Americans charged with dispensing aid to the world’s poor are in an uphill battle, arguing that benevolent intentions count for far less than hard numbers, while those who believe that goodwill rock concerts enrich the poor and heal the sick have a much easier time.

A philosophical difference between the approaches of the Bush administration’s and that of Europe and the United Nations on how to deal with poverty and disease was most pronounced recently as the two sides locked horns on something called “millennium development goals.”

The fact that President Bush used the term several times in his Turtle Bay speech last week made even the most-entrenched critics sing America’s praises. Columbia economic professor Jeffrey Sachs, an adviser on development to Secretary-General Annan, gushed to reporters that Mr. Bush is about to come around and will soon sign on to his own left-leaning development theories.

That is far-fetched.

“The American culture is less abstract and universal,” the head of the U.S. Agency for International Aid, Andrew Natsios, told a group of reporters late last week. He noted, for example, that no American administration – let alone this one – has ever agreed to being tied down to Mr. Sachs’s pet cause, an obligation to use a fixed percentage of GNP for foreign aid. As one of Mr. Natsios’s aides told me, America loathes giving blind checks to dictators who will end up depositing them in foreign bank accounts.

Even as it objects to universal dictates, the Bush administration has presided over the largest increase in foreign aid since the Marshall Plan. In 2000, foreign aid stood at $10 billion; it has almost doubled to $19 billion since. And while its detractors predict that Washington will soon lag behind Europe in contributions to foreign aid, America remains the largest donor. Mr. Natsios said foreign aid might suffer now, due to Hurricane Katrina-related expenses.

Those numbers, incidentally, reflect only a fraction of what America does to help other countries. When I once asked Mr. Sachs if the effort, in money and blood, to promote democracy in Iraq and the Middle East should count as a development contribution, the prolific writer sneered, saying that a whole volume of books could be written just to refute that theory.

Mr. Natsios noted that last year, as America increased its foreign aid budget by 14%, the European Union countries raised theirs by only 2.4%, and Germany and Norway decreased foreign aid contributions. Yet the world’s – and the American public’s – perception is that Washington is stingy compared to Europe, and that Democrats care more than Republicans about the world’s poor. The rich nations’ approach to development was described last week by President Mbeki of South Africa as “half-hearted, timid, and tepid.”

Five years ago, the United Nations set development goals that later were affirmed at a Monterey, Mexico, summit. One provision said that rich countries should strive to dedicate 0.7% of their national income to foreign aid, as poor countries strive to reform. In terms of the current American GNP of $13 trillion, 0.7% would add up to $91 billion – much more foreign aid than either a Democrat or Republican president could justify to voters. Mr. Natsios and other officials say America never signed on to achieving such percentage goals.

According to Mr. Natsios, America is very careful about its international obligations. Pledges count for less than hard cash, and “if you sign a damn document, you’ve got to carry the thing out.” On the other hand, even as they berate America for opposing it, some Europeans countries are not even close to reaching the magic 0.7%.

Far from allowing America to be tied down to such a magic number, the American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, negotiated a line in last week’s agenda for the U.N. summit that said merely, “We welcome the increased resources that will become available as a result of the establishment of timetables by many developed countries to achieve the target of 0.7%” of their GNP to foreign aid. It was on that noncommittal basis that Mr. Bush was able to praise the millennium development goals.

Like welfare, foreign aid dispensers should concentrate as much on the recipient’s obligations as on those of the donor. Imposing wealth transfers in the form of world tax is much less helpful for the poor than, say, demanding government accountability. Only with that in mind can officials such as Mr. Natsios justify foreign aid as a good investment.