Amid the blizzard of executive orders and bizarre budgetary decisions pouring out of the Trump White House, Gates put his finger on the cuts that really matter, the ones that will do lasting damage—not just to their unfortunate victims but to America’s sense of global leadership as well.In short, globally, the sharp cuts to USAID’s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America’s soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity.
In President Donald Trump’s transactional diplomacy, only the hard power of mineral deals, gifted airplanes, or military might matters. And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it’s much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed “soft power.” As the progenitor of the concept, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, put it: “Seduction is always more effective than coercion. And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.” He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants,” that “might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid.
Actually, soft power is seldom soft. Indeed, Spanish steel might have conquered the New World in the 16th century, but its long rule over that vast region was facilitated by the appeal of a shared Christian religion. When Britain’s global turn came in the 19th century, its naval dominion over the world’s oceans was softened by an enticing cultural ethos of commerce, language, literature, and even sports. And as the American century dawned after World War II, its daunting troika of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines would be leavened by the soft-power appeal of its democratic values, its promise of scientific progress, and its humanitarian aid that started in Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948.
Even in these uncertain times, one thing seems clear enough: Donald Trump’s sharp cuts to this country’s humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing.
The Logic of Foreign Aid
Foreign aid—giving away money to help other nations develop their economies—remains one of America’s greatest inventions. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe had been ravaged by six years of warfare, including the dropping of 2,453,000 tons of Allied bombs on its cities, after which the rubble was raked thanks to merciless ground combat that killed 40 million people and left millions more at the edge of starvation.
Speaking before a crowd of 15,000 packed into Harvard Yard for commencement in June 1947, less than two years after that war ended, Secretary of State George Marshall made an historic proposal that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. “It is logical,” he said, “that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Instead of the usual victor’s demand for reparations or revenge, the U.S. gave Europe, including its defeated Axis powers, $13 billion in foreign aid that would, within a decade, launch that ruined continent on a path toward unprecedented prosperity.
What came to be known as the Marshall Plan was such a brilliant success that Washington decided to apply the idea on a global scale. Over the next quarter century, as a third of humanity emerged from the immiseration of colonial rule in Africa and Asia, the U.S. launched aid programs designed to develop the fundamentals of nationhood denied to those countries during the imperial age. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on a promise to aid Africa’s recovery from colonial rule, disparate programs were consolidated into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961.
At the outset, USAID’s work was complicated by Washington’s Cold War mission. It would sometimes even serve as a cover for CIA operations. Just a few years after the Cold War ended in 1991, however, USAID was separated from the State Department and its diplomatic aim of advancing U.S. interests.
Then refocused on its prime mission of global economic development, USAID would, in concert with the World Bank and other development agencies, become a pioneering partner in a multifaceted global effort to improve living conditions for the majority of humanity. Between 1950 and 2018, the portion of the world’s population living in “extreme poverty” (on $1.90 per day) dropped dramatically from 53% to just 9%. Simultaneously, USAID and similar agencies collaborated with the United Nation’s World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox and radically reduce polio, ending pandemics that had been the scourge of humanity for centuries. Launched in 1988, the anti-polio campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, spared 20 million children worldwide from serious paralysis.
Behind such seemingly simple statistics, however, lay years of work by skilled USAID specialists in agriculture, nutrition, public health, sanitation, and governance who delivered a multifaceted array of programs with exceptional efficiency. Not only would their work improve or save millions of lives, but they would also be winning loyal allies for America at a time of rising global competition.
And Along Comes DOGE
Enter Elon Musk, chainsaw in hand. Following President Trump’s example of withdrawing from the World Health Organization on inauguration day, Musk started his demolition of the federal government by, as he put it, “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” As his DOGE hirelings prowled the agency’s headquarters in the weeks after inauguration, Musk denounced that largely humanitarian organization as “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Without a scintilla of evidence, he added, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
With head-spinning speed, his minions then stripped the USAID logo from its federal building, shut down its website, purged its 10,000 employees, and started slashing its $40 billion budget for delivering aid to more than 100 nations globally. The White House also quickly transferred what was left of that agency back to the State Department, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent six weeks slashing 83% of its global humanitarian programs, reducing 6,200 of them to about 1,000.
As USAID’s skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children. In Colombia, the agency had spent several billion dollars to settle a decades-long civil war that killed 450,000 people by mapping 3.2 million acres of uncharted lands so that the guerrillas could become farmers. That work, however, was suddenly halted dead in its tracks—project incomplete, money wasted, threat of civil conflict again rising. In Asia, the end of USAID support forced the World Food Program to cut by half the already stringent food rations being provided to the million Rohingya refugees confined in miserable, muddy camps in Bangladesh—forcing them to survive on just $6.00 a month per person.
Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership.
In Africa, the aid cuts are likely to prove catastrophic. Departing USAID officials calculated that they would be likely to produce a 30% spike in tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease that already kills 1.25 million people annually on this planet and that 200,000 more children would likely be paralyzed by polio within a decade. In the eastern Congo, where a civil war fueled by competition over that region’s rare-earth minerals has raged for nearly 30 years, the U.S. was the “ultra dominant” donor. With USAID now shut down, 7.8 million Congolese war refugees are likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million children will suffer from malnutrition. In war-torn Sudan, U.S. aid sustained more than 1,000 communal kitchens to feed refugees, all of which have now closed without any replacements.
With 25 million of the world’s 40 million HIV patients in Africa, cuts to USAID’s health programs there, which had reduced new infections by half since 2010, now threaten that progress. In South Africa, a half-million AIDS patients are projected to die, and in Congo, an estimated 15,000 people could die within the next month alone. Moreover, ending USAID’s Malaria Initiative, which has spent $9 billion since President George W. Bush launched it in 2005, essentially ensures that, within a year, there will be 18 million more malaria infections in West Africa and 166,000 more likely deaths.
On March 3, with such dismal statistics piling up, Elon Musk insisted that “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
Writing from Sudan just 12 days later, however, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Peter Donde, a 10-year-old child infected with AIDS at birth, had just died. A USAID program launched by President Bush called PEPFAR had long provided drugs that were estimated to have saved 26 million lives from AIDS (Peter’s among them) until Musk’s cuts closed the humanitarian agency. Kristof reported that the end of U.S. funding for AIDS treatment in Africa means “an estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid.” Why, he asked, should Americans spend even 0.24% of their Gross National Product on programs that keep poor children alive? Answering his own question, he wrote that the demolition of USAID “means that the United States loses soft power and China gains.”
Indeed, Dr. Diana Putman, USAID’s former assistant administrator for Africa, argues that the agency’s programs have been the chief currency for U.S. ambassadors in negotiations with developing nations. “Their leverage and ability to make a difference in terms of foreign policy,” she explained, “is backed up by the money that they bring, and in the Global South that money is primarily the money that USAID has.”
The Loss of Soft Power
In short, globally, the sharp cuts to USAID’s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America’s soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity.
In back-handed testimonials to USAID’s success, the world’s autocrats celebrated the agency’s demise, particularly the end of the $1.6 billion—about 4% of its annual budget—that it devoted to pro-democracy initiatives. “Smart move,” said former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. On X (formerly Twitter), Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán announced that he “couldn’t be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance, @elonmusk are finally taking down this foreign interference machine.” Expressing his joy, Orbán offered a “Good riddance!” to USAID programs that helped “independent media thrive” and funneled funds to the “opposition campaign” in Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections. Similarly, El Salvador’s de facto dictator, Nayib Bukele, complained that USAID’s pro-democracy funds had been “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.”
Offering even more eloquent testimony to USAID’s past efficacy, China has moved quickly to take over a number of the abolished agency’s humanitarian programs, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Beijing is locked in an intense strategic rivalry with Washington over the South China Sea. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, two public health specialists observed that “a U.S. retreat on global health, if sustained, will indeed open the door for China to exploit the abrupt, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. programs in… Southeast Asia, and it may do the same in Latin America.”
Last February, only a week after Washington cancelled $40 million that had funded USAID initiatives for child literacy and nutrition in Cambodia, Beijing offered support for strikingly similar programs, and its ambassador to Phnom Penh said, “Children are the future of the country and the nation.” Making China’s diplomatic gains obvious, he added: “We should care for the healthy growth of children together.” Asked about this apparent setback during congressional hearings, Trump’s interim USAID deputy administrator, Pete Marocco, evidently oblivious to the seriousness of U.S.-China competition in the South China Sea, simply dismissed its significance out of hand.
Although the dollar amount was relatively small, the symbolism of such aid programs for children gave China a sudden edge in a serious geopolitical rivalry. Just two months later, Cambodia’s prime minister opened new China-funded facilities at his country’s Ream Naval Base, giving Beijing’s warships preferential access to a strategic port adjacent to the South China Sea. Although the U.S. has spent a billion dollars courting Cambodia over the past quarter-century, China’s soft-power gains are now clearly having very real hard-power consequences.
In neighboring Vietnam, USAID has worked for several decades trying to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War, while courting Hanoi as a strategic partner on the shores of the South China Sea. In building a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” manifest in today’s close trade relations, USAID played a critical diplomatic role by investing in recovering unexploded American munitions left over from that war, cleaning up sites that had been polluted by the defoliant Agent Orange, and providing some aid to the thousands of Vietnamese who still suffer serious birth defects from such toxic chemicals. “It is through these efforts that two former enemies are now partners,” said former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-V.T.). “People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world.”
A Global Turn Toward Hard Power
Although the demolition of USAID and sharp cuts to economic aid will have consequences for the world’s poor that can only be called tragic, it’s but one part of President Trump’s attack on the key components of America’s soft power—not only foreign aid, but also reliable information and skilled diplomacy. In March, the president signed an executive order shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including organizations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that had been broadcasting in 50 languages worldwide, reaching an estimated 360 million people in nations often without reliable news and information.
A month later, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a 50% cut to the State Department’s budget, closing diplomatic missions and completely eliminating funds for international organizations like NATO and the U.N. While the actual implementation of those cuts remains uncertain, the State Department is already dismissing 20% of its domestic workforce, or about 3,400 employees, including a significant number of Foreign Service officers, special envoys, and cyber-security specialists. Add it all up and, after just 100 days in office, President Trump is well on his way to demolishing the three critical elements for America’s pursuit of global soft power.
Already, the erosion of U.S. influence is manifest in recent criticism of this country, unprecedented in its bitterly acrid tone, even among longstanding allies. “Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping away,” warned veteran French legislator Claude Malhuret in a March 4 speech, from the floor of France’s Senate that soon won a remarkable 40 million views worldwide. “Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a ketamine-fueled buffoon in charge of purging the civil service.”
With such cutting critiques circulating in the corridors of power from Paris to Tokyo, Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership. And, as Professor Nye reminds us, leadership based solely on coercion is not really leadership at all.
