US: Appearing at a Rose Garden press conference last week, George Bush was asked if he would sign on to Tony Blair's ambitious plan to raise extra aid money for Africa on the international money markets.
"It doesn't fit our budgetary process," the US president replied. In other words, "no".
Yesterday the US president sought to take the sting out of that refusal by announcing that Washington would allocate $674 million (€550 million) to respond to humanitarian emergencies in Africa.
But once again it is evident Tony Blair has been unable to cash in his IOUs from the Iraq war. The British prime minister has been pressing for a Marshall Plan for Africa that would involve a costly, wide-ranging and long-term effort to help stimulate the continent's economies.
He is campaigning in G8 capitals to commit new money for Africa, rather than the repackaging of funds already allocated for foreign aid.
However Mr Bush yesterday dipped into money already appropriated by Congress for aid, and most of it will go to famine relief in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The announcement of Mr Bush's pledge made the headlines in the US, where officials pointed out that the US already provides more development aid than Britain. This did not take into account the disproportionate size of the two economies.
No country in fact spends as much on development assistance as the US, but on a per capita basis, the world's richest and most powerful nation ranks seventh behind Canada, Britain, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands in a list of donor nations drawn up by the Centre for Global Development in Washington, which takes into account technical assistance and other non-financial help.
Ireland comes 18th in this list.
Of 22 donor nations drawn up by the OECD in Paris, ranking nations by humanitarian aid in dollars as a percentage of gross national income, the United States comes last. This list is also headed by Norway, while Ireland comes eighth.
America gives 15 cents for every $100 of national income, and another 6 cents in private donations, about a quarter of that contributed by Norway.
However, the view in America is prevalent that - as Republican Senator Sam Brownback commented in January - "we're the ones who generally foot the bill."
Mr Bush's "budgetary process" that stands in the way of greater American aid includes a mammoth Pentagon budget of $419.3 billion, not including a supplemental request for $80 billion to fund the Iraq war.
The target sum for Mr Blair is an extra $50 billion a year from the G8 nations by selling bonds on the world's capital markets.
Yesterday's meeting in Washington underlined the difficulties of closing the deal in time for the summit of the major eight industrialised democracies in Gleneagles, Scotland, four weeks from today.
Mr Blair acknowledged defeat even before arriving in Washington.
He indicated he did not expect to win US support for his plans to double aid to Africa or to win international consensus on global warming.
The US also remains the major world hold-out against the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that requires countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, on the grounds that it would cost millions of jobs.
Mr Blair insisted that progress could still be made on his plan for Africa, but he sounded a note of weary realism about money from America in an interview with the Financial Times: "There are certain things," he said, "we know they are not going to do."
Reuters adds: Massive US spending on the war on terrorism pushed global military expenditure above $1 trillion in 2004, the sixth successive year the total has risen, a leading research institute said yesterday.
World military expenditure rose 5 per cent to $1.04 trillion, still 6 per cent below a Cold War peak in 1987-88, but up sharply since 1998, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in its latest yearbook.
US military spending accounted for nearly half the global figure, rising 12 per cent last year. That was more than the combined total of the 32 next most powerful nations. The figure was set to rise still further to $502 billion in 2010.