The U.S. Keeps Its Global Commitments

William McGurn
Tuesday, July 8, 2008

If you've ever been through a G-8 Summit, right about now you're probably feeling like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day." That's the one where he plays a man forced to live the same day over and over.

In much the same way, G-8 meetings follow a familiar script year after year. They begin with leaders issuing lofty statements on a checklist of "global challenges." They continue with TV footage of riot police struggling with the global protester brigade. And they finish with news stories quoting unnamed diplomats sighing that American obstinacy has just lost the world its last chance for some great advance on some issue vital for humanity.

The good news is that this week's summit in Japan may be the one in which we finally awake from the G-8 version of "Groundhog Day." And when we do, we will find that the president has now succeeded in baking into the G-8 process a time-honored Texas principle. It's called "put up or shut up."

That's not how it will read in the official G-8 communiqués, of course. Instead, these statements will speak diplomatically of "accountability." And this time, they will give us something we have never seen before: country-by-country breakdowns of how well nations are living up to their G-8 commitments.

What a revolutionary concept: Judging a nation's commitment to problem-solving by whether its money matches its mouth. The first reports come out today, and will track how well G-8 members live up to promises to tackle health scourges such as polio, HIV/AIDS and malaria. These reports should have a salutary effect on the public debate.

For while the rhetoric about Uncle Sam's global leadership tends to the harsh and negative, the record tells a different story. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. has taken the lead on issues from combating malaria to breaking down trade barriers that keep the crops of poor African farmers out of First World markets. No one else is even close.

Take HIV/AIDS. Before the president launched his Emergency Program for Aids Relief in 2003, only 50,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa afflicted with the disease were receiving treatment. Since then, the U.S. has helped deliver lifesaving treatment to nearly 1.5 million Africans – many of them women and children. To put this in perspective, the president's AIDS initiative is the largest commitment ever by any nation for an international health initiative dedicated to a single disease.

At last year's summit in Germany, the president called on members to stem the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. They responded by committing to spend billions of dollars on care for tens of millions, and treatment for five million. When the accountability reports are released, we'll know who is doing their part – and who is falling short.

The aim is to ensure that old promises are kept before new ones are made. Under the old dynamic, summits were characterized by haggling over this or that sentence in a document that few ever read and even fewer had any intention of living up to. The new way should help shift the emphasis away from pie-in-the-sky promises (which are easy to make) to on-the-ground delivery of real results (which takes hard work and follow-through).

The president has taken much the same approach on climate. For many years, the preferred M.O. – as illustrated by Kyoto – was long-term and theoretical. Rich countries agreed to mandatory reductions in their greenhouse emissions that if fully implemented would cost their economies untold billions of dollars. Meanwhile, countries like China and India – developing nations that are also major emitters – were let off the hook.

The president argued that there could be no real progress unless all major emitters were part of the deal. He also suggested that instead of trying to regulate ourselves into carbon Nirvana – which would succeed only in wrecking our economy – we would be far better off investing in cleaner and more efficient technologies. So guess what happened? Tomorrow the G-8 members will sit down with leaders of the developing world's major economies to look for a better way forward. And don't be surprised if by the end of this summit we have G-8 backing for another Bush initiative: a Clean Technology Fund to help developing countries move from older, dirtier and cheaper technologies to cleaner and more advanced versions that they otherwise could not afford.

On issue after issue, the president has pushed for global policies and reforms that are opening up new opportunities, bringing relief to the suffering, and introducing a measure of sanity to the debate on climate. Maybe one day we will all wake up to a world willing to give him some credit for it.