Robert Zoellick: a good choice

I'm pleased that the Bush administration has nominated a qualified and, by most accounts, downright brilliant man to head the World Bank in Robert Zoellick. After all, it could have been Bill Frist.

The few anecdotes I've heard about Zoellick are like one-liners from the Chuck Norris Facts website. He works hard—13-hour days when he was in the Bush administration—and he runs hard. Bloomberg's Rich Miller and Matthew Benjamin briefly note that, on one trip to China, Zoellick's security team had to ride motorcycles just to be able to hang with him on a long-distance jog.

He does have his critics. I tend to dismiss the talk that he's a tough boss; that's par for the course once you get to those rarified heights. More substantively, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik worries that Zoellick will be inhibited by "old-fashioned ideas that pit states against markets." And, much less charitably, Matthew Yglesias notes that Zoellick "doesn't seem to have done the country any good as US Trade Representative or as Deputy Secretary of State."

It's true that Zoellick made little headway on Darfur or Doha, but these are herculean challenges that require sustained presidential engagement. (After all, the cossacks work for the Tsar.) On China policy, Zoellick made a hugely positive impact as a thoughtful counterweight to Pentagon hawks. His September 2005 remarks to the National Committee on United States-China relations were the most insightful comments made by any Bush official over the past six years. I think Zoellick will represent a vast improvement.