President Biden is at the G20 summit making promises of new loans to developing countries — to the tune he’s humming of between 25 billion and 100 billion Spondulix. He doesn’t have the money, though. He’s writing checks that the World Bank can’t cash. That’s because his plan to, as the Financial Times puts it, “enlarge the World Bank’s lending capacity for middle-income and low-income countries” would require bipartisan backing.

In Congress, that’s a dubious prospect. It hasn’t stopped Mr. Biden, though, from holding out the prospect of billions in loans from the World Bank for, say, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and even Communist Vietnam. At a time when America is staggering under some $32 trillion in debt — and running deficits of $2 trillion a year — Mr. Biden wants to send billions more to the World Bank. Better bite the coin, we say.

The White House is framing the scheme as “one of our main focuses heading into the G20,” calling the lending boost a matter of “reshaping and scaling up the multilateral development banks, especially the World Bank.” That’s per Mr. Biden’s National Security adviser, Jake Sullivan, but Willie “The Actor” Sutton couldn’t have put it better. The plan is framed in part as a challenge to China’s “Belt and Road” racket.

Mr. Biden’s “offer,” Reuters reports, can be described as “whatever happens to China’s economy, the United States can help fund your development.” Secretary Yellen, at New Delhi, explains that beyond the goal of “responding to China,” it’s a matter of “addressing long-standing global challenges.” That’s a reference to the left’s scheme to mitigate the changing weather by getting poor countries to borrow money guaranteed by American taxpayers.

Mr. Biden, while tempting the so-called “global south” with such lucre, is also planning to push for the “G20 to provide meaningful debt relief” for the loans that “low and middle income countries” have already taken out. This from Mr. Sullivan via Reuters. Mr. Biden’s solicitude for the rest of the world exceeds his concern for taxpayers, who have run up their own debts. A better way to help poorer countries would be a pro-growth strategy at the World Bank.

The push to squeeze more loans out of the World Bank arises amid pressure from liberal voices like the New York Times, which urged the bank’s leaders to “figure out how to raise and leverage the huge amounts of capital” needed to fix “a changing climate.” We warned in an editorial titled “The Great (World) Bank Robbery” about the effort to weaken the institution’s conservative limits, set by treaty, on leveraging its capital.  

Loosening those limits on lending would require revising the charter of the World Bank — dating to the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1944 — barring the bank’s loans from exceeding “one hundred percent of the unimpaired subscribed capital, reserves and surplus of the Bank.” Amending that language would mean obtaining the support of both parties in Congress, a prospect about which there is little grounds for optimism. 

Even Mr. Biden’s less ambitious effort to get Congress to spend $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to enable the World Bank to lend an extra $25 billion to foreign nations “could be a hard sell with Republicans” on Capitol Hill, the FT warns. It raises the concern that Mr. Biden is following a recent pattern among Democrats on the world stage — making promises they can’t keep and thereby not only embarrassing America, but creating a perception of weakness.

Feature President Obama joining the Paris climate accord, then failing even to try for Senate approval. Or Vice President Harris’ vow of an anemic $100 million in counter-terrorism support over 10 years for African nations. These disappointed countries are turning to Communist China, which lavishes them with billions in aid and investment. The misleading promise of World Bank billions at the G20 is shaping up as another foreign policy blunder for Mr. Biden.