The war against terrorism wasn't on the working agenda last week at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, but it popped up most everywhere you looked. The Brazilians complained about Washington's new rules for screening passengers on flights to the U.S., and Mexican commentators were outraged over plans to station American security personnel at Mexico's airports. "The U.S. concentration on terrorism undermines the whole process of developing better relations inside the Americas," said Annette Hester, director of the Latin American Research Center in Calgary, Canada, who was an observer at the summit. "Some felt the Americans have little appetite for anything else."

That may not be entirely fair. As Mexico's President Vicente Fox recently told Time, George W. Bush's new immigration policies — which may grant temporary legal status to migrant workers — reflect a new U.S. willingness to pick up issues that had "fallen behind" in the two years since Sept. 11, 2001. But even so, Monterrey showed that Americans continue to have a different set of priorities from most other nations — and in that it was part of a trend. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Thailand last October, Hu Jintao, the President of China, walked into a room of CEOs and gave a measured, thoughtful speech on economic integration in the region, followed by unscripted questions from the floor. President Bush, by contrast, didn't make it to the CEO gathering, and throughout the APEC meeting there was an undertone of grumbling about the U.S. The main focus of the high-powered American delegation was security and the continued threat of terrorism in Asia. But most of the Asians present wanted to talk about economics and the spaghetti-like network of free-trade agreements being negotiated in the region. Something similar had been evident a few weeks earlier at the off-the-record parties and dinners that, as usual, enlivened the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City. In private, there was a plain sense that many non-Americans no longer felt that the atrocities of Sept. 11 should define international politics forever. They wanted to talk about something other than terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.

The "one-prism syndrome" — former U.N. Under Secretary General Brian Urquhart's description of the American tendency to evaluate every question in terms of its impact on the war against terrorism — has become a problem. As Urquhart wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, other threats to global security and stability — disease and poverty in the developing world, and the dwindling supply of natural resources such as fresh water — command "far less attention than the policies and actions of the world's single superpower and the ferocity and ingenuity of its terrorist enemies." The question is: Can the rest of the world get the Bush Administration to focus on these other threats?

What you see depends on where you stand. If your vantage point is in or around the centers of the U.S.-led alliance, America's recent behavior can seem benign and helpful. Such an outlook would focus on the amazing recent performance of the American economy. As Ed Balls, chief economic adviser to Britain's Treasury, pointed out in a recent speech, "Between 1991 and 2002 the U.S. economy grew by more than 40% — double the growth in the euro zone and almost four times the growth of Japan." Whenever global economic hot spots erupted in the 1990s, as at the time of the Mexican currency crisis or the Asian financial meltdown, American government largesse and the willingness of the American consumer to buy the world's goods cushioned potentially devastating shocks. When security challenges presented themselves — for example, in North Korea in 1994 or in the Balkans throughout the '90s — American diplomacy and muscle were vital to resolving them. The U.S., in the phrase of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, became "the indispensable nation."

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, which, in the American telling, made "the war against terrorism" the dominant security issue facing the world. American soldiers, with an unparalleled technological advantage over all other armed forces, took the lead in waging it. In 2003, the Bush Administration acted on its conviction that the crises of the Islamic world could no longer be allowed to threaten those outside its borders. The U.S. removed the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, committing itself to the growth of democracy and liberal economics in an arc of crisis from Maghreb to Mindanao. Just as in the '90s, Washington was setting the agenda — and not just in security. Seen from the U.S., as the global economy entered its first synchronized recession for almost 30 years in 2001, it was wise American policy-makers and confident American consumers who started to lead it to recovery. The U.S. figures for both GDP and productivity growth released in the second half of 2003 proved, once again, that America was the motor of the international economy just as it was the guarantor of international stability. Indispensability, it could be argued, was too weak a word for American dominance of the international agenda.

That, in any case, is the view from the U.S. This week, it will be interesting to see if it is also the way the world looks from the Swiss Alps, as many of the planet's top business and political leaders make their annual trek to Davos for the meeting of the World Economic Forum. Not long ago, one of the joys of Davos was that you were more likely to meet finance ministers from the developing world and European business leaders than U.S. Senators and tycoons. Davos, the New York City-based filmmaker Peter Foges used to say, was "one great adult-education class for the Mittelstand."

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) But that changed in the late '90s, as Davos became much more attractive to Americans. Hillary Clinton was there in 1998, Al Gore braved a blizzard to get up from Zurich in 1999, and the following year Bill Clinton visited for the first time. The Lords of the New Economy decided the trip from California was worth it, and the meeting's character was subtly altered; you were more likely to meet a snot-nosed software brat from Silicon Valley than a shoe manufacturer from Turin. But this year, there is a case for hoping that Davos may once again become a place not dominated by American concerns, America's agenda and the sense that America is the sun around which everywhere else rotates. The world needs a broader perspective.

Of course, there's no denying that terrorism is a crucial threat — or that the U.S. is leading the world out of recession. Growth in the euro zone and Japan remains Micawberish, something that may turn up one day. But the relative health of the U.S. economy does not flow from the fact that American business leaders are more broad-shouldered than anyone else or American consumers more spendthrift. The recovery is a function of old-fashioned Keynesian economics; extraordinarily loose fiscal and monetary policies have lifted the U.S. economy out of its gloom. The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates 13 times since January 2001, so that short-term rates are now at their lowest for more than a generation. At the same time, the federal government has been spending like a drunken sailor. The federal budget deficit now stands at around 4.5% of GDP, its highest level since 1992. If that degree of stimulus had not got the juices flowing, every economics textbook in the world should have been burned. And the risks of American deficit spending are enormous: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently warned that although U.S. fiscal policies had "undoubtedly provided valuable support to the recovery so far," continued large deficits "may come at the eventual cost of upward pressure on interest rates" and leave "the budget even less well-prepared to cope with the retirement of the baby-boom generation." Any rise in interest rates, the IMF's economists noted, would not be limited to the U.S. but would be felt worldwide, so that the "adverse effects of U.S. fiscal deficits would spill over into global investment and output."

Growing U.S. indebtedness — just as the textbooks would predict — is already placing strain on the dollar, though currency realignments are, at present, distributed unevenly. Floating freely, the euro has climbed more than 40% against the greenback since the end of 2001, while some Asian currencies, which are in effect pegged to the dollar, have barely budged. "Although the dollar's adjustment could occur gradually over an extended period," the IMF warned, "the possible global risks of a disorderly exchange-rate adjustment, especially to financial markets, cannot be ignored."

Just as the story of the American economic recovery is more nuanced than it looks from Washington, so U.S. geopolitical priorities make less sense when seen from outside the country. The need to focus not just on security but on development, global health and poverty has rarely been greater. In a magnificent speech last September at the World Bank annual meeting in Dubai, Bank president James Wolfensohn pointed out that the proportion of rich-world budgets devoted to development assistance has never been lower than it is now. The development goals adopted at the U.N.'s Millennium Summit four years ago are not being met. Sub- Saharan Africa is getting relatively poorer. Cash transfers for education in the developing world — the single best way to improve lives — are falling well short of what is needed. Developing countries worry, said Wolfensohn, that aid money goes "to the latest crisis or to fight drugs or terror, rather than to long-term development."

Wolfensohn's warning has been echoed since by many other leaders. At Monterrey, Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, "If we want a stable and secure world, we must build a more just and equitable world." And Wolfensohn is even more concerned about the lack of attention to development goals today than he was four months ago. With reason: security concerns skew development priorities. Within the next few years, tens of billions of dollars for aid and reconstruction will be spent on roughly 50 million people in Iraq (which will soon be a major oil exporter) and Afghanistan. Yet African nations still wait for access to the rich world's markets for their textile exports.

The point here is not just to blame Washington for its focus on terrorism. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would have recalibrated the policies of any country in which they occurred. In fact, Wolfensohn gives credit to the Bush Administration for promising to increase both the U.S. aid budget and the amount that it spends on fighting aids internationally — although, as ever in the American system, both initiatives have been subject to congressional meddling and delay. But there are plenty of other culprits for the failure to develop an international agenda not determined by the war on terrorism. With a U.S. Administration absorbed by security, there has been a huge opportunity for Western Europe and Japan to promote a development agenda of their own. This they have not done. There have been honorable exceptions; Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has spoken eloquently of the need to increase aid budgets and forgive debt, while the French have taken the lead in providing peacekeepers to Africa. But in large measure, European and Japanese leaders have been just as preoccupied with their own local issues as any American has been with terrorism. The interminable construction of the European Union has monopolized the attention of the European political class. In Japan — which by the late '80s had become one of the world's most generous aid donors — a decade of economic disappointment led to a shrinking of political horizons. Even Canada, a country whose economy is in splendid shape and whose people like to boast of their commitment to the world's poor and downtrodden, shrank its aid budget in the '90s.

None of this is to suggest that other nations should set themselves up as rivals to the U.S. But they might consider what Harvard University's Joseph Nye calls "soft balancing." Nye has long argued that in conventional "hard-power" terms — for example, the strength of its military — the U.S. has an unassailable position. But in a forthcoming book, Nye suggests that in the realm of "soft power" — political and cultural resources — other nations' capabilities are increasing relative to the U.S. The U.S. is bearing the lion's share of the global-security burden. But Western Europe and Japan are wealthy, comfortable places. It is surely possible for them to balance America's agenda with priorities of their own.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) While we wait — and wait — for the E.U. and Japan to assume the responsibilities that go with prosperity, others are rising to the challenge. Traditionally, issues of economic development have been defined by rich nations, not just because they had the wealth to do something about them, but because they could speak with legitimacy. Putting it crudely, after 1945, rich nations tended to be true democracies, while poor nations — with honorable exceptions, like India — did not. But this is changing. The "emerging" democracies no longer need the patronizing adjective. The relatively poor nations of Eastern and Central Europe have had democratic governments for more than a decade. In the last four years, both Mexico and Brazil have seen the peaceful transition of power from one political party to another. Africa's giants, Nigeria and South Africa, are both democracies. Strengthened by a sense of their own legitimacy, and in some cases led by charismatic figures such as Lula, these nations have shown themselves willing to stand up for their interests. Last September, Brazil led a march out of the World Trade Organization talks in Cancún rather than accept a deal in which the richest nations gave little away. Later that month at the U.N. General Assembly, the leaders of Brazil, India and South Africa — representing over 1.2 billion people — pledged to work together on development issues. And at the E.U. summit in December, Poland resisted French and German bullying and refused to accept the dilution of its voting rights in the proposed European constitution.

How far should this new attitude go? Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University, recently argued that "the democracies of the developing world ... should say, 'We need to act on the issues that concern us, not just on the issues that concern the U.S.'" Sachs calls for a "declaration of independence from American willfulness." The language may be a bit harsh — there's little to be gained by such an open challenge to the U.S. — but the sentiment is an interesting one. Cooperation among the new democracies, and an enhanced saliency of their views, could turn out to be one of the most important developments of our time. Winning the war on terrorism — the dominant issue in international affairs when viewed from the U.S. — is important. But it is not the only thing that will improve the human condition over the next two decades. Many poor nations can now speak with just as much authority as rich ones. In time, that should transform the list of items that all of us consider important. It would be nice if the view of the world from Davos this year reflected such a change.

• MICHAEL ELLIOTT
• Michael Elliott argues that America's security concerns shouldn't dominate the agenda at this year's gathering of the world's business and political élite in Davos