American Depravity
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and DOGE’s demolition of USAID has had disastrous consequences for billions of ordinary people. Their decision springs from a misplaced conviction that Americans should only concern themselves with Americans and that the United States has no obligation to the international community despite its status as the richest nation in human history. More selfishly, the United States has lost an opportunity to project soft power and maintain its position as the hegemonic power in a unipolar, post-Cold War world.
What happens when the United States vacates its position as the hegemonic power and guarantor of the liberal international order? One need look no further than Sudan to glimpse the horror and devastation wrought by the United States’s hasty, ill-advised decision. Once regarded as the hegemonic power because of the predominance of Harvard and Hollywood as well as its foreign commitments to spreading liberal, democratic values, the United States is now a fraudulent caricature of its former self. As China perpetrates a genocide against the Uyghurs and Russia perpetrates a genocide against the Ukrainian people, the dissolution of the liberal international order reveals what will take its place: war and terror.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama argued that we had reached an “end of history” where liberal internationalism had triumphed over the ideologies of fascism and communism. In the light of recent far-right populist surges in the West and the decimation of USAID, Fukuyama seems to have underestimated the reactionary forces at play in the twenty-first century. Even as theorists have attempted to conceptualize a benevolent post-liberal international order, I must admit that I believe we were better off before.
Defending USAID is no easy task considering criticisms of it as a tool of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. Nevertheless, billions of lives were elevated out of poverty by its programs For example, Rovina Noboi in South Sudan is struggling to care for her ill daughter in the aftermath of USAID’s demolition. If and when her daughter succumbs to her illness, it won’t be reported in the news, but it will be a preventable death directly caused by the United States. If Republican policy-makers are comfortable criticizing Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the famines caused by Stalin’s policies in Ukraine, they must also make their peace with the fact that they have killed hundreds of thousands via their demolition of USAID. Hell has a special place for those with the power to help the poor who nevertheless refuse to do so.
