BUSH WILL LEARN: GLOBALIZATION BEGINS AT HOME

Even Latin American revolutionaries have use-by dates today: Fresher models
roll out for changing times. Colin Powell and Jorge Castaneda, Mexico's
foreign minister, spent one minute discussing Cuba's Fidel Castro and 10
minutes on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in talks here the other day.

"The Beard Also Sets" might be Hemingway's take on this evolution in
revolution. By claiming a key role for himself in oil politics, supporting
rebel forces in Colombia and befriending Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Chavez
casts a much longer and darker shadow over U.S. global interests than does
the fading Castro.

What to do about Hugo will be a major early theme for the Bush
administration as it confronts the emerging reality that globalization
begins at home. President Bush has promised to focus early on hemispheric
affairs, and he is right to do so.

Even the godfather of globalization, former Treasury secretary Robert
Rubin, pointed out to a Washington audience last month how that phenomenon
begins at home. Keeping U.S. borders open for eight years to drive a new
wave of world commerce and finance was a major Clinton administration
accomplishment, Rubin said.

But the rush of products, people and capital across the borders of the
Americas and elsewhere brings bad as well as good -- drugs and drug money
as well as investment returns and cheap toys. There is a dark side to the
free trade imperative that drives globalization. It needs to be assessed in
a sober and systematic fashion.

One glimpse of the effects of that dark side on American lives comes in the
new hit movie "Traffic," a tale of Mexico, the United States and the drug
trade. Castaneda and his aides went to see the film in Washington after
finishing their meetings with Powell and Condoleezza Rice. "Traffic" has
not yet opened in Mexico.

It is a measure of the welcome change occurring south of the Rio Grande
when a Mexican foreign minister goes from talks with the secretary of state
and the president's national security adviser to a mere movie. Castaneda's
more formal predecessors would have been at one of those stultifying policy
dinners where boilerplate is the main course.

But art can be smarter than life -- smarter at least than those American
policymakers who proclaim they are winning the "war" on drugs by
defoliating agricultural fields in Colombia while doing little to restrict
U.S. demand or to help Americans who have ruined their lives with narcotics
rehabilitate themselves.

Steven Soderbergh's artful film makes that point, a Castaneda aide noted.
He found the film "balanced" -- that is, the movie puts heavy emphasis on
the demand problem here and on the hypocrisy of an overly militarized and
punitive policy that hits American families harder than it hits the drug trade.

Castaneda spun finely filigreed answers of substance and candor to
reporters' questions about immigration, reform in Mexico, NAFTA and other
first-tier problems he discussed with Powell and Rice. But he was too
shrewd to play critic for me about a movie that offers such an intimate
portrayal of a vast social evil that unites the gringos and Latinos of the
Americas as do few other forces. That is, I assume, why he bucked my
question to his aides.

Castaneda came to office with President Vicente Fox in December. Fox has
just begun to explain to his nation the mess he found in the Mexican
criminal justice system and to try to establish control, gradually, of drug
enforcement and internal security. He will outline his plans when Bush
makes his first presidential trip abroad later this month to Mexico.

Castaneda's visit came shortly after a similar trip to Washington by
Canadian Foreign Minister John Manley, who engaged Powell on the challenges
and opportunities created by the cross-border exchange of $1 billion a day
in goods and 200 million visitors a year.

Bush hosts Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien on Feb. 5 as the first
foreign leader he will meet in office. Bush seems open to exploring a
triangular approach to the problems of the Americas with his two partners
in NAFTA. That would provide an early and positive sign to the world that
reports of Bush's unilateralist tendencies have been exaggerated.

The president should also use these opening meetings to show that the
mechanics of greater trade and immigration will not overshadow the social
and moral values that should be reflected in U.S. dealings with its closest
neighbors. If globalization begins at home, so does good foreign policy.