Analysis | Will Donald Trump get to pick the next president of the World Bank? Maybe not.

Analysis | Will Donald Trump get to pick the next president of the World Bank? Maybe not.
ppinclude, development, soft power, international influence, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, José Antonio Ocampo, E.U.
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Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, speaks May 1 at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Mike Blake/Reuters) By Geoffrey Gertz January 10 at 7:45 AM On Monday, Jim Yong Kim shocked both World Bank staff and the international development community when he announced that he would be stepping down as president of the institution at the end of the month, some three years before the scheduled end of his term. His resignation will kick off a scramble to select a new leader for the bank. And shifting international politics will make the process more complicated than it has been in the past. U.S. influence at the World Bank Historically, the process has been straightforward, if not without controversy: The U.S. government has always chosen the president of the World Bank. But there’s no official reason this should be the case. Indeed, according to the formal rules of the World Bank’s Articles of Agreement, the president is selected by a vote of the institution’s executive directors, the 25-person board that oversees the bank. These directors represent the interests of national governments and, in principle, could choose to select a president who has been nominated by any government. In practice, however, informal rules and influence play an important role in shaping the activities of the World Bank and other international organizations. And one of the strongest informal rules at the bank is that the executive directors will endorse whatever candidate the U.S. government nominates. Throughout its 75-year history, every World Bank president has been an American. [Why the World Bank’s new famine warning system won’t help prevent famine.] How has the U.S. maintained its grip on the World Bank presidency, despite frequent calls for an open and meritocratic process? Three factors allowed the United States to preserve this prerogative. First, and perhaps most obviously, the United States has had the power and leverage to coerce other countries to go along with its choice. As the world’s hegemon and the bank’s largest individual shareholder, the United States is used to getting its way, and any country that opposed the U.S. pick could face an international political price for doing so. Second, and just as important, the United States has had the soft power to convince other countries that American leadership was in the global interest. While such claims were frequently contested, the U.S. government could at least make a quasi-credible claim that, though it was a hegemon, dominating world events, it used that power benignly, so there was no need for other countries to band together to counter U.S. influence. Third, the United States has been able to rely on European support during World Bank president selection processes due to a long-standing tacit bargain between the United States and the European powers: The Europeans will back American picks to run the World Bank, while the United States will back European picks to r