SAVING THE WORLD
New York Post
By NICOLE GELINAS
PAUL Wolfowitz is done with foreign policy. Wolf owitz has defended Ameri ca's global interests under six presidents, but soon that won't be his job anymore. As president of the World Bank, Wolfowitz won't serve the president of the United States. He'll serve the fiduciary interests of the world's poor.
The left finds this jarring. The New York Times' Paul Krugman mutters that Bush wants to turn the World Bank into the "ugly American bank."
But Wolfowitz's nomination isn't quite that radical — and in fact, I wonder if the idea for his nomination wasn't seeded from within the frustrated ranks of the bank itself. Wolfowitz should fit right in with the idealistic economists and theorists who populate the international-leftist flank of the bank's Washington headquarters.
Wolfowitz has long argued that America's interests are best served when we encourage, or push, other nations to be free — so that their citizens can thrive, politically and economically. Free people don't resent their dictators, nor do they resent the Western governments who long tolerated those dictators.
The progressive wing of the World Bank has long advocated the democratic, bottom-up economic development that indirectly furthers this goal — as opposed to the top-down economic development that just props up third-world dictators and shuts regular people out of economic growth.
The bank's progressives don't believe in financing billion-dollar mining or oil-pipeline projects for unaccountable national governments and multi-national corporations. They think the institution should think smaller — awarding more small-scale loans and grants directly to third-world cities and towns, for example, so that those cities and towns can build modest water-treatment plants and power plants for their people.
They also argue that the bank should award more modest-sized loans to small businesses in the developing world, as well as tiny loans to individual entrepreneurs: women who want to open laundromats, bakeries and schools, and men who want to open barber shops and restaurants.
The theory is that entrepreneurial capitalists and small businesses can best decide which businesses will thrive in an emerging economy, and local leaders can best determine which infrastructure projects will encourage economic development.
This dovetails neatly with Wolfowitz's own global experience with democracy and economic growth. Wolfowitz served as ambassador to Indonesia during the second Reagan administration — and he often notes that he observed how Indonesians stagnated, politically and economically, under their dictator's centrally planned regime.
Wolfowitz has remained a close observer of Indonesia — and he has seen that Indonesia finally achieved organic economic growth just as the nation moved toward freedom and democracy. Each was a necessary counterpart to the other.
Wolfowitz has said that real economic development around the world "scares extremists . . . because [its] ascendancy," along with pluralism and democracy, "only means the lessening of the terrorists' iron grip on the people they control and oppress."
Wolfowitz has also said that one of America's goals in Afghanistan is to develop a representative government that protects both the "political and economic rights" of its citizens. And he often notes that one of the first things America did in Iraq was to get Saddam's picture off the dinar — because it was a symbol of how Saddam controlled the nation's economy and its people.
Wolfowitz's inevitable focus on encouraging bottom-up democracy through World Bank projects will likely help the bank's most thoughtful idealists put their long-held beliefs into practice — and it will put him in direct conflict with the people who have historically gotten things done at the bank.
Wolfowitz will likely clash with the bank's actual bankers, who prefer to finance the billion-dollar pipelines and mining projects, because they make real money. Unaccountable third-world governments love these projects, because huge, export-based projects put hard cash directly into their pockets. But the lefties have always hated the big projects, because they keep governments unaccountable and isolated from the people.
Wolfowitz can help the bank's best thinkers to articulate the direction they've unsuccessfully pushed for years: Don't measure success by the billions of dollars raised and loaned each year, but measure it by more modest results on the ground.
Has bank financing helped to develop property rights and the rule of law in a formerly opaque region? Has bank financing helped to facilitate trade — first between individual business owners, and then between regions and then nations? Has the construction of a piece of local infrastructure improved relations between local leaders and their citizenry? Are successful merchants and workers demanding that their leaders be more accountable to them?
Critics have always caricatured Wolfowitz as a far-right neoconservative on the flat American political landscape. But they forget that the world is round — which means at the bank, he'll be just a few degrees shy of being an actual lefty. Running the bank may give him the final push. |
