Bush Appoints Robert Zoellick to Presidency of World Bank

President Bush announced on Wednesday that he would appoint former US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick as president of the World Bank. Mr. Zoellick replaces the completely unqualified Paul Wolfowitz, who is resigning over ethical short-comings effective the end of this month. While Mr. Zoellick is a supporter of the Bushevik approach to Iraq-Nam, he is vastly more qualified than Mr. Wolfowitz, having actually spent most of his career in international economics and finance.

Although a lawyer by academic training, he holds a masters degree in public policy from Harvard (where he also attended law school), his government service has largely been at the US Treasury and at the Department of State. In the second Reagan administration, he was at Treasury as Counselor to the Secretary and Executive Secretary; Executive Secretary and Special Adviser to the Secretary; Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy; Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary; Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary (enough secretaries to open a temp agency). In Pere Bush’s administration, he served at State as Under Secretary for Economic and Agricultural Affairs.

In the private sector in the Clinton years, he was at Fannie Mae as Executive Vice President, where he had been Vice President and Assistant to the Chair and Chief Executive Officer right after Harvard. He also found time to be a consultant to Enron, but nothing improper or untoward attached itself to him. Also during those years, he fell in with the Project for the New American Century, signing the January 1998 letter to Bill Clinton from PNAC which advocated war against Iraq; thus he paved the way back into government with Mr. Bush’s election in 2000.

Be that as it may, he came in as Mr. Bush’s first US Trade Representative from 2001-2005, and so, he is relatively insulated from the Iraq-Nam debacle. He was active in bringing China and Taiwan into the WTO and in getting the Doha Round of trade negotiations going. He also butted heads with the EU over genetically modified food exports from the US. He’s also an agitator against the Sudanese government’s continuing genocide against its own citizens in Darfur. That puts him, if not on the side of the angels, then at least on the side of this journal.

Mr. Zoellick has a big job ahead of him, starting with getting enough votes from the non-American members of the bank to secure the position. After that, he has to convince the bank staff that he’s going to run the bank in a less dictatorial fashion, respecting the talents and experience of the people there. Because he has significant experience in the field of world economics, he will be given a chance (but only one) to convince the various constituencies that he is the man to lead the bank. The appointment is a much better one than Mr. Bush made when he picked Mr. Wolfowitz. The question now is whether it is good enough to overcome the bad will that currently exists.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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