If you listen to the Democrats these days you will hear lamentations about the deep cuts the Trump Administration is making to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Lives will be lost, they insist.
But, curiously, outside of the United States, there has been a deafening silence in regard to this massive shift in how America goes about funding various projects around the world, and even some support for the changes from unlikely quarters.
Take the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, who shocked his CNN interviewer this week by saying of the cuts to USAID, ‘President Trump has unconventional ways of dealing with things. I completely agree with him.’ When pressed on the support his nation’s people may lose, he replied, ‘We might learn some lessons.’
The point that Kagame is making, and it is a wise one, is that Africa needs to be more self-sufficient and not permanently a needy client state of global powers, including America. USAID and the State Department dole out most of the roughly $70 billion in annual foreign aid from the U.S. But much of USAID’s funding is passed directly to various groups and projects that may or may not align with the recipient’s government.
In Hungary, President Viktor Orban has gone a step further than applauding Trump’s USAID actions. His nation is making it illegal for many anti-government organizations to accept foreign aid from our country.
What started out as an opportunity to spread the basic American ideals of freedom and democracy turned into anti-democratic attempts to affect political change in other nations that border on imperialism.
‘Now is the moment when these international networks have to be taken down, they have to be swept away,’ Orban said this week, alleging that American foreign aid funds have been used in attempts to ‘topple’ his government.
Orban has a point. There is a fine line between, for example, exporting the American value of a free press by funding Hungarian news outlets, and interfering in Hungarian elections, especially if the news outlets are essentially mouthpieces for opposition parties.
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, seconded Orban’s assessment in an X post in which he wrote that most nations don’t want the aid. ‘While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.’
U.S. foreign aid serves two basic purposes. The first is economic: We buy a certain amount of allegiance from developing nations with our largesse, as well as eventual access to their markets.
The second is informational: We get a megaphone to try to make those nations more like America and less like China.
USAID is an independent agency established by President John F. Kennedy, but President Trump has moved to put it under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Although Rubio has proposed deep personnel cuts, he has assured Americans that important, life-saving, economic aid that is in line with America’s interests will be protected by his department. And few argue we should simply shut down medical clinics or stop sending mosquito nets to Africa.
Even Kagame envisions his continent being weaned off of a need for foreign assistance, not quite going cold turkey.
No, where the real issue lies is in the informational purpose of foreign aid. What started out as an opportunity to spread the basic American ideals of freedom and democracy turned into anti-democratic attempts to affect political change in other nations that border on imperialism.
Moreover, the side order of wokeness that comes with American foreign aid these days, in areas like gender and sexuality, are not only unwelcome in many third world nations, but it can actually retard those societies’ natural evolution towards greater tolerance.
It is difficult at the moment to understand exactly what changes are being made to foreign aid. Beyond the dramatic removal of agency names on buildings and announced layoffs, it’s not clear what aid we are keeping and what we are disposing of.
Ultimately, it is Rubio who has put himself in charge of foreign aid and the future of USAID. It is his responsibility to separate the wheat from the chaff, the programs that both save lives and advance American interests, versus those driven by partisan ideology.
What is not acceptable to the American people, or it seems to many global leaders, is that American foreign aid continues with the status quo. Trump was elected to make concrete changes to how we influence and interact with the world.
Trump and Rubio earned and deserve this chance to dramatically change and fix an aspect of our foreign policy that has been broken for decades, that has lost sight of its mission and that has often wrought more harm than good.
This can be a new age for American foreign aid, and a much more successful one.