The recent suspension of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) foreign aid programme by American President Donald Trump has led to the resurfacing of the decades-long contentious discourse concerning the moral certitude and effectiveness of this policy measure on developing countries. A good number of vigilant scholars, development practitioners and human rights activists have expressed their discontent with this abrupt cessation, highlighting how it would result in an unfortunate halt to ongoing health, education and basic infrastructure projects in many underserved regions, thereby exposing their beneficiaries to unwarranted detriment. As well-meaning as this concern may be, it however only mildly touches upon the implicit, structural disadvantages of the institution that is Western foreign aid. Even the scholarly engagements which talk about the long-term adverse impacts of foreign aid, such as those posited by Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, tend to understate the imperialist political economy ambitions that form an integral part of this policy.
Despite humanitarian assistance being provided for development work, such financial flows are almost always directed by donors to serve the geopolitical interests of their nation within the recipient’s territories. This stratagem seems to largely play out in two ways. First, through the imposition of conditionalities on such foreign aid, NATO countries straitjacket the recipient nations to deform their domestic institutions for the purpose of aligning them with the global capitalist order, in the quest for making them eligible for further aid in the first place. Hence, this conditionality results in developing nations being pushed to consolidate reform promises to shrink the state, roll back welfare programmes, and liberalise the economy in order to facilitate the entry of Western companies or other private firms which are allied to the donor country’s economic interests. Prior to the Iraq War, the NATO-led foreign aid funding provided to Iraq’s Kurdistan largely resulted in an intense wave of privatisation and the subsequent transformation of critical social development programmes into profit-maximising ventures for local contractors and politicians; binding the beneficiary populace to a clientelist status quo.
Secondly, in the event of the existence of a regime in the concerned recipient nation which espouses political views and enacts policies that hold the potential for disrupting the Western capitalist oligopoly and hegemonic influence in the world order, the donor nations render the financial aid flows accessible to intranational political factions and social associations which are ideologically contrarian to the establishment’s endeavours. Such “counterrevolutionary” entities, often champions of the free market who are politically aligned with NATO, act as potent forces to subdue the predominantly socialist, populist factions which assert the national sovereignty of the country’s natural resources or find geopolitical allies in American adversaries such as Russia or China. Libyan rebels were generously rewarded with USAID funding to help overthrow Muammar Gaddafi’s Arab socialist regime which sought not only to diminish the American petrodollar supremacy but also nationalise Libya’s rich oil reserves away from American capitalist control and therefore empower the Libyan economy through direct governance over its natural wealth. Likewise, communist Milosevic of (former) Yugoslavia, a potential Russian ally, met with stark agitation from Western aid-funded organisations such as Otpor!, in addition to the American-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, which worked to topple his administration and eventually disintegrate the socialist state of Yugoslavia itself; thereby fulfilling the Western dream of nipping the spread of communism in Eastern Europe in the bud.
In fact, think-tanks and American government officials have declared the ‘necessity’ of keeping Russian and Chinese influence out of developing countries, such as Libya and Haiti; forming the primordial motivation behind the Global Fragility Act; the latter that allows billions of dollars in aid to be invested in “fragile” developing nations through local civil society organisations that espouse a free-market approach. The justification of defending human rights from dictatorships given by NATO for bombing Serbia and starting a violent civil war in Libya sounds all the more ironic when the local allies funded by NATO donors have themselves committed equal or worse human rights violations, whether it be Libya’s rebel coalition or Yugoslavia’s Kosovo Liberation Army.
Even though the aforementioned points might highlight the critical demerits of Western foreign aid, they still do not illuminate the reason behind Trump’s decision. The Republican government, ideologically marked by social and fiscal conservatism, has arrived at this policy certainly not out of virtuous concern for foreign aid-inflicted issues faced by developing nations, but in fact to reinvest those funds into more assertive protectionist instruments, and to simply shrink the American state much more than before by cutting down on government spending as well as the tax burden on the conservative-friendly corporate lobbies.
Slowly decoupling from the institution of foreign aid by expanding state revenues seems to be a sustainable option, as it is amply clear that any form of dependence on Western assistance cannot be divorced from the imperialist subordination of the Global South.
[Photo by United States Coast Guard, via Wikimedia Commons]
Divyanshi Sharda is a Public Policy graduate from the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O. P. Jindal Global University. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
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