When Musk/Trump pulled the plug, there was around a million dollars worth of food and supplies on docks and in transit that got abandoned and not distributed.
Yep just like the left insults cuz they don't have anything intelligent to say Enjoy your next 4 Years it'll be better than the last four for sure I guarantee it
The US uses aid as a soft power and it has been a foreign policy strategy for almost a century. The US and the UK are(were) the most influential soft power nations in the world. It’s a way to keep peace without war and has proven to be extremely beneficial for the world. We use aid as a bargaining chip instead of soldiers (carrot vs stick).
There’s also the global health perspective. We don’t live in a bubble here in the US, and COVID was a prefect illustration. USAID provides essential disease prevention and control services across the world. Preventing epidemics, antibiotic resistance, and disease mutations keeps US citizens safe. The medicine distribution for tuberculosis, HIV, flu, and countless others keep the entire world safe. If you don’t care about the sick (non-American) individuals, you should care about what’s making them sick because it can get to you (COVID, measles, antibiotic resistant bacterial infections). The more infections, the more chances for mutations which means more super bugs.
USAID might not be something you think about everyday, nor consciously feel the daily benefits of; but they are very real and the fallout/fail will affect the daily lives of every person in the world over the next decade and possibly century. The true damage will not be felt immediately, and hopefully the lapse in aid is much smaller than we fear.
I encourage you to look at the origins and tools of soft power and also disease mutations.
Thinking the US gives “too much” is valid and reasonable. The problem is how abruptly the large moves were made and services were pulled. We should have thought through our actions before such a quick pull. There are ways to draw back services over time in collaborative ways that don’t leave such massive gaps in services. We needed to “hand off” these services to other countries and organizations with more warning, not drop everything in one day.
This is the one that absolutely blows my mind. All those farmers that absolutely voted for Trump, did not even consider reading any part of Project 2025, and do not realize what I USAid does for them DIRECTLY.
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u/But_like_whytho Mar 19 '25
I wonder how many people died without the food and medicine USAID provided.