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1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal program
by Papazsazsa 8mo ago
1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
- freejazz 8mo ago[flagged]
- Papazsazsa 8mo agoWhether DOGE's motivations were reform, political theater, or budget slashing is irrelevant to whether the underlying problem – IC integration into civilian development infrastructure – is a legitimate issue worth addressing. For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
- freejazz 8mo agoBut they aren't addressing it. They just outright ended USAID without any regard for any of the things you continue to type. Addressing it would be to provide the functions without the IC.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Papazsazsa 8mo agoThere is no un-poisoning of this well unfortunately. Whatever benefit USAID was offering should have been put under State long ago.
- freejazz 8mo agoThey did not put it under state. The issue you are talking about has nothing to do with DOGE and the actions they took.
- Noaidi 8mo agoYou’re right! Who needs soft power when we have hard power!
- oblio 8mo agoIt's never one without the other. Germany had a lot of hardpower in WW1. People forget they won the Eastern Front. But they lacked soft power and their allies were weak.
- ajross 8mo ago> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra. That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests. And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power". The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
- Papazsazsa 8mo agoUSAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S., just a highly visible one. Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government: - Dollar hegemony & financial infra - Cultural exports - Universities & research - Private sector (including tech)
- natpalmer1776 8mo agoI'm somewhat ignorant on this subject (by design, my mental health cannot afford too much pondering on that which I cannot control) but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power? That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
- Papazsazsa 8mo agoTwo games: Domestic and Foreign Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending. Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.