The nomination of deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank shows that President Bush does not scant the importance of multilateral institutions, as the caricature has it, but rather dissents from conventional liberalism about what their future should be.

The nomination of deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank shows that President Bush does not scant the importance of multilateral institutions, as the caricature has it, but rather dissents from conventional liberalism about what their future should be. He has chosen to send one of his administration's most capable officials to the bank. There have been all the predictable yelps about Wolfowitz's being an "architect" of the Iraq invasion, as though there should be some shame in this fact (or, rather, in this overstatement). The World Bank certainly would benefit from its own version of the Arab Spring that Wolfowitz helped to bring about. The bipartisan Meltzer report, released in 2000, judged 59 percent of the loans made by the bank in the 1990s to have been failures. Wolfowitz's critics will shift back from being antiwar to anti-globalization--which shows a perverse consistency, since the Iraq war and free trade have done more for oppressed Third Worlders than anything those critics have dreamed up.