dispel the prejudices, especially among journalists (including me) about "dumb" actors leveraging their celebrity to promote philanthropic causes. Plenty of CEOs do it, some bright and some not so bright. Gere gave a thoughtful, detailed speech on how he has gone about battling HIV for the past 20 years, starting with the fact that AIDS has decimated his own creative community -— his friends and colleagues. This is a cause he has championed for a long time. Gere said governments are slow to act due to bureaucracy, so he works with the media and corporations first because they can move quickly. He said James Murdoch, son of Rupert and head of satellite news network 2Sky2, called him, wanting to help in India, and they partnered up to fight HIV there -- just like that. It was a surprising message from a surprising source. And that's Davos for you.  Nussbaum is editorial page editor for BusinessWeek Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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