In early July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a press release stating that the “NGO Industrial Complex” had fundamentally misaligned foreign aid objectives from the core national interests of the United States. Nations that had received a large amount of developmental assistance apparently did not reciprocate diplomatically. What he really meant, in the transactional parlance of the Trump Administration, is that these aid-receiving states had failed to subordinate their own interests to that of Washington D.C. to a level deemed suitable to justify the spending. As far as the present administration is concerned, foreign aid has been a failure because it did not outright vassalize the target countries.
The ironic thing is that foreign aid has been a stunning success at spreading American influence abroad, but not at all in the way its foremost champions envision. For while the influence networks are very real, the strategic values they pursue are relics of a bygone era.
Aid as engineering political change
The ending of much of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programming has exposed a vast global network of interference in other countries’ internal affairs. With the dismantling of many of these operations the true scope of what a relatively small proportion of the US government’s budget was capable of can be critically examined. While it is certainly true that much of the work done by these organisations has humanitarian value and is often non-political in nature, it is undeniable that such work is hardly the sole element of such institutions. From Bangladesh and Ukraine, where internal divisions and political action were fueled by actors involved in these networks, to Georgia, where the country became extremely encouraging of foreign non-profit civil society organisations in the hopes of aiding its quest to build security ties with NATO. What this led to in that country in particular, however, was an overly-large NGO class whose size was disproportionate to the general populace. This created a large degree of instability. The sudden collapse in viability by many of these organisations with the announcement of funding cuts from USAID seems to be vindicating the Georgian critics of these past policies. Meanwhile, the defenders of these policies in Washington have, no matter their intentions, created a feedback loop of received wisdom which prevents critical thought about what options actually strengthen diplomacy abroad.