Is the EU challenging U.S supremacy in international finance?
The behind-the scenes power struggle between the U.S and the EU over the Pentagon strategist turned development banker’s removal has yet to be fully revealed in the press. However, his fate apparently was determined by the great European powers — Germany, backed most likely by the U.K. and France. In the U.K. especially, a constant barrage of editorials in the influential daily Financial Times urged Washington to throw the discredited bank’s chief by the wayside. Berlin, which holds the EU rotating presidency and acted on behalf of all the European states, according to the Financial Times applied relentless pressure for the Bank president to leave his job. Heidemarie Wieczorek Zeul, an SPD minister of Angela Merkel’s coalition cabinet who long opposed the U.S intervention in Iraq, publicly expressed her concern at the damage the promotion of Shaha Riza, Wolfowitz’s companion, had done to the bank’s international credibility. For his part, the former top banker ignored the warnings fro
