�Mr. Turner, who is also giving a billion dollars to UN programs, is not the only American taking on a role usually reserved for government. In most countries opponents of dictatorship or those struggling to build civil society can find help at the American embassy. But in nearly 60 nations they might be able to get more direct support at George Soros�s Open Society Institute.

�The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving government-size contributions to combat third-world diseases. These foundations contribute to vital global programs that lack a constituency in Washington, and promote American interests in the process.

�High-impact philanthropy is not new. The green revolution of the 1960s was financed largely by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. But today�s donors have impact because Washington is falling back from overseas commitments and aid to poor nations has plummeted.

�The new philanthropy is not guided by the trustees of an estate. Each foundation instead serves the personal vision of a single aggressive international entrepreneur. Their missions - more focussed, impatient and overtly political than the grass-roots development work of Ford and Rockefeller - resemble miniature foreign policies, and often bump shoulders with Washington�s version.

�Of the three big givers, Mr. Soros - who spent $470 million last year to create open societies overseas - has the clearest foreign agenda, shaped by his experience as a refugee from both Nazism and Communism.

Mr. Soros�s foundations, which began in former Communist nations, have now moved as far afield as Indonesia and South Africa. They are frequently more challenging of authoritarian leaders than the American embassies.

�While there is a danger that the Gates�s, Turners and Soros�s will simply supply Washington with a justification for further cuts in aid to the developing world, the reverse is more likely. Mr. Turner�s UN dues were a catalyst for a 189-nation deal, allowing Senator Jesse Helms to agree to pay much of Washington�s back dues. The foundations are necessary in a city where it is not need but attention and public support that guide the flow of money.�

As praiseworthy as the present volunteer philanthropists undoubtedly are, there is something basically awry when the lone superpower that has its say and influence on just about everything that happens on any continent, should be the grand absentee when it comes to meeting pre-arranged commitments. That leaves the field open for private interests to use mammoth contributions to advance private interests. During the last US presidential elections the world watched incredulously while private interests used their financial contributions to guide national policy. The private contribution format will be a vehicle standing ready to frustrate the still tentative democratic processes of benefited countries. If a hundred thousand dollar contributions, for example, were judged suspect in the electoral process of a country of the wealth of the US, how great the danger of corruption where the contributions are many times that in mouse-poor lands?

Even in a newspaper as perceptive as The New York Times, just reporting this philanthropy, but not contributing it, we note the phrase creeps in �opponents of dictatorship can find help at the American embassy.� By the Times� own record, that can hardly be said of most countries of Latin America over the years. In Brazil and the Argentine discussed below, bloody military dictatorships in the not-too distant past came to power with the active help of Washington. Moreover, there are other indications of the withdrawal of Washington under its new president from the economic crises of South American countries to which the Deregulation and Globalization agenda advanced by Washington has played its part.

An article of The New York Times in the same issue by Larry Rohrer �First Things Last - Argentina and the Aid Next Door� from Rio clues us into that not unrelated aspect of Washington�s policy.

�With Argentina�s economy in meltdown and Brazil�s straining under growing market pressure, the Bush administration is now facing its first full-fledged international economic crisis.

�Thus far it has acted with so much reluctance, hesitancy and awkwardness that it risks leaving both countries more vulnerable than ever.