security.In view of the poll, it would seem that there are more pertinent questions: Can the United States be contained and other nations secured in the face of the U.S. threat?In some parts of the world the United States ranks even higher as a perceived menace to world peace, notably in the Middle East, where overwhelming majorities regard the U.S. and its close ally Israel as the major threats they face, not the U.S.-Israeli favorite: Iran.Few Latin Americans are likely to question the judgment of Cuban nationalist hero José Martí, who wrote in 1894, “The further they draw away from the United States, the freer and more prosperous the [Latin] American people will be.”Martí’s judgment has been well-confirmed in recent years, once again by the analysis of poverty by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, released last month.The U.N. report shows that far-reaching reforms have sharply reduced poverty in Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and some other countries where U.S.
