For a really classic case of how the Democratic Party has positioned itself on the wrong side of the foreign policy debate, feature the editorial in the Washington Post on Thursday in respect of President Bush’s nominee to head the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. Ostensibly the editors of the Post offered some support for Mr. Wolfowitz’s nomination, which is stirring fear and loathing in all the usual left-wing and European circles. Then they offered this bit of advice:

Moreover, Mr. Wolfowitz will have to modulate his admirable passion for democratization, the idea that has animated his thinking since his experience, as a State Department official, of the people-power uprising against Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The World Bank is a poverty-fighting institution, not a democracy-spreading one, and in the short term the link between development and democracy is tenuous: Some of the greatest recent advances against poverty have come in autocracies such as China and Vietnam.

What do you figure Donald Graham and his editors are thinking? That Vietnam, a sink of political oppression and poverty, would be even poorer had the communists not been in power and the people permitted to elect their own government? Or that the free Chinese republic on Taiwan is so much richer than any other province of China despite the fact that it’s democratic? Why if that’s true, maybe the World Bank should start funding secret police organizations and providing incentives to dismantle voting machines and melt them down into handcuffs and leg irons.

The truth is that every serious study that’s looked at the link between political freedom and prosperity – most notably those of the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation and Freedom House – has found that the two are linked indeed. And the Democrats can look to their own icons for confirmation, as one of the most famous articulations of this point was by President Carter in his speech at Notre Dame, where he declared the truth that the great democracies of the world are not free because they’re rich, but are rich because they’re free.

President Bush’s nomination of Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank is a brilliant stroke precisely because Mr. Wolfowitz is a man who has proven he will risk all for democracy and freedom. The prospect of his tenure at the World Bank is one of the most exciting things in decades to hit the development world, which veered off onto a tragic trajectory when Robert Strange McNamara began his ill-fated tenure at the bank. This is a chance to bring back the recognition that political liberty and economic liberty are the same thing, the warp and woof in the fabric of freedom.