By cutting USAID, is Trump really making America great again?

Demonstrators outside the headquarters of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, on February 3. AFP

On Monday, I was on a conference call with friends and colleagues in the aid and peace-building community. The mood was sombre as we contemplated the results of US President Donald Trump’s order to freeze nearly all American foreign aid for 90 days. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio swiftly followed up by saying that “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, the original announcement had already affected huge numbers of people.

In Khartoum, Sudan, the US was the biggest donor for the soup kitchens that were feeding more than 800,000 people. Last Friday, it was reported that 434 of the 634 kitchens run by volunteers had shut down. Hospitals in camps on the Thai border, where about 100,000 refugees from Myanmar live, closed their doors. Malaria programmes in Uganda and Bangladesh have been affected, with key staff laid off. Aids clinics in South Africa have had to suspend their work. The Middle East has been affected, too, as this paper reported on Tuesday.

But there’s another kind of US foreign aid, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt outlined on Monday. Citing “$70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland”, $47,000 on a “transgender opera” in Colombia and $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru, she said: “I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going towards this [sic] and I know the American people don’t either.” Cutting these programmes, she said, is exactly what Elon Musk, director of the US Department of Government Efficiency, “has been tasked by President Trump to do”.

It doesn’t matter what you think about DEI – or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – as a policy, and the opera in Colombia may quite possibly be a masterpiece, Ms Leavitt knows her audience. They most certainly will be thinking: “We’re funding that?” What cannot be denied, as well, is that such projects are neither neutral nor indisputably beneficial. They are fundamentally political.

This links to a third category of US foreign aid. The agency has long been accused of interfering in the internal political affairs of a number of countries, and Mr Trump appears to agree. The first paragraph of his executive order reads: “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilise world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”

Critics from the anti-colonialist left and the Global South might not use quite the same words. But they have complained for decades that US-funded projects – nominally to promote a specific type of governance, human rights and so-called independent media – are often highly partisan attempts to undermine governments and promote politicians of whom the American foreign policy establishment approves.

The trouble is that all three categories can end up being lumped together, and the fact that USAID provided 42 per cent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the UN last year – for which the world should be very thankful – can be overlooked by those irritated by what they see as never-ending American meddling, if not downright coercion.

So here’s a suggestion for Mr Trump, Mr Musk and Mr Rubio. Let the review of US foreign aid proceed, and identify the core humanitarian work. Cut anything and everything that’s even slightly political. Drop the controversial. Focus the $70 billion that the US so generously spends annually on international aid on the work everyone can agree on. Eradicating diseases. Feeding desperate people. Strengthening education and health services. Supporting women and girls. Building peace and enabling dialogue. Monitoring elections when invited to be an objective observer.

Think about the kind of work the Carter Centre does. Does anyone, anywhere object to that?

This would fit with the “Maga” view that the rest of the world’s politics is not their issue, and Mr Trump’s words in his speech at the 2017 Riyadh summit that I’ve quoted before: “America will not seek to impose our way of life on others,” he said. “We are not here to lecture – we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.”

Let the aid be straightforward, with no strings attached. If anyone in the Trump administration needs a reason to spend those billions without a quid pro quo, well, many if not most leading Republicans see themselves as godly people, and all the Abrahamic religions would approve of such charity. And in any case, wouldn’t unfettered US aid – with no lecturing, moralising, or conditions – actually improve America’s standing in a lot of countries?

A kind of template for this springs to mind. Many years ago, I went to Kenya for a reporting trip supported by a Christian charity. Their workers, some of whom were priests, never talked about their faith, however, to forestall any accusations that they were really there to proselytise. They did concede that a phenomenon called “unavoidable witness” could occur. Someone might see the work they were doing – in this case, in education about HIV and reducing the stigma for the infected – then become interested in what motivated them, and thus their religion. But the charity’s mission explicitly ruled out demanding that “people hear any religious message or convert to Christianity before, during or after receiving assistance”.

If US foreign aid was repurposed to the purely charitable and humanitarian, “unavoidable witness” would surely be inevitable. No one could see what is still the world’s mightiest country selflessly donating such large sums of money, while expecting nothing in return, and not be impressed.

Perhaps it’s too much to hope for. But if Mr Trump wants to make America great again, not just in the eyes of his fellow citizens, but in the hearts of the rest of the world, it would be a magnificent start.