Robert Zoellick - Views

Views

In 2005 Tom Barry, the policy director of the International Relations Center, wrote that Zoellick "regards free trade philosophy and free trade agreements as instruments of U.S. national interests. When the principles of free trade affect U.S. short-term interests or even the interests of political constituencies, Zoellick is more a mercantilist and unilateralist than free trader or multilateralist."

Gavan McCormack has written that Zoellick used his perch as U.S. trade representative to advocate for Wall Street's policy goals abroad, as during a 2004 intervention in a key privatization issue in Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's re-election campaign. McCormack has written, "The office of the U.S. Trade Representative has played an active part in drafting the Japan Post privatization law. An October 2004 letter from Robert Zoellick to Japan’s Finance Minister Takenaka Heizo, tabled in the Diet on August 2, 2005, included a handwritten note from Zoellick commending Takenaka. Challenged to explain this apparent U.S. government intervention in a domestic matter, Koizumi merely expressed his satisfaction that Takenaka had been befriended by such an important figure… It is hard to overestimate the scale of the opportunity offered to U.S. and global finance capital by the privatization of the Postal Savings System."

In a January 2000 Foreign Affairs essay entitled "Campaign 2000: A Republican Foreign Policy," he was one of the first of those now associated with Bush's foreign policy to invoke the notion of "evil," writing: "here is still evil in the world—people who hate America and the ideas for which it stands. Today, we face enemies who are hard at work to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, along with the missiles to deliver them. The United States must remain vigilant and have the strength to defeat its enemies. People driven by enmity or by a need to dominate will not respond to reason or goodwill. They will manipulate civilized rules for uncivilized ends." The same essay praises the "idealism" of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Two years earlier, Zoellick was one of the signatories (who also included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John R. Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Bill Kristol) of a January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton drafted by the Project for the New American Century calling for "removing Saddam 's regime from power."

While in the position of Deputy Secretary of State, Zoellick visited Sudan four times. He supported expanding a United Nations force in the Darfur region to replace African Union soldiers. He was involved in negotiating a peace accord between the government of Sudan and the Sudan Liberation Army, signed in Abuja, Nigeria in May 2006.

Zoellick is considered an influential advocate of US-German relations. Fluent in German, he possesses considerable knowledge of Germany, the country of his family background.

In the lead-up to the 2010 G-20 Seoul summit and in the immediate wake of the U.S. elections and subsequent Fed QE2 monetary-policy move, Zoellick published a noted call for increased awareness of the function of gold in international currency markets. This was misinterpreted by many economists as a call for the return of some form of gold standard in a post-Bretton Woods II world. The reaction of economists to this suggestion was largely negative, dismissing a renewed gold standard as unrealistic. Zoellick's response was to point out the misinterpretation: he did not advocate a return to the gold standard, but a new role for gold in currency markets as an alternative monetary asset, which he termed "reference point gold".