We’ve completed the circle. We Americans have gone out into the world, seen what we’ve seen, come rushing back home slammed the door shut and fitted out the house with surveillance cameras, automatic machine guns, potbellied camo boys with tattoos that scream like John Prine’s* waitress, “Make America Great Again”, a moat slithering with crocodiles and snakes and a steel wall.
We are ugly Americans again. Led by Mr. Uggers himself, DJT. His Pestilence is assisted by a black shirted, Seig Heiling immigrant who fled Apartheid not because he opposed it but apparently because he sensed the USA’s soil was more fertile for such diabolic Dogebags** as he.
They say JFK read the novel The Ugly American and felt shame. Soon afterwards he announced the Peace Corps. And created USAID. Not so every child in Asia could have cotton candy every morning but because he and his bros believed the USA could win friends by being decent.
Now his nephew sparks outbreaks of measles in small Pacific Island states.
We’ve completed the circle. We Americans are ugly again.
The decision by Trump/Musk to do away with USAID should be a development we are not surprised by. But I am. It does not bode well for millions of people and communities around the world whose American tax-payer-funded assistance will cease. But its certainly, a huge nail in the nearly completed coffin of the aid sector as we know it.
The move to disappear stand-alone aid agencies is not new. Canada did it. Boris Johnson did it. And it happened here in Australia in 2013 when a pugnacious let’s-move-back- to-the-past Prime Minister mandated the death of AusAID.
Everywhere it has happened it has had a similar effect. The quantum and impact of the ‘aid’ decreases dramatically. Experts with decades of experience and knowledge are turfed out and replaced by graduates and bland bureaucrats with no interest in the subject matter. When Australia did its downsizing over a decade ago, the budget for international aid had been growing steadily and significantly every few years. Both parties, pledged to make Australia a good global citizen and set a target of .7 GNI (gross national income) to be the annual goal. This would have taken Australia from a medium sized supporter of community development and humanitarian response to the major leagues.
When Tony Blair became Prime Minister of Britain in 1997, he removed the ’Aid’ office from the Foreign Office and created a separate and well-funded agency which dominated the sector for the next 15 years. DFID, as it was known (Department for International Development) was very well funded, filled with recognised technical experts and championed new ideas. It was the thought leader of the global sector, respected by all for its commitment to addressing some of the inherent problems that exist in such an agency.
USAID was the Daddy Warbucks of the industry. The agency with the deepest pockets, largest infrastructure and a pioneer in the financing of major infrastructure projects like dams and roads that were critical for countries to building their sense of nationhood and post-colonial economies. It had its political constraints imposed by Republicans (no support to abortion or reproductive services, for example) but it was so big these things got lost in the shuffle.
As a kid in India, one of the regular features on the landscape were American men sporting crewcuts and white shirts running around in the most remote places laying the groundwork for or directing the building of such projects. I attended school with several kids whose parents were in India or Bangladesh or Burma or Ceylon for a few years, working for USAID or the Canadian aid agency on these massive projects.
It seems those days are now gone forever. I lament not the white men and crewcuts or even the massive projects, but that governments no longer consider soft power and aid to be something of value. And the implicit if unspoken belief that poverty can be defeated. And that the ‘West’ has a degree of responsibility for taking steps to reduce that poverty and vulnerability.
DFID is no more. BJ smooshed it back into the Foreign Office and its budget was stripped to support other brilliant schemes like sending asylum seekers to imaginary camps in Rwanda. And to support other underfunded Tory projects. Where if once was a beacon, Britain’s aid program, like so much else in the UK, is flickering candle in a rainstorm. Canada means well but has lost its importance as an aid donor.
Australia, flying high with billions of dollars and ambitious plans to support climate change around the world, is now a sick, in-house joke. Rather than .7% of GNI, the aid budget represents .19% GNI! The lowest level since the 1950s! It’s important presence in South Asia, Africa, and SE Asia has disappeared. It’s only significant programs are in Papua New Guinea (former colony) and a few other Pacific Island nations. Its priority is pro-business and infrastructure. Issues like public health, agricultural support, education support or humanitarian response is as thin as the storyline the politicos spin in front of the cameras.
For well over a decade now, Interntional non-governmental organisations (INGOS) have been struggling to find a reason to stay alive. This is a long and inglorious story of strategic blindness, consolidation and refusal to face the reality of a changing world. In this way, perhaps Trump’s bull-in-a-China shop approach will finally bring on the crisis that will at last bring reality crashing through the cubicle partitions. That could be good. But the damage will be massive and the chances of it leading to anything but chaos and corruption, extremely low.
More likely what we will see is the aid budget going to support Trusk designed projects (Trump hotels in Myanmar, rocket ships for Kazakstan, oil drilling in South Sudan, shopping malls and data farms in Greenland). And huge disruption to the financial viability of INGOs around the world that have built themselves into large often-bloated institutions whose main source of revenue is USAID. Which is now shuttered.
I just tapped in “USAID.gov”
Stay tuned for further developments on this front.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 