Features
The US in a brave new world
By Uditha Devapriya
Donald Trump’s dismantlement of foreign aid signals what I see as the third wave of the US conservative right’s attack on the Kennedy-Johnson consensus that guided US foreign policy for much of the last half-century. In the first wave, during the Reagan years, Washington did away with many of the domestic programmes which had been set up by John F. Kennedy at the heyday of Keynesian economics. In the second wave, which I trace to both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, domestic social programmes were again singled out for attack, with welfare and healthcare facing much of the brunt.
President Trump’s attacks on foreign aid programmes, barely five years after Joe Biden revived them, including in countries like Sri Lanka – a good example being Peace Corps – are as radical and far-reaching as they are going to get. Over the last two decades, going back to the Tea Party movement, Washington has lurched so far to the right that older generation of conservatives identified by Trump supporters as warmongers and establishment folk – the likes of Liz Cheney and her father Dick, the Bushes, and so on – resemble in no way their critics in the Republican Party. Musk’s battle of the tweets with the likes of conservative commentators like Bill Kristol and Republican senators like Liz Cheney is telling in that sense because it underscores a pivotal ideological shift in US politics.
This shift mirrors a broader lurch to the right that continues to characterise the anti-woke right in much of the Global North and, I would say, parts of the Global South. In the US, the anti-woke right has been incensed by what they frame as the doling out of taxpayer dollars to divesiry, equity and resilience (DEI), climate resilience, and gender initiatives in countries like Sri Lanka, programmes which in their view have served no one. As more and more disclosures about what USAID programmes were used for here – prominently in media and democratic governance NGOs, to say nothing of parliamentary committees – come to light, it becomes easier to see why the right has become so angry. That the likes of Victor Orban have been openly happy at Trump’s ongoing retrenchment of foreign aid is understandable, if you factor in Orban’s and Vladimir Putin’s past attitudes to USAID and even private donors.
In that sense, what of the contention that US national interests will be undermined by these developments? The argument, in my view, has some merit for two reasons. First, it is an admission of something the Left, particularly the anti-imperialist Left, has voiced for years if not decades: that organisations like USAID were used as tools and instruments of US foreign policy, as a means of entrenching American hegemony.
In response to Musk’s criticism of her involvement with USAID, Liz Cheney declared that she was “proud” of having helped defeat the Soviet Union via such institutions. This goes to show that, far from being a benevolent bequest, foreign aid has very much been linked to the geopolitical ambitions of powerful countries. To say this is to remember that, during the Kennedy years, institutions like the Alliance for Progress, while doing necessary, good work in a postcolonial world, was shaped by that administration’s priority of economic stability in countries which seemed vulnerable to Communism.
There were times when such organisations were used in more explicit ways to achieve these geopolitical objectives. Costa-Gavras’s beautiful and searing film State of Siege, a fictional account of USAID employee Dan Mitrione, who taught torture and interrogation techniques to the Uruguayan police before being kidnapped and killed by left-wing guerillas there, is a stark case in point. Yet even if one concedes this point, it is possible to acknowledge the good work such institutions have done on the humanitarian front – as liberal commentators like Nicholas Kristof have constantly reminded us today.
The second reason as to why the national interest argument has merit is that once the US withdraws from the multilateral order vis-à-vis foreign assistance, it theoretically becomes possible for countries like China and Russia to take their place. I say “theoretically” because, for all the rhetoric about Beijing filling the gap that the US will leave behind in institutions like the World Health Organisation, it is questionable whether those countries will, in fact, devote their budgets to financing them in the long run. I believe it is in everyone’s interests, not least of all China’s, that they do. This is precisely what the older conservative right in the US, represented by the likes of Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell, fear.
But really, such fears are unwarranted. In a context of growing tensions between the US and the rest of the world, these developments will be bemoaned by the liberal and conservative establishment yet accepted as necessary collateral damage by the hardcore, Trumpist right. Until now, the US political establishment took great pains to distinguish between ally and enemy – even if, as was seen during the Reagan years, the government engaged in verbal gymnastics (“autocratic” versus “authoritarian”) to justify its foreign policy. Today, no such distinctions exist – Elon Musk continues to attack elected heads of state, while both the US President and Vice-President support the work he is doing as “good” and “necessary.” What we are seeing now is a return to the days of naked big stick diplomacy, with Trump as symbol of the pre-Wilsonian phase of US foreign policy.
The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific-focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk.