America Still A Safe Place

‘Terror’ Map Shows U.S. A Good Place To Do Business; Mideast, Not So Much

May 21, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

Living under oppression creep in the United States, it is common — and right — to view today’s America as a severely compromised, quasi-socialist version of the land envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.

But a little present-day perspective can be informative, too. And while there’s a lot of work to do if the Nation is to ever live up to the ideals that gave it birth, the United States is still far ahead of most countries when it comes to providing the basic, raw materials that lay the groundwork for the pursuit of happiness.

Risk management firm Aon, which sells insurance to companies that seek to establish an international footprint, released its global “Terrorism and Political Violence” assessment map for 2013 last week, revealing that countries in North and South America, generally, are among the Earth’s most politically stable, most terror-free and most friendly to new business.

The assessment reviews the relative political stability of each Nation on Earth, looking at factors like internal sabotage, the threat of terror, labor unrest (such as strikes and riots), insurrection and revolt, war and civil war in predicting the risk factor for businesses that require peace and some measure of domestic happiness just to open up shop.

By those measures, the United States and Canada, along with 12 other countries in the Americas, all are regarded as low-risk business zones. Mexico, Guatemala, Jamaica, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina are considered to be “medium”-risk countries. Six more — Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Paraguay — were rated as “high” risks for upheaval in its various forms. But no country in North or South America was rated as a severe business risk.

Contrast that with nearly all of Central Africa and the Mideast, where severity is the norm, or even Western Europe, where France and Spain find themselves in the same category as Mexico, Kazakhstan, China and Bosnia.

The report names terrorism — which it ominously describes as a “foreseeable risk” — as the lone man-made factor threatening American businesses’ physical capital and human resources, whereas all of the “severe”-risk countries are threatened not only by terrorism but by violent internal strife, as well as the threat (or the existing condition) of outright war.

Of the developed nations, only Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Iceland are considered to harbor “negligible” man-made risk.