Institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, GATT, and other trade and commercial treaties, as well as direct U.S. aid, were designed to knit together the Western democracies and the emerging nations of the Third World. Some of these initiatives may have been conceived out of self-interest because the expansion of economic growth around the world provided a fertile field for U.S. private-sector investment. But many of these efforts can be crudely and cynically regarded as bribery, a means of buying the allegiance of strategically important nations. The Soviet Union could not hope to keep up with the wealth of the West in such a bidding war. Most of these international aid efforts, of course, were ill-conceived and poorly executed.

In many cases they were a waste of money and in some cases worse. Aid programs often retarded economic development, and helped entrench corrupt governments, especially as they were operated on a bureaucratic central-planning model. President Mobutu of Zaire, for example, supposedly accumulated a personal fortune of several billion dollars—most of it simply stolen from Western (chiefly American) aid. More recently, we learned   that much of the billions in aid sent to help Russia disappeared into Swiss bank accounts, while multinational aid to Kosovo was similarly drained away through corrupt practices. (Little or no U.S. money was lost, we were told, as though Americans are ignorant of the fungibility of international aid money.)

Now that the grand strategy of containment of the Soviet Union is no longer required and world markets are flourishing on their own without the neo-Keynesian stimulus of American aid, it would seem time to shrink or abolish many of the Cold War era international agencies. Instead, American policy makers are tending toward a dramatic expansion of America’s multilateral entanglements in ways that promise not simply to waste money, but which pose a greater threat to liberty, especially for the citizens of the emerging world, than that posed by domestic bureaucracies. In short, the agenda of statism has gone multinational.

Those who can’t get energy taxes through Congress simply make the United States a signatory to an international treaty that compels the environmental agenda of energy taxes. When Congress becomes nervous and resistant about committing U.S. troops to foreign peace-keeping and humanitarian rescue ventures, some turn to Article 43 of the UN Charter, calling for placing American troops at the disposal of UN command. Trade liberalizations that make environmental regulation more cost-ineffective here likewise prove no problem: just clamp a bilateral environmental commission onto NAFTA and other trade agreements so as to export costly American-style regulation.

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