Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Trump & US foreign aid: Does global chaos loom?

Legend has it that tiny Monaco frantically cabled Paris when the Second World War ended for the urgent despatch of half a dozen French Communist terrorists. Monaco would not qualify otherwise for aid under the United States of America’s Marshall Plan which it needed desperately for reconstruction after the ravages of war. The “Yankee go home but take me with you!” slogan heard during the agonisingly protracted Vietnam war, when three million Vietnamese may have perished, confirmed Asia’s even more blatant double standards where America and Americans are concerned.

Europe knew that the United States alone could save it with its mix of money, manpower and organisational skills. Seventy-seven years later, a world trembling on the brink of disaster blames American parsimony and eccentricity for the threatened chaos throughout the globe.

America has done more for the world than any other nation by distributing more than $3.8 trillion (adjusted for inflation) to poorer recipients since 1948. It is also the nation that the world -- or large parts of it -- loves most to hate. The fiasco of the 104 Indians who were flown to Amritsar in a military jet is a case in point. Nobody mentions that this small part of a much larger contingent of some 725,000 undocumented Indian fortune-seekers went illegally to the US, the legendary place of opportunity, land of the free and home of the brave. But no Indian can forget the humiliation of their return in handcuffs and shackles, which is blamed on America’s racist arrogance.

Obviously, the fortune that the United States disburses subject to geopolitical circumstances, economic conditions, and national priorities is not undiluted charity. As the globe’s leading practitioner of realpolitik, the US regards aid as some sort of investment. If not reward for past acts of friendship, it is advance payment for future favours like Donald Trump’s expectations from the Panama Canal, a blatant act of brigandage in 1903. John Hay, then US secretary of state, and Philipe Bunau-Varilla, a French commercial adventurer who had bought up a number of corrupt Colombian delegates representing the Panamanian secessionist movement, signed a treaty that was a cruel hoax perpetrated through fraud, political subversion and military aggression.

The promise of American support persuaded the rebel politicians to allow Bunau-Varilla to grant the United States “in perpetuity the use, occupation and control of a zone of land” and “all the rights, power and authority within the same… which the US would have if it were sovereign of the territory… to the exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority”. Almost all that Panama could secure after more than 70 years of striving was that its flag would fly with the Stars and Stripes.

Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera, who had ruled Panama for many years, denounced this iniquitous arrangement at Non-aligned Nations’ Summits. Dean Rusk compared it to the unequal treaties imposed on the Manchus and Ottomans. Even Henry Kissinger admitted it was not “an equitable and freely negotiated agreement”. Staunchly pro-American Australia, Austria, France and Kenya supported Panama at the Security Council and only the US veto frustrated the liberation of the Canal Zone until the US, under President Jimmy Carter, initiated steps to restore what had been so unfairly acquired.

President Trump’s decision to freeze billions of dollars in international aid projects, including more than $268 million that Congress allocated to support the independent media and the free flow of information, has resulted in chaos and consternation. While the United States Agency for International Development is in turmoil, its website inaccessible and its X account suspended, the agency’s headquarters are closed and employees have been told to stay home. Meanwhile, the South African-born multi-billionaire, Elon Musk, whom President Trump has chosen to lead the quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency, reportedly called USAID a “criminal organisation” and said: “We’re shutting down.”

Ambivalence about America can involve the most revered national leaders in unpleasant controversies. His Western critics accused Jawaharlal Nehru of biting the hand that fed him. He forbade the publication in India of foreign-owned journals, rejected the New York Times’ request to print in India, and thundered that the fewer Indians that went to the US the better. Yet, when push came to shove during the 1962 China war, he appealed for US military assistance. If he tried to keep it quiet, it may have been because apart from questions of consistency and self-respect, Nehru knew that America’s blessing was the kiss of death for Asian leaders. South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran paid dearly for getting too close to the Americans.

No one expects gratitude in politics or diplomacy. Yet, curiously, no entity has to put up with as much opprobrium as the government that has given most to the welfare, even survival, of mankind. Daw Zin Mar Aung, the foreign minister of Myanmar’s government-in-exile -- known as the National Unity Government – has urged the US to carefully reconsider its aid and immigration policies to avoid worsening the already dire conditions that refugees live in. But there was little question of thanking Washington when US food, medical, social and educational aid flowed in. That has been the pattern since June 5, 1947 when George C. Marshall, then US secretary of state, speaking at Harvard, called for a comprehensive programme to rebuild a rapidly deteriorating Europe to avoid a Communist takeover. Spurred by his vision, the US Congress passed the Economic Cooperation Act and approved funding that would eventually rise to over $12 billion to rebuild Western Europe.

It may sometimes seem like “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” to Americans, but there are signs now of another kid on the block and a need for the US to come to terms with China’s seemingly unstoppable march in AI. There are also signs of resistance. Almost immediately after the freeze, Clayton Weimer, executive director of Reporters Without Borders, protested that “the funding freeze is sowing chaos around the world, including in journalism… President Trump justified this order by charging -- without evidence -- that a so-called ‘foreign aid industry’ is not aligned with US interests. The tragic irony is that this measure will create a vacuum that plays into the hands of propagandists and authoritarian states”.