Reconstructing the administration

Now that Paul Wolfowitz has been tapped for World Bank head, the strategy of the U.S. administration is becoming clear. With Condoleeza Rice at the helm of the State Department, the U.S. administration now has a policy lock on two major organizations which have traditionally engaged in nation-building activities. Since it became evident that the U.S. military is not well-suited to nation-building, they apparently looked for existing organizations which could be folded into a coherent multi-department effort. Such nation-building will also serve U.S. strategic economic interests.

For example, there is an element of competition with two nascent economic engines in Asia. Referring to http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/bwi-wto/wbank/2004/1012easttimor.htm:

As Anne Carlin from the Bank Information Center points out in a recent report on IFI activity in Afghanistan, IFIs such as the World Bank have moved into nation building as a ‘new line of business’ to offset the reduced demand of large borrowers such as India and China. Timor’s Bank-managed trust fund system has been replicated in Afghanistan and was recently proposed in Iraq. All of these developments strengthen the claim that the World Bank and other IFIs are the de-facto managers of the ‘developing’ world.
The Bank’s CEP in Timor epitomizes the contradictions of the new trend in nation building on the quick.

The shift was tracked in the piece at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/01/05/study_urges_bigger_role_for_state_dept/:

A senior advisory board to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is recommending a significant expansion of the State Department to cope with the diplomatic challenges of nation-building efforts that cannot be met by the Pentagon.
The new study by the Defense Science Board also takes indirect aim at the Bush administration's preparations for postwar Iraq, saying that achieving political success following military victory requires ''effective planning and preparation in the years before the outbreak of hostilities."

The U.S. efforts to assists tsunami victims was also part of this coherent policy, and has already paid off, at least in the short term, with reduced anti-American sentiment in Indonesia. Cf. http://cippad.usc.edu/ai/tsunami/tsunami_news.cfm:

According to a recent poll carried out by the Indonesian pollster Lembaga Survei Indonesia, Indonesians' backing for Osama bin Laden dropped from 58% in 2003 to 23% today. The poll also found out that 65% of Indonesians view the United States more favorably in the aftermath of the country's military logistic support and millions of dollars in private and government aid for tsunami-hit Indonesia. The poll included 1,200 adults in Indonesia, and it was commissioned by Terror Free Tomorrow, which is a U.S.-based non-profit organization that seeks to defeat global terrorism by undermining the support base that empowers extremists. (Source: Reuters, March 4, 2005).