James Collett, Gloucestershire Socialist Party
The morning after Donald Trump’s decision to cut USAID (United States Agency for International Development), catastrophic results were already evident for some of the world’s poorest: patients arriving at HIV clinics in South Africa and Uganda found them closed; health centres in Nairobi had to lay off nurses and were confronted with the prospect of running out of medicine; refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border announced they have only weeks of food left. If USAID is gutted as Trump and Elon Musk plan, deadly consequences will be felt on a mass scale.
USAID was set up by president John F Kennedy in 1961 with the core aim of using aid programmes to “contain communism”, i.e. to further US influence abroad and fend off the threat of revolution.
But US capitalism is no longer in competition with an alternative economic system in the form of the Stalinist planned economies of the Soviet Union. Instead, the use of aid has focused on shoring up America’s influence and global market share against the encroachment of other capitalist powers.
The comments of UK foreign secretary David Lammy revealed the true cynical character of foreign aid: Trump’s cuts to the US foreign aid budget could be “a big strategic mistake”, Lammy said, and could allow China to step in and further its own global influence. Capitalist politicians typically see foreign aid as a form of ‘soft power’, a means by which capitalist powers can increase their influence, and open up routes to profit making, particularly in underdeveloped and neocolonial countries.
Many of the aid programmes funded by US imperialism attempt to partially ameliorate the economic collapse of countries which, through wars, IMF austerity packages and other methods of wealth extraction, have been devastated by that same US imperialism.
Iraq war
After the US-led invasion of Iraq obliterated that country’s infrastructure, public services and industry, the US Congress pledged $2.5 billion towards reconstruction through USAID. At the same time, it awarded lucrative contracts to US companies to ‘rebuild’ Iraq (in particular its oil industry), opening the way for US exploitation of Iraqi resources.
This is the ‘generosity’ of the mafia boss who bestows ‘favours’ which he expects to be repaid with interest. The difference between Trump and previous US presidents is that Trump is a different type of gangster: he prefers to make his associates “offers they can’t refuse”.
New world order?
But this is about more than personal preference. The reckless behaviour of Trump and Musk reflects deepening splits within the US ruling capitalist class over how to defend their interests. A section of the capitalist class is concluding that the ‘rules-based order’, working through crumbling international institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and so on, is no longer suitable for maintaining the profits of US imperialism in this new era of fractured and fast-changing world relations. Instead, they look to figures like Trump to use naked force to bend others to his will, and to cut spending, cut taxes, and remove any regulations that stand in the way of maximising short-term profits.
The truth is that capitalism itself has no way forward and it stands more and more exposed before the world’s working class and poor people, as a system of gangsterism, greed and extortion, making us pay for the crises of the rich. Only a democratic socialist plan of production can provide the world’s population with the food, healthcare and education it needs and rebuild the world order on the basis of cooperation and solidarity.
