The Rest of the World Had a Great Time

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." (See related story on page 44.)

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CREDIT: TIME Graphics by Steve Hart

CAPTION: RIO SUMMIT'S PAPER TRAIL