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THE END OF U.S. SOFT POWER?  
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John Feffer
March 4, 2025
Hankyoreh
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_ Trump’s effort to end US foreign aid throws out a lot of babies
with the bathwater. During the Cold War, the US waged a war of ideas
with the Soviet Union to capture the hearts and minds of the world.
Foreign aid also boosted US businesses. _

A protester holds up a sign outside the USAID office building in
Washington, DC, on Feb. 3, 2025, after the Trump administration
announced he would be slashing the agency., EPA/Yonhap // Hankyoreh

 

During the Cold War, the United States waged a war of ideas with the
Soviet Union to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of the world.
It was in many ways a lop-sided contest, at least in terms of popular
appeal. The United States had pop songs, Pop art, Pop-Tarts, not to
mention Hollywood films, McDonalds, and democracy. The Soviets had
Shostakovich, the Bolshoi Ballet, the collected works of Lenin,
Tetris, and not much else.

The two sides also offered various forms of assistance to other
countries: disaster relief, humanitarian medical missions, scientific
cooperation, and financial loans. Because the U.S. economy was
considerably larger than the Soviet one, the advantage here also went
to the Americans.

After the Cold War, the United States continued to cultivate what it
called “soft power”—the power of ideas and culture—alongside
its enormous military. This soft power continued to be a major vector
of American influence, for both good and ill. On the positive side,
American activists helped construct the world of international law,
American aid workers responded to earthquakes and typhoons, American
scientists participated in developing new vaccines and other medical
breakthroughs, and American consultants were instrumental in building
a range of democratic institutions from election monitoring to a free
press.

More than half of U.S. aid
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to humanitarian assistance (21.7 percent), health (22.3 percent),
governance (3.2 percent), education and social services (2 percent),
and environment (1.9 percent).

But there has also been a dark side to this soft power. Foreign aid,
for instance, is highly politicized, often distributed according to
political allegiances rather than actual need. A good chunk of this
aid has been security-related (14.2 percent), and both Israel and
Egypt have traditionally been the top recipients of military
assistance. And aid is often used by corrupt recipients to line their
own pockets or hand out to their own patronage networks, though the
level of corruption is nowhere near
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anti-aid campaigners claim (and the United States has also used its
aid programs
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corruption and organized crime).

Moreover, much of foreign aid is tied to purchases of U.S. goods and
services, which means that the U.S. government is basically just
giving a lift to U.S. business. Economic development absorbs 27
percent of U.S. foreign aid, much of it spent within the United
States. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which
the Trump administration has illegally suspended, was so proud of this
fact that it once boasted
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its website that “the principal beneficiary of America’s foreign
assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80
percent of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts
and grants go directly to American firms.”

Combine this boosterism with the fact that foreign aid has often
included a disproportionate number of loans, not grants, and it
becomes clear that a lot of so-called development doesn’t actually
help the poorest of the poor. It’s why so many countries, despite
decades of foreign assistance, remain locked in poverty.

So, perhaps Donald Trump is right to eliminate USAID by ending most of
its programs and reducing its staff from 14,000 to under 300?

But alongside the problematic disbursements, the agency funds a lot of
absolutely critical projects around the world. Here is a
sample, from _Time _magazine
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of the chaos that Trump’s shut-down order has already caused:  

_Schools for fourth- to sixth-grade girls are being closed in
Afghanistan. Families are returning to destroyed neighborhoods in Gaza
with no access to clean water, shelter, or provisions. Funding for
teachers and supplies in Uganda has dried up. Tons of seeds are
currently sitting in a warehouse in Haiti instead of being distributed
to farmers. Maternal health and family-planning clinics in Malawi are
shuttered. In Bangladesh, food assistance for refugees will be cut by
half in March and run out entirely in April._

It’s not just basic services that are now on hold. There’s also
the effort to roll out
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new AIDS vaccine in Africa and clinical trials
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control tuberculosis globally. There’s all the critical research
that USAID funds at U.S. universities on agricultural innovation
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governance, and educational performance
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The Trump administration has been spreading considerable
misinformation about U.S. soft power. It has suggested that cutting
USAID will save the United States a lot of money when foreign aid
amounts to a mere 1 percent of the federal budget—and much of that
money is either spent in the United States or for purchases of U.S.
goods and services. It has claimed that a lot of it has gone to
overhead and bureaucracy, not to the intended recipients, but USAID
has worked with a number of subcontractors like Catholic Relief
Services and the Red Cross to implement programs, which is standard
practice
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ensures a measure of accountability. Trump supporters have claimed
that USAID money has gone to celebrities for trips abroad, which is
simply not true
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For some people around the world, anything the United States does is
malign. When the U.S. government provides military assistance to
Israel for its horrifying war in Gaza, when it is pushing American
corn or soybeans down the throats of consumers abroad in place of
locally grown alternatives, or when it is promoting U.S.-style
democracy instead of a more diverse approach to governance, then it is
easy to agree that U.S. soft power is indeed problematic.

But much of U.S. foreign assistance comes from a different place: a
genuine desire by U.S. civil society to partner with groups around the
world to improve medical, educational, agricultural, and political
outcomes.

It’s unrealistic to expect that the Trump administration, which is
determined to destroy social services in the United States, will help
other countries improve their own services.

So, for the next four years, fighting for the best programs of U.S.
foreign aid will be part of the resistance to Trump’s overall
agenda. Saving the program to create a better AIDS vaccine in Africa
is an integral part of saving similar initiatives for medical
innovation within the United States. The sad truth is: the U.S.
population now needs these exceptional “soft power” programs just
like people all around the world.

[_JOHN FEFFER [[link removed]] is the director
of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is Right Across the
World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* U.S. foreign aid
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* USAID
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* Trump 2.0
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump Administration
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* Cold War
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* Russia
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* China
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* Europe
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* NATO
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* Asia
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* U.S. and Africa
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* US policy towards Latin America
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