Photo courtesy of foodtank
“We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot.” US State Department, January 19, 2025
US President Donald Trump has ordered a 90 day pause on all foreign assistance and aid programmes, with a few exceptions. The pause is supposedly for the US government to take an audit of these programmes and to ascertain whether they are in the country’s national interest. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that in future US foreign assistance would have to meet three conditions: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”
One can argue that conditioning foreign aid on the donor country’s safety, strength and prosperity is somewhat oxymoronic. But as human rights organisations around the world scramble to meet funding requirements, some are arguing that Washington is making a mistake; for decades, programmes like USAID and the Peace Corps, to say nothing of the many foreign exchange programmes organised by the US State Department, were pivotal in projecting to the world a friendly, positive image of the US. The US was able to win a battle of hearts and minds during the Cold War because it gave away so generously and in doing so signalled its willingness to be a part of the global multilateral order.
Yet this reading of things overlooks certain inescapable realities. For one thing, we are no longer in the world of the Cold War. We are in the midst of a second Cold War between China and the US. The dynamics are considerably different. While Washington played an active role on multilateral institutions and mobilised multilateralism to further its interests during the Cold War, the conservative right no longer sees this as a viable strategy in its competition with China. The post-1991 consensus, where abstractions such as human rights were seen as necessary for US hegemony, has more or less eroded.
For another, the economic discourses of the conservative right no longer fit the usual left-right spectrum. While Trump speaks of strengthening US industry and scrapping renewable energy and climate change initiatives, Elon Musk speaks loftily about reducing government waste and intervention. Fifteen years ago, US conservatives were busy lambasting the “nanny state” and decrying welfare. Today, the discourse on the right is geared towards making America First and making American industry supreme. President Trump does not, in that regard, fit the mould of earlier conservative commentators, including Bill Kristof. The latter saw the US’s national interests as best served by the global spread of US values. The America First coalition does not: they have retreated to isolationism. In this scheme of things foreign aid and assistance are seen as expendable, if not wasteful.
Yet at the same time, there is little that distinguishes US foreign policy objectives of that era from this. The foreign assistance pause indicates this somewhat: the State Department is investigating whether taxpayer money has gone into funding such causes as gender justice, DEI and of course climate resilience. If, in that earlier era, the US government poured in money for these causes, now it is withdrawing money from them. In both instances, Washington is globalising its values and has framed foreign assistance as a means of strengthening its position, or its hegemony, abroad. The values may have changed but the underlying objectives have not.
The dangers of relying on foreign, particularly Western, government funding should have been apparent to human rights organisations everywhere, particularly in the Global South. Now, with several projects closing down, there is concern that these organisations will become more vulnerable than ever. The US State Department’s framing of foreign aid and assistance as wasteful is, in that sense, rather telling. In the poorer nations of the Global South, which have been ravaged by centuries of colonialism and brutalised by economic exploitation unprecedented in their scope and breadth, Western aid should no longer be seen as a munificent bequest from the developed world, an act of charity which somehow exonerates the West’s complicity in the immiseration of our societies.
Aid programmes of the sort that have now been shut down were, for decades, seen as constituting a third sector between the public and the private. They were seen as indispensable in the context of a growing rift between the Global North and the Global South. Yet as Western economies recede into recession and as their societies become more and more polarised, Western government funded foreign aid is likely to take the first hit. This paradigm shift, which I predict will accelerate over the next few years, should serve as a warning to human rights groups in the Global South. It should serve as a wakeup call, a point of departure in the way we see and promote human rights.
Meanwhile, the US, which for decades mobilised foreign aid to shore up its image internationally, is receding from the multilateralism it advocated for so long. The US under Joe Biden marketed itself as a crusader for human rights, for democracy and for a host of other causes. Things have changed immeasurably since. There has been little consistency in how the US has dealt with the world over the last 20 years. Trump’s executive orders should hence not come as a surprise; they are just another stage in that country’s inexorably cyclical history. The sooner the Global South realises this and thinks of new ways of tackling challenges endemic to their societies, the better.