New York ? Global business is burbling while global politics croaks messages of dread, frustration and hatred. It is supersized Dickens: The best of times by many economic measures is also the worst of times when we listen to the pollsters and the politicians.

Why this disjunction of spirits? Or to put it another way: Why not? Selling fear is the oldest tool of politics. Selling hope and confidence is the mother’s milk of business. The more we get, the more we have to fear being taken away by “others” as defined by race, religion, class or rivalrous sameness.

But there is a different, fragile feel to this particular “golden moment,” a term George Shultz used in a recent Washington talk. As a former secretary of both treasury and state, Shultz is credible in warning that the current public fury with leaders, material conditions and the conduct of nations does not match – and eventually can threaten – the economic openings that bring billions of new workers into global labor markets and generate huge profits for the happy few of highest finance.

Protectionism is the danger Shultz has in mind.

The jarring contrast is easy to spot. I went recently from listening in Washington to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, hopefully describe a world of growing individual empowerment and prosperity as Chinese and Indian peasants join the Internet era to listening to politicians at the annual Munich Security Conference darkly emphasize the threats of terrorism, failed states and, yes, American unilateralism and lawlessness.

That point was put most pungently by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a widely misunderstood presentation. Putin’s speech was an intensely personal mocking of President Bush rather than a policy declaration of hostility toward the United States. Moreover, it was laboriously calculated for domestic political effect to bolster the other important Russian in Munich, Sergei Ivanov.

It was good cop, bad cop. Ivanov talked reassuringly about U.S.-Russian cooperation. Also a former KGB officer, Ivanov is moving forward now to succeed Putin. He was portrayed on Moscow television as the more statesmanlike figure – including in one program filmed before either spoke in Munich but showed afterward, one knowledgeable Russian told me. Putin promoted Ivanov to become first deputy prime minister five days after the president’s speech in Germany.

Putin’s political intentions and the makeup of his audience reflect how the national security imperative has displaced pocketbook issues that should dominate political discourse today. A relatively strong global growth cycle is continuing longer than experience and experts say is normal. You can argue economic policies round or flat and pick your own numbers. In this confusion, foreign policy and national security issues become more salient and decisive in campaigns around the world.

Putin’s audience included U.S. Sen. John McCain, a leading Republican presidential contender, who took the high road by characterizing Putin’s jabs as “aggressive” but quickly adding that Americans still must work with Russia. But it did not include Sen. Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic contender. Clinton decided to stay away from a meeting she dazzled two years ago. This time she did not want to be put in the position of criticizing the Bush administration or Democratic rivals on Iraq from a foreign forum.

Instead she went to New Hampshire to criticize Bush on Iraq and to eclipse her Democratic rivals. Republican strategists hope she will now “chase John Edwards to the left” to counter his populist economic programs and thereby muddy her appeal to the electoral center on national security.

The dynamic is similar in other democracies. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin gets little to no political credit for announcing that unemployment has declined steadily through his tattered term. Segolene Royal, the Socialist presidential candidate, has tumbled her once front-running campaign into second place with foreign policy blunders that make her seem inexperienced and duplicitous. (The second the French may forgive, but not the first.)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel presides over a stalemated coalition and a surprisingly robust economy. No need to dwell on Tony Blair’s politically poisoned golden economic chalice in Britain.

Abundant financing in global markets and broad confidence in the ability of today’s central banks to control inflation have created a buoyant international financial system in which risk premiums scrape historic lows. Oil price volatility creates enormous psychological strain on Western consumers – but has not derailed growth to this point.

There is always cause for concern about markets overshooting, especially when risk premiums evaporate. But the merchants of political despair are overdoing it as they manipulate the new instruments of intrusive 24/7 communications. Breathe deep, look around at what is really happening, and spend more time in life than online or in other forms of virtual reality.