How Donald Trump took over the World Bank by alexnazaryan
WASHINGTON — Though its headquarters are only two blocks from the White House, the World Bank managed to stay almost entirely out of President Trump’s view for the first two years of his administration, even as he continued to rail against other transnational arrangements, such as the United Nations and NATO.
After his nomination was made public, some worried that Malpass would only weaken an institution that has struggled to fend off a criticism captured in a 2012 headline from the Financial Times: “The World Bank is flirting with irrelevance.” When the World Bank was established in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference, international development was a new concept. There were still European colonies in Africa, while Europe’s own financial institutions were devastated by the soon-to-end war. That war’s aftermath would also sequester much of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, making institutions like the World Bank important weapons in the West’s Cold War arsenal.
These forces conspired to turn the World Bank into a “vanishingly small institution,” says Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Kim only made things worse, according to several former high-ranking executives at the bank who frequently interacted with the new president early in his tenure. Upon coming to the bank, he had wanted the staff in the president’s office dismissed, because he believed they were loyal to previous heads, remembers one executive from that time. The dismissals were initially blocked, but Kim did eventually manage to fire several senior staffers, all women, none for clear reasons.
Under Kim, the bank also strove to engage China, which in 2014 had moved to create a World Bank of its own, called the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. With assets of only $50 billion, it would be a 10th of the World Bank’s size, but the geopolitical challenge was hard to miss. The Obama administration said it would have nothing to do with the new Asian bank, which found an eager courtier in Kim. “We would welcome any new player,” he said.
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