Yves here, It is striking to see the degree to which Trump is all about maximizing his shows of personal power, no matter what it costs the US economically or in terms of international position. What, for instance, is the point of alienating Canada? Accelerating the dollar losing its attraction to foreign investors? Destroying US (admittedly slipping due to competition from China) leadership in the sciences? The appeal overseas of studying at top US universities?
The article below focuses on one aspect of this conduct, the Trump team taking a wrecking ball to US programs that provide various forms of development aid, particularly to poor countries. There’s been a lot of misinformed cheerleading about DOGE gutting USAID, as if that was taking the US out of the regime change business. Apparently, unlike Brian Berletic, these Trump-boosters missed that Marco Rubio testified before Congress very early on in the assault on USAID, and stated that those operations would be retained and moved into the State Department. Consistent with that, DOGE only briefly froze the distributions to the infamous National Endowment for Democracy. Anitwar.com reported that the funding has been reinstated almost entirely.
While the post below has a great deal of detail, there are some howlers. For instance, it attributes the global reduction in extreme poverty to US munificence, as opposed to high growth and thus strong and sustained increases in living standards in China.
By Alfred McCoy. Originally published at TomDispatch
With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let’s recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you’re a this-or-that and you shout back: “Takes one to know one!” Indeed, it does. This month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said of his fellow billionaire Elon Musk: “The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
Elaborating, Gates explained that Musk, as head of his self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had decided to put “U.S.A.I.D. in the wood chipper” by cutting 80% of its global humanitarian programs and that, he pointed out, will mean “millions of additional deaths of kids.” To help undo the damage, Gates announced that he’ll be spending down his own $200 billion fortune over the next 20 years to promote public health in Asia and Africa so that “children [are] not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting H.I.V.”
Amid the blizzard of executive orders and bizarre budgetary decisions pouring out of the Trump White House, Gates put his finger on the cuts that really matter, the ones that will do lasting damage — not just to their unfortunate victims but to America’s sense of global leadership as well.
In President Donald Trump’s transactional diplomacy, only the hard power of mineral deals, gifted airplanes, or military might matters. And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it’s much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed “soft power.” As the progenitor of the concept, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, put it: “Seduction is always more effective than coercion. And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.” He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants,” that “might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid.
Actually, soft power is seldom soft. Indeed, Spanish steel might have conquered the New World in the sixteenth century, but its long rule over that vast region was facilitated by the appeal of a shared Christian religion. When Britain’s global turn came in the nineteenth century, its naval dominion over the world’s oceans was softened by an enticing cultural ethos of commerce, language, literature, and even sports. And as the American century dawned after World War II, its daunting troika of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines would be leavened by the soft-power appeal of its democratic values, its promise of scientific progress, and its humanitarian aid that started in Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948.
Even in these uncertain times, one thing seems clear enough: Donald Trump’s sharp cuts to this country’s humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing.
The Logic of Foreign Aid
Foreign aid — giving away money to help other nations develop their economies — remains one of America’s greatest inventions. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe had been ravaged by six years of warfare, including the dropping of 2,453,000 tons of Allied bombs on its cities, after which the rubble was raked thanks to merciless ground combat that killed 40 million people and left millions more at the edge of starvation.
Speaking before a crowd of 15,000 packed into Harvard Yard for commencement in June 1947, less than two years after that war ended, Secretary of State George Marshall made an historic proposal that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. “It is logical,” he said, “that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Instead of the usual victor’s demand for reparations or revenge, the U.S. gave Europe, including its defeated Axis powers, $13 billion in foreign aid that would, within a decade, launch that ruined continent on a path toward unprecedented prosperity.
What came to be known as the Marshall Plan was such a brilliant success that Washington decided to apply the idea on a global scale. Over the next quarter century, as a third of humanity emerged from the immiseration of colonial rule in Africa and Asia, the U.S. launched aid programs designed to develop the fundamentals of nationhood denied to those countries during the imperial age. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on a promise to aid Africa’s recovery from colonial rule, disparate programs were consolidated into the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) in 1961.
At the outset, U.S.A.I.D.’s work was complicated by Washington’s Cold War mission. It would sometimes even serve as a cover for CIA operations. Just a few years after the Cold War ended in 1991, however, U.S.A.I.D. was separated from the State Department and its diplomatic aim of advancing U.S. interests.
Then refocused on its prime mission of global economic development, U.S.A.I.D. would, in concert with the World Bank and other development agencies, become a pioneering partner in a multifaceted global effort to improve living conditions for the majority of humanity. Between 1950 and 2018, the portion of the world’s population living in “extreme poverty” (on $1.90 per day) dropped dramatically from 53% to just 9%. Simultaneously, U.S.A.I.D. and similar agencies collaborated with the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox and radically reduce polio, ending pandemics that had been the scourge of humanity for centuries. Launched in 1988, the anti-polio campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, spared 20 million children worldwide from serious paralysis.
Behind such seemingly simple statistics, however, lay years of work by skilled U.S.A.I.D. specialists in agriculture, nutrition, public health, sanitation, and governance who delivered a multifaceted array of programs with exceptional efficiency. Not only would their work improve or save millions of lives, but they would also be winning loyal allies for America at a time of rising global competition.
And Along Comes DOGE
Enter Elon Musk, chainsaw in hand. Following President Trump’s example of withdrawing from the World Health Organization on inauguration day, Musk started his demolition of the federal government by, as he put it, “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.” As his DOGE hirelings prowled the agency’s headquarters in the weeks after inauguration, Musk denounced that largely humanitarian organization as “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Without a scintilla of evidence, he added, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
With head-spinning speed, his minions then stripped the U.S.A.I.D. logo from its federal building, shut down its website, purged its 10,000 employees, and started slashing its $40 billion budget for delivering aid to more than 100 nations globally. The White House also quickly transferred what was left of that agency back to the State Department, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent six weeks slashing 83% of its global humanitarian programs, reducing 6,200 of them to about 1,000.
As U.S.A.I.D.’s skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children. In Colombia, the agency had spent several billion dollars to settle a decades-long civil war that killed 450,000 people by mapping 3.2 million acres of uncharted lands so that the guerrillas could become farmers. That work, however, was suddenly halted dead in its tracks — project incomplete, money wasted, threat of civil conflict again rising. In Asia, the end of U.S.A.I.D. support forced the World Food Program to cut by half the already stringent food rations being provided to the million Rohingya refugees confined in miserable, muddy camps in Bangladesh — forcing them to survive on just $6.00 a month per person.
In Africa, the aid cuts are likely to prove catastrophic. Departing U.S.A.I.D. officials calculated that they would be likely to produce a 30% spike in tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease that already kills 1.25 million people annually on this planet and that 200,000 more children would likely be paralyzed by polio within a decade. In the eastern Congo, where a civil war fueled by competition over that region’s rare-earth minerals has raged for nearly 30 years, the U.S. was the “ultra dominant” donor. With U.S.A.I.D. now shut down, 7.8 million Congolese war refugees are likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million children will suffer from malnutrition. In war-torn Sudan, U.S. aid sustained more than 1,000 communal kitchens to feed refugees, all of which have now closed without any replacements.
With 25 million of the world’s 40 million H.I.V. patients in Africa, cuts to U.S.A.I.D.’s health programs there, which had reduced new infections by half since 2010, now threaten that progress. In South Africa, a half-million AIDS patients are projected to die, and in Congo, an estimated 15,000 people could die within the next month alone. Moreover, ending U.S.A.I.D.’s Malaria Initiative, which has spent $9 billion since President George W. Bush launched it in 2005, essentially ensures that, within a year, there will be 18 million more malaria infections in West Africa and 166,000 more likely deaths.
On March 3rd, with such dismal statistics piling up, Elon Musk insisted that “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
Writing from Sudan just 12 days later, however, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Peter Donde, a 10-year-old child infected with AIDS at birth, had just died. A U.S.A.I.D. program launched by President Bush called PEPFAR had long provided drugs that were estimated to have saved 26 million lives from AIDS (Peter’s among them) until Musk’s cuts closed the humanitarian agency. Kristof reported that the end of U.S. funding for AIDS treatment in Africa means “an estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid.” Why, he asked, should Americans spend even 0.24% of their Gross National Product on programs that keep poor children alive? Answering his own question, he wrote that the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. “means that the United States loses soft power and China gains.”
Indeed, Dr. Diana Putman, U.S.A.I.D.’s former assistant administrator for Africa, argues that the agency’s programs have been the chief currency for U.S. ambassadors in negotiations with developing nations. “Their leverage and ability to make a difference in terms of foreign policy,” she explained, “is backed up by the money that they bring, and in the Global South that money is primarily the money that U.S.A.I.D. has.”
The Loss of Soft Power
In short, globally, the sharp cuts to U.S.A.I.D.’s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America’s soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity.
In back-handed testimonials to U.S.A.I.D.’s success, the world’s autocrats celebrated the agency’s demise, particularly the end of the $1.6 billion — about 4% of its annual budget — that it devoted to pro-democracy initiatives. “Smart move,” said former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. On X (formerly Twitter), Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán announced that he “couldn’t be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance, @elonmusk are finally taking down this foreign interference machine.” Expressing his joy, Orbán offered a “Good riddance!” to U.S.A.I.D. programs that helped “independent media thrive” and funneled funds to the “opposition campaign” in Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections. Similarly, El Salvador’s de facto dictator, Nayib Bukele, complained that U.S.A.I.D.’s pro-democracy funds had been “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.”
Offering even more eloquent testimony to U.S.A.I.D.’s past efficacy, China has moved quickly to take over a number of the abolished agency’s humanitarian programs, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Beijing is locked in an intense strategic rivalry with Washington over the South China Sea. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, two public health specialists observed that “a U.S. retreat on global health, if sustained, will indeed open the door for China to exploit the abrupt, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. programs in… Southeast Asia, and it may do the same in Latin America.”
Last February, only a week after Washington cancelled $40 million that had funded U.S.A.I.D. initiatives for child literacy and nutrition in Cambodia, Beijing offered support for strikingly similar programs, and its ambassador to Phnom Penh said, “Children are the future of the country and the nation.” Making China’s diplomatic gains obvious, he added: “We should care for the healthy growth of children together.” Asked about this apparent setback during congressional hearings, Trump’s interim U.S.A.I.D. deputy administrator, Pete Marocco, evidently oblivious to the seriousness of U.S.-China competition in the South China Sea, simply dismissed its significance out of hand.
Although the dollar amount was relatively small, the symbolism of such aid programs for children gave China a sudden edge in a serious geopolitical rivalry. Just two months later, Cambodia’s prime minister opened new China-funded facilities at his country’s Ream Naval Base, giving Beijing’s warships preferential access to a strategic port adjacent to the South China Sea. Although the U.S. has spent a billion dollars courting Cambodia over the past quarter-century, China’s soft-power gains are now clearly having very real hard-power consequences.
In neighboring Vietnam, U.S.A.I.D. has worked for several decades trying to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War, while courting Hanoi as a strategic partner on the shores of the South China Sea. In building a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” manifest in today’s close trade relations, U.S.A.I.D. played a critical diplomatic role by investing in recovering unexploded American munitions left over from that war, cleaning up sites that had been polluted by the defoliant Agent Orange, and providing some aid to the thousands of Vietnamese who still suffer serious birth defects from such toxic chemicals. “It is through these efforts that two former enemies are now partners,” said former Senator Patrick Leahy. “People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world.”
A Global Turn Toward Hard Power
Although the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and sharp cuts to economic aid will have consequences for the world’s poor that can only be called tragic, it’s but one part of President Trump’s attack on the key components of America’s soft power — not only foreign aid, but also reliable information and skilled diplomacy. In March, the president signed an executive order shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including organizations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that had been broadcasting in 50 languages worldwide, reaching an estimated 360 million people in nations often without reliable news and information.
A month later, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a 50% cut to the State Department’s budget, closing diplomatic missions and completely eliminating funds for international organizations like NATO and the U.N. While the actual implementation of those cuts remains uncertain, the State Department is already dismissing 20% of its domestic workforce, or about 3,400 employees, including a significant number of Foreign Service officers, special envoys, and cyber-security specialists. Add it all up and, after just 100 days in office, President Trump is well on his way to demolishing the three critical elements for America’s pursuit of global soft power.
Already, the erosion of U.S. influence is manifest in recent criticism of this country, unprecedented in its bitterly acrid tone, even among longstanding allies. “Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping away,” warned veteran French legislator Claude Malhuret in a March 4th speech, from the floor of France’s Senate that soon won a remarkable 40 million views worldwide. “Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a ketamine-fueled buffoon in charge of purging the civil service.”
With such cutting critiques circulating in the corridors of power from Paris to Tokyo, Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership. And, as Professor Nye reminds us, leadership based solely on coercion is not really leadership at all.
Welcome to Planet Trump in the year 2025.
Copyright 2025 Alfred W. McCoy
“sharp cuts to U.S.A.I.D.’s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America’s soft power”
It is questionable whether the US ever had soft power in its minimal humanitarian aid, which has always been less than $1 per year to the poorest half of humanity, 1/7 of 1% of that poverty threshold of $1.90 per day. US aid never resulted in improvements to industry, infrastructure, education, nutrition, or employment: it merely provided cheap vaccines to “save lives” without dealing with poverty that actually worsened as survival rates increased. US aid was never more than a trivial part of its advertising budget, just as the wealthy make trivial donations to charities, to silence critics rather than benefit anyone. Any improvements due to US/WB/IMF loans are for profit not gifts. But of course those who would cut even that trivial aid level have no reasonable role in government.
The Panglossian tone of the above does grate. All of the actions described could be seen as part of the FP beauty contest the US was conducting with the Soviet Union, which also gave aid and perhaps more sincerely opposed imperialism. The overwhelming motive was to promote capitalism over a socialism that might have done a lot more to help the poor than food handouts. And those handouts themselves helped US farm support programs to get rid of agricultural surpluses. When the soft power didn’t work the US was more than willing to resort to hard power with the horrific Vietnam intervention capping the era.
Of course that doesn’t justify Trump who is truly showing himself to be a boob. Perhaps his only redeeming quality is that he does seem reluctant to turn his incessant boasting into the sort of routine past violence that would start bringing back the body bags. Whereas all those “humanitarians” like JFK and Lyndon and Eisenhower had no such compunction.
Here’s suggesting our DC poohbahs should drop the notion of “power,” soft or hard, and start acting like genuine humanitarians, at home and overseas. It seems unlikely that Trump will be doing that unless it’s some kind of “deal.”
I’d be less harsh on JFK. I think the evidence shows that by 1963, he’d had enough of both the CIA and the Pentagon’s lies. He’d issued orders to begin withdrawing advisors from Vietnam, and would perhaps have tried, having ****canned Allen Dulles from the CIA, to reform that hive of fascists. Kennedy was the first, last, and only, president to oppose the national security/deep state. And what happened to him is a lesson not lost on all subsequent presidents.
This article seems unable to acknowledge the fact AID and other soft power agents have always had a self-serving element, but have been severely compromised and undermined by the activities of the National Endowment for Democracy[sic] and similar agencies and a number of US-backed NGOs since the fall of the Soviet Union. Samantha Power stands as the poster girl for these compromises.There was no mention of the color revolutions sponsored by NED and intended to weaken Russia while expanding NATO via the overthrow of a democratically elected leader. That effort caused the Ukraine War. NC readers know that many others are the result of weaponizing “liberal democracy”. The Cold War never ended for these elements of the deep state, determined to maintain the empire’s global dominance, while the US now crumbles from within. Given the extent of Allen Dulles and cronies’ activities during and after WW2 to preserve and protect high-ranking Nazis, it may not be far-fetched to suggest we are coming to the end of the 4th Reich. The jury is out on whether it ends with a bang or a whimper.
If the US wants “soft power” it will have to do something to deserve that. If we had spent 50% to 80% of our military budget on humanitarian aid to the developing nations, we would since WWII have rescued the poorest half of humanity from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease, would have no enemies, and would be the world’s moral leader, encouraging all nations to cooperate in the interests of all humanity, and building stronger international institutions of conflict resolution. We have no such goal because US government institutions and mass media are completely corrupted by money power: it has no morality, only commercial propaganda that money=virtue despite being gained primarily by lying, cheating, and stealing. Soft power requires getting money power out of government.
The reforms needed include:
1. Constitutional amendments prohibiting election or media funding beyond limited Individual donations;
2. Checks and Balances Within each functional branch, because they do not have powers to balance each other;
3. Public and mass media education to identify and avoid dangerous social dependency upon tribal groups.
The problem in passing such reforms is convincing politicians that they can still be re-elected by those means.
That list makes me muse about the Marshall Plan. Did it open the trough for so many and show them how to game whatever loose control systems may have been in place? The honor system never stood a chance.
Those $600 hammers and toilet seats from the MIC of decades past led to inflation seizing another opportunity to juice up the takings, pile on the overhead and motivate the agency of like-minded crooks in and out of government.
Alfred McCoy is correct in his condemnation of the Trump administration for the reasons he provides. But I continue to be puzzled by the revisionist history he has been writing in recent years, especially since in doing so he seems to be revising some of his own historical contributions. His depiction of postwar US policy reads more and more like the Court histories for which his work used to be an antidote. He does note that the Cold War (and the CIA) sometimes “complicated” our magnificence. But for the McCoy of today, our intentions were mostly good, and anyway after the Cold War ended in 1991 we ended such “complications” and devoted ourselves to good works. It is apparently only the world’s “autocrats” and “dictators” who are too dense to see that our interests are their interests.
There is a reason we keep insisting on getting the history right no matter how bad Trump is. It is because as NC commenters keep pointing out, Trump is not the *cause* of our current condition – including our “loss” of “global leadership.” Rather, he is the effect, the culmination of a long history of disastrous US policies both here and abroad. These include policies in the Middle East, toward Russia/Ukraine, and toward China in both Democrat and Republican administrations after 1991. We need to understand that history, not whitewash it. What I want to know is what happened to the Alfred McCoy who used to help us in that endeavor?
Taibbi discusses Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” and those ‘Good Intentions”: https://www.racket.news/p/the-quiet-american-has-never-been
McCoy has got qute strange of late, and as you observe his current take seems to contradict the world view of The Politics of Heroin. What is he thinking when he writes how USAID generously helped Vietnam and Colombia? Whose policies and militaries wrecked those countries in the first place?
This is a great article and compliments to the author. But the emphasis on soft power and what it can profit the USA is a fundamental part of the problem. The spirit of the article gives the reader the opportunity to reflect on what makes me world work, and what leads to progress rather than profit. Instead of asking what can gain wealth for me, one should ask what kind of world do I want to live in and be responsible for. The USA is the richest country in human history. Do we really want to live in a world where we are the richest and others live in poverty, oppression, and subjugation. Do we want to live in world where Gaza exists. What makes the world work is cooperation. As long as we believe capitalist ideology that says that competition drives capitalism to make the world work, we are doomed to live in a MAGA USA. Cooperation creates teams and sharing that produces innovation and progress.
I recall the “Ugly American” and do not have any nostalgia for the “works” performed by US during the cold war.
How many Americans in their mid 70’s and older remember that TV ad with the burly, uniformed communist needing a shave smashing a radio receiver with an axe.
Then Vietnam….
I just re-read Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies over the weekend, and it’s a laborious task as he couldn’t convey the message in an entertaining fashion such as Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, but I persevered.
With the collapse of hegemony, everything else falls in line, our way of life, social order and the whole kit and kaboodle.
In the past, empires collapsed without much of the rest of the world even knowing of their very existence, we are in a different time, although similar financially to the Roman Empire-with hyperinflation leading to its swan song.
How are all those holders of greenbacks in foreign locales gonna feel when our promise sorry notes are just that?
Thank you for the reminder to go take a look at it again!
I wish they’d make it available on Kindle….
Decades ago the US was a very powerful country that was in competition with the USSR. As such, they not only developed a network of powerful allies but also resorted to soft power such as food handouts, Hollywood films, artwork – in short the entire spectrum of activities. But after the implosion of the USSR the US fell into the same trap that other empires have fallen into. They were no longer interested in strong allies but only wanted vassal states and if that meant sabotaging those countries, then so be it. It also mean sabotaging any country of group of countries that threatened its pre-eminance. Look at what happened in Japan from the 80s on. Look at the crippled of the EU the past coupla years. That is what the present economic war against China is all about. To maintain hegemony and not to be challenged in any significant way. If India got too powerful, then the US would seek to sabotage them as well. And this is where what Trump is doing enters the scene. He has been raised on legends of the US military being the greatest in the history of this planet and I think that he actually said that. He also believes that the US economy is the greatest as well going by the numbers – the financial numbers that is. Thus he feels that he can get away with anything and everything. Put a tariff on the whole world. Sure. They owe us. Threaten to take over other countries/ Who is going to stop us. But he is running into the realities of China, Russia, Iran and worse of all, the bond traders. But I think that his ego will tell him to double down.
How many American cities have ‘Homeless Camps’ that look like Gaza today?
None. They don’t have children that are skin and bones.
Life is cheap for our homeless population, but much of it stems from bad choices, unlucky breaks or a combination.
To compare them to Gaza is absurd
They called ’em Hoovervilles back in the day, and here’s a photo of one from Seattle, and aside from not having cheap made in China tents, they made do, with the biggest ‘jungle’ occupying 9 acres!
I’d hardly call any of our homeless encampments anything along those lines, it isn’t as if there is an empty 9 acres area in our bigger cities to camp out in, or a smaller one for that matter.
https://depts.washington.edu/depress/hooverville_seattle.shtml