Trump’s Egomania Is Endangering National Security
Shuttering USAID isn’t going to do what he thinks.
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The day President Trump took office, he issued an executive order suspending almost all foreign aid for 90 days. “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” he wrote in the order.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) disburses more than half of U.S. foreign aid, which as of fiscal year 2023 amounted to $71.9 billion. The $43.8 billion USAID disbursed that year was less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget, according to the Department of State.
Trump recently said that the organization is run by “radical lunatics.” And a Feb. 3 White House memo asserted that USAID “funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” Some of these supposed projects:
$70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland
$32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru
“Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria”
Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post fact-checked the above claims and many more, proving them demonstrably false.
The fake narrative that somehow USAID is a radical organization is easily disproven. But there’s another prong to the government’s (aka Trump and Elon Musk’s) justifications for shuttering USAID. See these words from Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, who wrote in a statement about the stop-work order: “President Trump stated clearly that the United States is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people.”
Instead, she wrote thatU.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “is initiating a review of all foreign assistance programs to ensure they are efficient and consistent with U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda.”
And here we come to the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country. The right has consistently demonstrated its selfish “me, me, me” attitude, while it appears that the left still has some compassion for people in the rest of the world who need our help. But the decision to stop supporting people in need isn’t purely about a lack of compassion.
Let’s look at the fallacy that there is “no return for the American people” in giving foreign aid to assist with, for instance, a new Ebola outbreak in Uganda. Let’s think about this for a minute. There are many examples of how foreign aid does benefit the U.S., but let’s stay with Ebola. Offering aid to help contain the Ugandan outbreak is beneficial not just to that country and surrounding countries, it is beneficial to the U.S. Remember when the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo jumped borders, with patients landing in the States? Right. The idea is that containing the spread of a deadly disease is good for this country.
Now take that a step further. Say we offer assistance like rebuilding schools in Ukraine. Or maybe money for bomb shelters. We are not only helping people in great need, but we are also building goodwill at the local level as well as the governmental. That’s what Trump and his people are missing: Foreign aid assistance is about building relationships in the world, beyond doing the fundamental work of responding to humanitarian crises. Not only that, but foreign aid is a crucial means of ensuring U.S. national security. After offering help, the next time the U.S. needs something in that part of the world, they have created an ally — as opposed to forcing countries in need to seek support from countries that are hostile to the U.S, like Iran, China or Russia.
There’s a reason the world’s dictators have been cheering on the demolishment of USAID.
“Smart move,” Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban “celebrated what he called an end to the funding of ‘globalist’ organizations in a Facebook post on Tuesday. Mr. Orban’s political director said he ‘couldn’t be happier’ with what Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were doing,” reports The New York Times.
Not all of USAID’s previous work has been intended to purely create goodwill, or to satisfy our moral duty to people suffering, or to even ensure our national security.
Samantha Power, who ran USAID under President Biden, wrote in an op-ed in the Times yesterday that she had shared with Trump’s incoming people that the organization had “expanded its activities recently in areas that are particularly threatening to China and Russia — increasing efforts to expose corruption, supporting countries as they try to renegotiate usurious debt they have incurred to China, and developing frameworks to diversify U.S. supply chains and expand critical mineral imports to the United States — which are essential to powering America’s economic future.”
Aka the move was in the U.S. economic interest.
Power calls foreign aid “a cost-effective example of what once distinguished the United States from our adversaries.” What once distinguished this country, which opened its arms to generations of refugees fleeing war and violence, which ran headfirst to help in natural disasters like Haiti’s 2010 7.0-magnitude earthquake, which understood that the world doesn’t have to be ruled by an iron fist at all times to keep the peace, has been in precarious decline in recent years.
The selfishness of America is reaching an apex under Trump. And the results will undoubtably weaken not only global stability, but America itself.
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The selfishness and cruelty is the point. As is the entitled superiority which is so blatant. For a "pro-life" group of people, they sure have no capacity to care about the lives of people.
The unconscionable effort to end USAID is not only a cruel heartless action, but one of total shortsightedness that could have terrible long term consequences. That untold numbers would suffer is a given. The effect on our position as a leader around the world would be catastrophic. This move would swing the doors wide open for Russia and especially China to move right in and replace us, virtually overnight. It is hard to believe that trump and his advisers are so brain dead as to not be aware of that.