The US Government is showing all the compassion of a loan shark, where the Rubio Rule rules—”What’s in it for me?” Tragically, any international social capital the U.S. built over the past 80 years has been torched in a bonfire of pointless cruelty.
Yesterday, Politico published a draft document obtained from a government aide describing a revamped USAID. It is entirely about the U.S.—safer, stronger, more prosperous—with the benefits to others only arising en passant, if at all.
According to the document, international assistance will focus on investments that deliver “first-order benefits back home [in the U.S.]”. That is, there must be an immediate, directly attributable gain to the U.S. from it’s humanitarian “investment”. This is in marked contrast to the successful decades of soft power developed by the U.S. after World War II.
Global Health would sit in a new agency for International Humanitarian Assistance (IHA).
“By responding rapidly to natural disasters, preventing famines, containing disease outbreaks, and securing peace, IHA would demonstrate American values, prevent instability that could threaten our interests, distinguish ourselves from our geo-political adversaries (such as China), enhance U.S. leadership on the global stage, and increase safety at home.”
That sounds great! I wonder what those Amercian values are? They are not the values of compassion or empathy, nor the values established by the U.S. in the international human rights instrument. Those international values established by the U.S. are the ones that the Trump Administration has “put through the wood chipper”.
The values must be those of “strategic transactionalism”. This is my newly minted term that refers to the idea that no agreement with the U.S. can be trusted because it has shown itself to have no regard for such things. Agreements, contracts, and treaties exist only to the extent that the administration chooses to honour them. Here today, gone tomorrow.
What’s in it for me?
According to the document, “in all cases, countries would have to demonstrate high levels of “commitment” to be eligible for any U.S. assistance engagement”.
“High levels of ‘commitment’” is code in the world of crime bosses and authoritarian leaders for absolute subjugation. A country will do what it is told, when it is told—without question. Give up resources. Cede Territory. Treat some people as less worthy than others.
“Success would be measured by concrete metrics: lives saved, outbreaks of infectious diseases contained, pandemic prevented, famines averted, and measurable increases in in positive perception of the United States in emerging markets.”
The irony of this is that things like “lives saved” is exactly what was being measured before the conflagration. The new metric appears to be “measurable increases in positive perception of the United States in emerging markets”.
Rest assured, any positive perception of the U.S. is now only a form of “strategic transactionalism”. It is performative because money is still money, but anything else from the US risks bully, bluster, and betrayal.