The US Agency for International Development (USAid) sounds innocuous and benevolent – a charity dispensing financial help to those in need overseas. Indeed, there are humanitarian programs within the purview of USAid, and the staff working on those initiatives are motivated by integrity and a genuine desire to help the less fortunate globally.

Being fair and reasonable regarding the financially helpful features of USAid programs should not blind us to the underlying reality – this organisation is an instrument of US soft power and regime change. Its top personnel have never been altruistic humanists, but cynical and politically calculating realists who have leveraged US assistance to the goals of extending American political and economic power.

No, this is not meant to intentionally sound conspiratorial, but rather encourage readers to engage in a critical analysis of the instruments and role of US soft power.

Forgive me for feeling schadenfreude at this moment; viewing the paroxysmal hysteria of centrist and liberal imperialist security state political tribes lamenting the shutdown of soft power regime vehicle of US foreign policy makes me smile.

Chris Hedges, long term activist and scholar, who can hardly be called a friend of the Trump-Musk-MAGA cult, wrote the following regarding US foreign aid:

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

Founded in 1961 by former US President John Kennedy, USAid’s mission was always the soft power promotion of US capitalist power. Spending millions on NGOs, ‘independent’ media networks, and humanitarian programmes, USAid was an instrument of the cultural Cold War. US imperialism, in line with previous empires, does not rely exclusively on brute force to expand, but also through cultural domination.

Noam Chomsky understood, in the 1970s, that USAid is the friendly face of US soft power imperialism. Chomsky, a veteran leftist critic of US foreign policies, cannot be considered politically adjacent to the far right Trump administration, by no means. Yet, he understood and wrote about the machinations of USAid, stating that it was hard to know when official CIA influence ended, and USAid began, in nations targeted for regime change.

He wrote about his experiences in Laos, where USAid was directly contingent on Laotian ruling parties following US interests in the region. And Laos was not the only place where financial support came with strings attached. In the early 1990s, USAid promised to finance the rebuilding of the international airport at Port-au-Prince, with one condition; that Haiti vote against Cuba’s bid to become a member of the Organisation of American States (OAS). The Haitian authorities duly obliged.

We can all see the immediate and devastating consequences of cutting off USAid to millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Recipients of humanitarian aid in Africa face famine, with crucial food supplies left undistributed in warehouses. HIV patients, millions in Nigeria for instance, rely on USAid-supported clinics to access antiretroviral treatment. Currently, 25.6 million people live with HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is still prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Cutting of their access to medical treatments will only worsen the occurrence not only of HIV/AIDS, but also cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases.

In fact, it is the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation (WHO) which delivered the crucial blow to HIV patients health care in Africa. Canceling its international commitments and finance from the WHO represents a serious deterioration in health care provision both in the US and globally.

I am not oblivious to the unfolding humanitarian disaster which is a predictable consequence of shuttering USAid funding. It is not being heartless or cruel to recognise that USAid, far from being an innocuous charitable organisation, is a sharp spear in the effort of US soft power regime change. It is not just me saying this; leftist former President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, demanded that USAid be expelled from his nation in 2023, citing its role as an interventionist instrument of US foreign policy.

Former Bolivian president, the socialist and indigenous activist Evo Morales, expelled USAid from his country back in 2013, citing its role as a key financial of Bolivian right wing and oligarchic figures dedicated to the overthrow of his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party. The MAS party has consistently opposed the exploitation of Bolivia’s natural resources by rapacious foreign (namely American) corporations, and defended the lives and welfare of the working class, the peasantry and indigenous people.

From 1996 until 2003, USAid was instrumental in funding, to the tune of millions of dollars, the seemingly benevolent Democratic Development and Citizen Participation programme in Bolivia. One of numerous NGOs funded by USAid overseas, it played a pivotal role in agitating against MAS.

The Trump administration, staffed by an assortment of MAGA cultists, religious fanatics, corporate leeches, Christian fascists and psychopaths, is engaging in a cannibalistic intra-security state warfare to cut government spending. Free market fundamentalism is what unites the MAGA cult. Any kind of government spending on social programmes is immediately denounced as ‘Communism.’ Indeed, Musk himself made this point clear, attacking USAid as being staffed by radical Marxists.

That is news to me. As Professor Vijay Prashad has stated, it is a viper’s nest of imperialists.

USAid has fallen victim to the relentless free market fanaticism of the MAGA cultist camp. Vilifying government spending for decades as a uniquely burdensome economic evil, whether it be on health care, education or scientific research, has now rebounded on the liberal imperialist segment of the US financial elite.

In Australia, the term ‘foreign aid’ gets a bad press. The underlying xenophobia of cutting Australia’s already measly contribution is rationalised with the simplistic claim ‘we should be helping Aussies’. Overhyped concerns about alleged corruption in foreign aid organisations divert the conversation from the fact that those who state ‘we should be helping Aussies’ do not help neither Australians nor the foreign-born.

Rather than lament the demise of USAid, let’s focus our energies on countering the oligarchic policies which continue to impoverish the majority of the world’s population; unceasing overseas wars, foolish spending on harebrained military fantasies, and the merging of IT tech companies with global surveillance.