Mr Paul Wolfowitz will today be appointed president of the World Bank. It is a controversial appointment for two main reasons: as a prominent neo-conservative Mr Wolfowitz symbolises the Bush administration's unilateral power projection policies, most notably in the war against Iraq; and his false predictions about the war - that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for its reconstruction and that the US would be greeted as liberators there - raise serious questions about his political judgment as head of such a sensitive multilateral organisation.
The bank's chief shareholder, the United States government, nominated him for the post two weeks ago. This would normally be accepted as a fait accompli since the convention has been that the job is in Washington's gift, while European states select the head of the bank's sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund. There was concern and perplexity in equal measure around European capitals at what seemed to be a gratuitously arrogant gesture in the middle of a sustained effort to improve transatlantic relations.
Such blunt reactions were rapidly put aside as the adverse political consequences of a European veto were assessed. Instead Mr Wolfowitz was invited to meet EU finance and development ministers to respond to their concerns. In Brussels yesterday he gave a convincing account of himself and found acceptance, some of it grudging and hedged. Politically his nomination is seen as a compensation for failing to get the top job in the US Department of Defence.
Bargaining for other powerful jobs, such as the head of the World Trade Organisation comes into these calculations - although there is widespread and justifiable anger over the secretive and severely limited ways in which such appointments are made by the world's wealthiest states, when they have such large consequences for its poorest ones, amid so much talk of marrying good governance to development.
Mr Wolfowitz is certainly a conviction politician, but he is not the stereotypical ideologue often portrayed by opponents of the Bush administration, and is open to dialogue and policy analysis. He has concentrated on military affairs and diplomacy, not economics. He is convinced of the need to maintain US primacy and is a passionate advocate of democratisation and market solutions. But does he agree with the United Nations millennium development goals? Will he promote privatised solutions to development tasks? And can he ensure the World Bank's autonomy on these questions? Mr Wolfowitz has an uphill task on all these central issues.