Tom and I got into an email exchange the other day on L’Affaire Wolfowitz, its implications for the World Bank, as well as what it means for the United States global role.

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DAMIR: Linked from Ruth Wedgwood’s latest defense of Wolfowitz:

Moreover, Mr. Wolfowitz acknowledged the conflict promptly upon his nomination. I believe that he consistently acted in good faith attempting to carry out the board’s wishes that the conflict be resolved without unduly penalizing her for making a career move she did not seek. He would have avoided much grief if he had simply presented the details of the arrangement to the ethics committee, if in fact he didn’t, but it wasn’t unreasonable to assume he was acting as directed, especially since the committee expressed satisfaction with the outcome. A clearer public explanation also would have helped, but no fair reader of the released documents would call his actions a “scandal.”

That, right there, my friends, is the key concession. It’s glossed over too frequently by Wolfowitz’s defenders. He screwed up procedurally, not ethically, and is now being screwed for it in turn.

An excellent article in many other ways, too. Worth a read.

TOM: Right. He did something stupid, though defensible because he got the sign-off of the board of ethics. He compounded his error with naivety that it wouldn’t be used by his enemies. In the dog-eat-dog world of international bureaucracies, he gave his enemies the rope to hang him with, and that’s on him.

But, after saying all of that, just because it was avoidable doesn’t mean he deserved it. It is still the mean-spirited and vindictive people at the bank that should ultimately come in for the most criticism. And those people—the ones who decided to try Wolfowitz in the “court of the media—shoulder at least as much responsibility for the loss of World Bank credibility that various European leaders are no dutifully bemoaning.

DAMIR: Surely all true as well. The Bank staff will not be well served by this acting out.

That all said, I’m just not ready to get all huffy about it. It’s power politics, dirty nasty business as usual. The Europeans are definitely playing their own game here, and it should be recognized as such.

My point is that Wolfowitz has lost this round, and the U.S. with him. The U.S., if it wants to preserve its hegemony at the Bank, should shove him aside and put in someone credible in his place, someone who won’t screw up in the same way. That Wolfowitz at heart is blameless is not important.

TOM: I’m all for realpolitik, especially in the international arena. However, I am ready to get all huffy about it, especially when the chief offenders, in my view, are sanctimonious pricks who think they hold the key to saving the world. Moreover, if the U.S. was currently using the World Bank to advance its realpolitik agenda, the bank’s staff would be screaming bloody murder. That’s all bs, and it should be called bs in every conversation about the Wolfowitz dust-up.

And it is important that he’s mostly blameless. The U.S. can minimize its losses and increase its chances of winning next time by exposing the way the game was played. It matters that they screwed him over, because the next time they’ll try to play the we’re-just-a-bunch-of-disinterested-do-gooders-trying-to-save-the-world card. But they’re not, at least not anymore.

DAMIR: I don’t mean to sound too jaded or anything, but games aren’t won by exposing the mere fact that special interests are always at play and that they play dirty. Games are won by seeing how the system works and bending it to your will by picking your battles and decisively winning them. This is what diplomacy is all about: war by other means; dirty tricks galore; arm-twisting; threats of violence.

Too often, especially in this administration, I think this country has tried to take principled stances and has lost big-time. That has lots to do with a fair amount of incompetence, but also stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works.

I’m not saying that American administrations should be all realpolitik. I recognize that to a certain extent, it’s very alien to the DNA and self-understanding of Americans to behave that way. But you hope that in the bowels of every administration there lies a Kissinger-type who knows the global ropes and knows how to get things done. Bob Gates seems like just that kind of guy to me. Too bad he’s come on so late in the game.

Furthermore, the Bank’s employees aren’t really do-gooders. My dad worked at the UNDP his whole life. He strongly and repeatedly encouraged me to go to the Bank and work there after SAIS. I didn’t because I don’t like large organizations and bureaucracies and I don’t much care for development. But his rationale was that it’s a good place to go do well for yourself. Great benefits, intelligent people, etc. “Just don’t think you’ll get too far up in the hierarchy,” he said to me. “Above a certain point, everything is political there. Everyone is appointed by donor countries. It’s all jockeying and back-stabbing.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. Just saying, I’ve never been under the impression that the World Bank was some altruistic organization. You shouldn’t let that misperception make you unduly angry.

TOM: First, it does help you to win by taking a club out of the other guy’s bag, i.e., making him look like a hypocrite. I would never suggest that it’s the only thing you have to do. These games are complicated, to be sure, but being right helps! Why not tell people about it? Moreover, call me old fashioned, but I do think it’s necessary to call BS by it’s true name, rather than just say, “Oh well, bureaucrats will be bureaucrats.”

Second, just because we’ve executed principled efforts badly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act on principle and do it right. Principled actions are not inherently doomed to fail. But more importantly, I don’t regard bureaucracies like this as “the world” (as in “misunderstanding how the world works”), and there’s a limit to which we can look at instances of U.S. foreign policy bumbling and apply them here. We shouldn’t confuse bureaucracies and nation-states. It doesn’t clash to have different approaches to both. The reality of international anarchy and the limits of power require us to accept certain behavior from other nation-states. We don’t have to accept it from sub-state actors, by definition.

Third, re do-gooders. It doesn’t matter whether they are do-gooders or whether I thought them to be. It matters what they profess to be. Insofar as there’s a contradiction between what they are and what they claim to be, see my first point. And I’m not angry because I’m disillusioned, I’m angry because it’s hypocrisy (the bad kind).

To a certain extent I think we’re talking past each other here. I don’t want to conflate my views on who’s most damnable here with how the U.S. government should approach this important issue (it’s also worth mentioning that this one wasn’t the U.S. government’s fault). They’re two entirely different things. I haven’t been talking about how the U.S. government should handle this. The one thing I will say is that when Wolfowitz does go, Bush should replace him with someone just as committed to fighting corruption. The bank staff may have won this round and brought down someone through dirty tricks, but that can’t change the agenda. That encourages further dirty tricks. If the corruption agenda is what pissed them off, then more of it they must have. (How’s that for realpolitik? Cold as ice!)

DAMIR: Well said, I don’t think we fundamentally disagree.

Another thing worth considering, as a coda. If the Bank “goes” (whatever that could mean), the US loses an important (though increasingly impotent) lever on the world stage. The Bank has always been a US-run institution. The Europeans can apparently switch their lending to EU institutions like the EC. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Europeans are making as hard a push against the Bank because on some level, they’re not concerned if it doesn’t survive. They get to whack the Bushies over the head, make them look bad, and at the same time make the US a little less relevant on the world stage.