Hours after his inauguration on January 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all US foreign aid for 90 days, including through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The 10,000-strong agency, the main channel for administering $43bn worth of US aid and development programmes annually, was, or so Trump told reporters, run by “a bunch of radical lunatics”. With the stroke of a pen, the opening act of his “America First” policy tore up a decades-old script of how the US wields its soft power and began rewriting the rules of geopolitics in real time.
Since then the impact has swept every part of the world. In Afghanistan, women’s education programmes shut down. Health services were suspended for refugees from Myanmar taking shelter in camps in Thailand. In Colombia, anti-narcotrafficking helicopters were suddenly idle. But African countries were hit particularly hard. In Uganda, medical trials were halted. Life-saving medicines are gathering dust in warehouses in Malawi, where more than half of healthcare spending is dependent on US and foreign aid. Perhaps greatest of all has been the impact on the decades-long battle to end the Aids pandemic.
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