Donald Trump’s second term has been something of a mixed bag with some very bad foreign policy moves and a ridiculous and cynical crackdown on anti-Israel dissenters. But it has also featured an incredible war against some of the worst aspects of permanent government.
I previously wrote about “Fighting the Middle State,” and at least on that count Trump has not disappointed. He has left the Democrats showing slavish devotion to the federal bureaucracy and the “NGO” sector which employs a veritable army of the useless and over-educated. Most notably, the Trump administration is doing its best to end the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and has also tried to shut down the Voice of America propaganda network—though at every step the Federal Judiciary has attempted to block these moves. Critics cry out that not only will this cause mass death but that it is the end of U.S. “soft power,” but few of those liberals ask if these programs work or deliver anything for the American people—or for that matter, people in the recipient countries.
To hear the liberals tell it, USAID and other such programs are largely based on the goodwill of the global elite, but simultaneously are good for U.S. business and function as soft power. At best, when used properly, these programs primarily function to employ administrators, enrich pharmaceutical companies, and keep agriculture commodity prices up by buying excess birdseed off of farmers to ship to foreign countries. In countries receiving aid it prevents economic development and breeds dependency and corruption.
You will notice that in the discourse about USAID being cut there are countless people who work for the aid programs crying, but none of the recipient governments imploring that the aid continue. In fact, many seem relieved, a sentiment described by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. Among the better intellectuals who cover Africa, it is acknowledged that there will be pain in the transition away from aid dependency, but all acknowledge that even if it has some immediate benefits in the big picture it also has immense downsides.
When done properly such aid has many downsides, but much more of what these programs do is either pointless or nefarious. There are countless examples, but one which just came up is that the Prague Pride Parade was canceled due to a lack of USAID funding. How is that possibly necessary to have a foreign state fund your parade? And what American interest does this serve that it should be the responsibility of U.S. taxpayers, even if it is a tiny amount of money as far as government goes? In reality these programs have a tendency of discrediting both freedom and human rights because they are used to bludgeon host governments and prevent any sort of genuinely democratic development in favor of cultivating a class of dependents who serve little purpose but to open the countries to being looted by Western capital. It is quite obvious that if these programs were going to have a positive impact they would have by now, but very few countries in Africa are free or democratic, and many other countries where such money are spent are hardly even sufficiently poor to justify outside assistance.
On top of these organs of soft power, Voice of America is supposed to be shutting down. There is concern that everyone will give into Russian narratives if VoA isn’t there to spread the truth! There may have been some use for these programs during the Cold War, but in the modern era it serves no good purpose. Very few countries have the kind of censorship that existed behind the Iron Curtain, and anyway it is easy enough to get around censors and get international news in the modern era. Many of the countries where Voice of America operates have fairly free domestic media and also access to international media. For example, do they really need an Armenian service?
During the Cold War, anodyne reporting about the outside world could make the censors look foolish for blocking it. (This is said to be why distributing the novel Dr. Zhivago was effective, because it wasn’t particularly subversive so being banned made the censors look ridiculous.) It stands to reason that the sort of idiots who would actually consume Voice of America and hang on every word are so stupid and irritating they make other people in the country hate America.
It doesn’t seem that any of these programs make the global public like America. Soft power works when it develops economies, not when it builds dependence. Literacy programs without propaganda are popular, as is developing wells and roads and teaching the public how to repair and maintain them. Imposing weird cultural “values” and breeding dependency was almost the nightmare of William Lederer, who was in many ways the mid-century architect of modern soft power programs: the “ugly American” in his famous novel wasn’t badly behaved, he was “ugly” because he was dirty from living with villagers and working as a useful technician. It is certainly true that if countries are more prosperous they prove less of a breeding ground for terrorists, make better trade partners, and tend to be amicable towards America. But none of these things are accomplished by dumping grain to undercut their agriculture while incompetent women lecture the government and public about gay rights or whatever else is the nonsense du jour.
In the great text We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Peter Van Buren tells of his time working for the State Department in Iraq during the “soft power” phase of the occupation. I highly recommend the text as it is quite comical, but it also provides deep insight into how these ridiculous programs work. In short, the government creates a situation where spending money is seen as being productive, the public is constantly pressured to change how they’ve been doing things to new, “smarter” ways that don’t work, and local corrupt chieftains are empowered at the expense of everything else. It is, overall, a huge waste of time that at best cultivates a small elite who can become a proxy target of ire of the public instead of the United States directly.
In Van Buren’s entire time there, one thing did work as intended: starting a 4H Club for the children. Parents thought it was great the kids were learning useful skills and had something to do, and what’s more, the kids genuinely learned about democracy when a farmer’s kid won the club president election over the child of a local Sheikh. What is funny though is that was the one thing that didn’t cost any money, amidst a year when Van Buren’s job was to help the government waste money on nonsense development projects. Iraq is an extreme example, but the text shows how the whole system functions in practice.
Watching these levers of the permanent state finally come under attack is like a dream to many of us who have opposed the government. No matter how many bad things the Trump Administration has, we have been waiting decades to see anyone view these programs as what they are: nefarious instruments of financial interests and a Mandarin class designed to subvert the public will at home and abroad. It is true they are a small amount of the budget and will do little about the debt, but the cost is not actually the issue—just an insult—but that the things they do are terrible and corrupt our society and the world and further do much to make people hate us. Unfortunately, our overpowered judiciary is doing everything to force the public to keep funding and employing these losers, so it seems that we are rapidly moving from fighting the middle state to fighting the judicial oligarchy: c’est la vie.
