WorldCity Business Magazine

Taking a Step Backward

by Ken Roberts

Uproar over Dubai Ports World deal shows how much work still needs to be done.

The United States had a trade surplus last year with 112 countries, nearly half the world’s nations, despite posting the largest-ever trade deficit in history. While WORLDCITY does not share other media’s fixation on the deficit to the exclusion of all else – imports, exports and total trade all set records in 2005 – a closer look at those surpluses reveals something striking.

In dollar terms, the biggest jump in a U.S. trade surplus was with the United Arab Emirates. That’s the home of Dubai Ports World.

There have been a number of low points on the path to increased global integration since I founded WORLDCITY in 1998, but the brouhaha involving Dubai Ports World has been the most asinine. Major television news outlets are the biggest offenders, closely tailed by ignorant and grandstanding politicians from both parties.

Beyond the jump in U.S. exports to the United Arab Emirates, mostly in the form of Boeing aircraft from Seattle, here are other reasons the ports deal should have gone forward:

-Terrorists would not be more likely to bomb or otherwise sabotage our seaports with an Arab company managing the facilities. If anything, they would be less likely.

-If the United States has any real interest in rebuilding its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, this uproar works decidedly against that. Dubai Ports World is a wellknown and respected global company.

-Under the agreement, Dubai Ports World would have had nothing to do with security, just as P&O Ports did not. That duty stays with local, state and federal governments.

To quash the plan was a colossal blunder, made all the more offensive by TV reporters painting it as a deal under which the United States was selling its ports to an Arab company, initially failing to understand the difference between a port and a terminal operator at a port.

What saddens and frightens me most is how ineffective a voice we – those of us whose businesses directly benefit from increased globalization – were in setting the record straight.

Somehow, U.S. consumers don’t understand that the clothes on their backs, the electronics in their pockets and the food at their dinner tables are all far more affordable thanks to open and expanding global markets.

The Dubai Ports World case was a giant step backward, even if it was in an imported shoe.