US President Donald Trump’s decision to practically disband the USAID is a blessing in disguise for countries affected by its consistent interventions, both direct and indirect. Imperialists in the US, therefore, see it as a major loss for US hegemony worldwide.
Manufacturing ‘Truths’
How the expansion of NATO to militarily encircle Russia falls within the ambit of so-called “democracy” is beyond one’s comprehension. But what is comprehensible is the scale of these ‘soft operations’ led by the USAID Trump’s decision has frozen about US$ 268 million earmarked for the so-called “independent media” in 2024/25. A kye question that arises here: how “independent” this media is when it actually financially “depends” on funds from Washington?
A report by Global Investigative Journalism Network shows the vast extent of these media houses’ actual dependence on USAID, and how putting a freeze on their biggest source of funds will damage the role they were playing in furthering the narratives of the US empire. The empire aided media houses, not just in places like Ukraine and Latin America, or the Third World in general. The US Department of Defence, for instance, also awarded US$9 million to a unit of Reuters, the world’s largest news agency. The reason for this payment was for research on “large-scale social deception” operations, according to Elon Musk, who added that “they are a total scam”. The New York Times and Politico are among other key, notable media houses that have received funds from the US government to advance specific, pro-Washington narratives. (Let’s not forget that the New York Times was a key media house advocating war on Iraq in 2002-03.) These funds were not used to aid democracy and protect journalism. They were used to targeting countries and leaders not willing to submit to the dictates of Washington.
A “Flash Report” released by Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office shows USAID funded media outlets under investigation in Hungry. Hungry, a NATO member, states in the report that USAID is “part of the machinery that implements US national security strategy. The agency complements the work of the secret services, using covert and overt pressure through payments disguised as aid and grants”. Hungry becomes a political target because of its opposition to the US-funded conflict in Ukraine. Because a lot of the covert work being done by the “deep state” in the US is now under pressure from the Trump administration, it has pushed several known imperialists within the US to a breaking point.
Loss of Hegemony
Imperialists in the US are in panic. Those who led USAID and those who used it see its dismantling as a conspiracy. In reality, however, the dismantling of USAID is the dismantling of institutionalized covert ways of maintaining US hegemony worldwide. Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that the “assistance” provided by the agency “is one of the most powerful tools Washington has to push back against Chinese and Russian influence and to prevent transnational threats”, adding that the agency still has a role to play in helping “the United States prevail in an intensifying global competition”. Unless this is done, the argument logically follows, American capability to prevail will only dwindle overtime.
Samantha Power, who was the agency’s administrator in the Biden administration, was a bit more blatant in her recent guest essay for the New York Times. According to Power, “USAID has become America’s superpower in a world defined by threats that cross borders and amid growing strategic competition”. It was a “superpower” because it has “generated vast stores of political capital in the more than 100 countries where it works, making it more likely that when the United States makes hard requests of their leaders — for example, to send peacekeepers to a war zone, to help a U.S. company enter a new market, or to extradite a criminal to the United States — they say yes”.
In other words, with the loss of this assistance, the US has lost its ability to force countries to toe its line regardless of the cost. That, in simple words, is a step taking US global influence backwards.
A key question is: why is the Trump administration doing this? For many, Trump’s resurgence, seen within the context of Making America Great Again (MAGA), symbolized a partial return to the isolationist foreign policy framework that dominated the US before the Second World War. The Trump administration is eager to reduce, if not totally eliminate, the US geopolitical presence worldwide. Dismantling USAID is a step in that direction. Samantha Power sees this as a reason why Russia and China (and many other states) are cheering the end of this agency, why shouldn’t they? They were the primary ideological, political, and economic rivals that the USAID targeted ever since it was established in 1961. The end of the USAID for them, therefore, is a welcome development insofar as it might create an opening for these countries to build ties and develop themselves, not necessarily in ways dictated by the so-called “hard requests” coming from Washington.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
