■"U.S. Challenged to Increase Aid to Africa," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 5 June 2005, p. A8.

■"AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls," by Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times, 3 June 2005, p. A1.

The article describes a "powerful consensus" that is emerging among the world's heavyweight donors to buy into Jeffrey Sachs' quest to dramatically ramp up (basically double, in most cases) their amount of official developmental aid to Africa as part of the UN's big push to reduce poverty there by half in coming years.

The EU's 25 members seem on board, as does Japan, which has already taken the pledge. The Bush Administration is seen as the lone hold-out, and I don't necessarily disagree with their stance. Having interacted with people from State, USAID, and the Millennium Challenge Account on the subject, their doubts are the doubts of development experts everywhere regarding Sachs's latest version of "shock therapy": too much too fast with most of it likely to be wasted by governments in Africa yet unable to manage those flows and too often beset with internal strife. The U.S. is basically ready to ramp up, but not at the same pace.

Me, I am concerned that in all this aid talk, there's little talk about the huge amount of civil strife and generalized violence and associated corruption that is afflicting big chunks of Africa. Money alone can't solve these problems, and I worry that what ends up happening is a lot of triage that helps people, especially refugees, simply get by under such dire, violent circumstances, without any real associated push to deal with those violent circumstances.

In short, I see the market linkages (many of which start if very basic stuff like healthcare and education), but not the military ones (as recent reports have indicated, so many of the premature deaths in Africa result from conflict-driven migrations).

What's also interesting in the article is a share-percentage breakdown of U.S.-versus-EU-versus-Other donors of ODA (official developmental aid) over the past 45 years. Not surprising, in the early 60s, the U.S. alone provided roughly half, as Europe was just emerging from the shadow of WWII. Since the mid-1960s, coincidentally when the U.S. got involved in Vietnam, the U.S. share has slowly decline while the EU share has slowly increased, as has the other. Now the U.S. provides around 25%, the EU around 50% and the Others (led by Japan) providing the remaining 25%.

To me, there is a certain symmetry in these numbers, for you could say that the U.S. provides roughly 75% of the security aid (aid, training, crisis responses, major military interventions, and follow-on stabilization and reconstruction ops-aka nation-building) to the Gap, while the rest of the Old Core (EU + Japan + others) supplies around a quarter (reasonable ballpark guess). So if that's the rough breakdown in military aid, then it shouldn't surprise if the ratios are reversed in the market aid.

Wrong or right, fair or unfair, that's the way it has naturally emerged-this division of labor within the Old Core.

So if America weighs in primarily with the Leviathan and the rest of the Old Core primarily with the ODA, then what is the New Core logically good for? Me thinks a certain specialization in the SysAdmin.

I had my eyes opened on that score by The New Map Game and the strategies of the China team, treating, as they did, the SysAdmin role as a potential Gap-market-conquering strategy.

So must we fret if the Chinese "infiltrate" too much of sub-Saharan Africa and turn these backward societies toward something better?

Read the frightening and very depressing story on AIDS orphans in Africa and tell me America should ever be in the business of worrying about some New Core power paying "too much" attention to that continent.