AFTER THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS in January, David Tell suggested that some might object to the United States acting “unilaterally” by spending $15 billion over then next 5 years to alleviate the AIDS crisis in Africa. It seemed like a funny joke at the time.

But some Democrats, including presidential hopeful John Kerry and Sen. Joseph Biden, are now calling for the lion’s share of the money budgeted for Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to go into the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The Global Fund is a U.N.-initiated public-private partnership based in Geneva that has “multilateralism” written all over it.