Disquiet has been the major theme of this year's World Economic Forum held in New York before an audience of some of the world's richest and most influential people. Disquiet was expressed about the prospects for economic recovery in the United States, about a pattern of unilateralism in US foreign policy reasserted by President Bush's State of the Union speech last week, and about the maldistribution of wealth and resources in a highly unequal world.
This sense of unease tended to pitch European critics against American policy-makers, in a significant barometer of a growing trend in world politics.
There was a clear difference of emphasis between US and European views about the likelihood of a rapid economic recovery. Upbeat assessments by private researchers were disputed by economists and chief executives who see the current US downturn lasting through the coming year. As Mr Peter Sutherland put it, "a lot of Europeans view American optimism as part of the character of the country and not necessarily reasoned analysis". Critics point to the collapse of profitability, slow productivity growth and high consumer indebtedness in the US, rather than the buoyancy of consumer spending underlined by more optimistic commentators.
A more disquieting disagreement about policy arose from discussion about President Bush's reference last week to an "axis of evil" between Iran, Iraq and North Korea in harbouring and promoting terrorist organisations. This was described as a "bridge too far" for the Europeans by Mr Joseph Nye, the international relations scholar. As he put it, "there's a strong suspicion here that Bush is back to unilateralism, that after Afghanistan, America isn't especially interested in listening to the rest of the world".
Such critics detect a victory for Pentagon hawks over State Department diplomats in the crafting of Mr Bush's speech - an impression confirmed at a high-level meeting on security in Munich over the weekend. A veteran French participant compared the US Secretary of State, Mr Donald Rumsfeld's attitude to NATO with that of Charles de Gaulle, adding that "we're in danger of creating a world in which the US fights, the UN feeds, and Europe funds".
The most disquieting trend revealed at this meeting is the increasing inequality between the rich and poor in today's world. Passionate exchanges between the U2 singer, Bono; Mr Bill Gates, and the US Treasury Secretary, Mr Paul O'Neill, underlined the burden of Third World debt and the need to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa. There is room for hope that more attention is now being paid to the sheer waste of human lives and resources involved, even among such a privileged gathering. Rampant inequalities destabilise the world by breeding terrorism. That such problems must be tackled politically, not by solely military means, is increasingly recognised.