Broken Promises and Lost Opportunities
Christi Siver for the Avon Hills Salon
It is hard to imagine a more disastrous first 100 days for U.S. foreign policy. President Trump’s “achievements” include the failed promise to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours, proposed U.S. ownership of Gaza and creation of the “Riviera of the Middle East”, promises to acquire Canada, Greenland, and Panama by force if necessary, and the alienation of allies through ill-conceived tariffs. However, the decisions with the greatest long-term impact are the cancellation of more than 80% of U.S. foreign aid programs and the dismantling of USAID.
Millions of people’s lives will be fundamentally changed by these seemingly capricious decisions. Some of the top countries receiving foreign are Ukraine, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Syria. The abrupt loss of funding for these countries will mean the closure of health clinics, schools, food distribution centers, and many other programs. After Elon Musk claimed on X that “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” The New York Times and the Center for Global Development released estimates: 1.65 million could die without HIV prevention and treatment, 500,000 could die without American funding for vaccines, 550,000 could die without food aid, 290,000 could die without malaria prevention and 310,000 could die without tuberculosis prevention. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially sought to reestablish some aid programs through an emergency humanitarian waiver, many of these programs were subsequently cut or lack the needed staff to function.
One of the programs endangered because of these cuts is continuing education for Afghan women. After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban took control of the country and imposed strict restrictions on women. They decreed that women could not pursue education after the sixth grade. Women’s only opportunity was through online classes offered by the American University of Afghanistan (now located in Qatar). Funds that had supported over 200 scholarships will only continue through June 2025 and the school may close. If it does, the women studying in Qatar will lose their housing and Qatari visas, requiring them to return to Afghanistan. One student warned “If we go back…they will label us as spies, sent to infect Afghans against the Taliban with our American ideology.” Many of these women were slated to come to the United States as refugees and reunite with their families, but even that seems impossible given the Trump administration’s suspension of the Refugee Resettlement Program and cancellation of Temporary Protected Status for Afghans already in the country. This is but one of many broken American promises to allies that will not soon be forgotten.
Congresspeople from the Midwest are lobbying for the restoration of the Food for Peace program, which buys $2 billion annually for U.S. agricultural goods distributed around the world. Kansas produces grain sorghum, or milo, that is nutritious but has no market in the United States. Almost all milo is exported, and USAID traditionally has bought 10% of the crop for food aid. Now, milo is stuck in storage or stranded in ports or warehouses with no buyers. Similarly, producers of PlumpyNut, a ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) that has helped millions of children survive malnutrition, warn that they may have to completely stop production if USAID contracts are not restored. Neither of the RUTF production facilities, located in Rhode Island and Georgia, have any orders for fiscal year 2025.
Foreign aid has traditionally been an important tool of “soft power,” a concept created by Joseph Nye in the 1980s to discuss a “country’s ability to influence others without resorting to coercive pressure.” For decades, people around the world have received food packets and medical aid with the label “a gift from the American people.” This goodwill has helped the United States both promote ideals of freedom and human rights and served American interests by preventing the spread of disease, providing safe shelter so people could stay in their own countries rather than becoming refugees, and creating infrastructure to promote civic dialogue and prevent violence. The United States has long used foreign aid to help build trust with countries near and far. The Trump administration has broken this trust and repairing these relationships will not happen easily or quickly.
Photo: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons