Foreign aid has always had its detractors. Many people feel either, “Why should we be giving aid to those ungrateful shithole countries?”, or else, “USAID is such a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, it’s just another big, wasteful black hole for tax dollars.”
Well, I want to share my experience working for USAID some years ago in both Haiti and Cambodia, as well as working closely alongside USAID in Côte d’Ivoire. I do not come down fully either pro or con. There is one truth, not always fully realized, that must be pointed out: USAID is an arm of US foreign policy, and its number one goal is to advance American interests. Of course, helping flood victims or building hospitals is a means to that end, but we shouldn’t forget the real end objective, since sometimes helping countries and extending American influence can work at cross purposes.
I worked for USAID in Cambodia to set up what is now the National University of Management. USAID wanted the NUM to be an American-run, American dominated institution, while the Cambodians said, “Wait a minute; NUM is a Cambodian institution.” This led to bitter fighting between the Americans and the Cambodians. The leaders were interested in playing power politics, and many were self-serving, ambitious bureaucrats with little interest in helping Cambodians. It was mostly a game of stroking egos.
On the other hand, the lowly grunts hired to train teachers, set up curriculum, and develop the staff, were dedicated professionals, aiming at establishing a credible university in the midst of the political chaos going on in Cambodia immediately following the fall of the Khmer Rouge and the UNTAC elections. I get a real sense of pride when I see the NUM today – 30 years later – as the premier business university in the country. I feel that our team achieved this despite the political machinations of the big bosses.
I saw the same pattern in Haiti. USAID was intent on currying favor with Haitian officials, and often overlooked corruption and incompetence by those officials. At the same time, I worked with a team of Haitians to develop educational materials in Haitian creole, and they were real professionals who knew what they were doing, and who were dedicated to that goal.
So the pattern is always the same: political egos fighting for power at the top, with dedicated professionals trying to do good. I saw this again in Côte d’Ivoire, working alongside some truly amazing people (and I single out Steve Grant of USAID), who were adroit enough to straddle the sometimes conflicting agendas of power-hungry bureaucrats and local Africans with needs. The key was to adopt a win-win attitude, in which American influence and local development went hand-in-hand.
It appears to me that Trump’s dislike of USAID stems from his dislike of win-win solutions. For him, everything is a power play with a winner (himself, he hopes), and a loser (who ends up bending the knee but hating the US). In the tension between doing good and making America a winner, Trump thinks that USAID is doing too much good and not forcing America’s will upon developing countries. He calls USAID officials “radical maniacs”, by which he means “woke people who want to help others.”
In my experience with these two sometimes conflicting objectives, I feel that on balance, USAID has done a lot of good, not only for the developing countries, but also for America’s image as a partner in development. It is this image that Trump wants to destroy; he feels that America must dictate to other countries how to act and bully them into submission. That is what Trump means by ‘respect’, and ‘America first’.