{"id":128728,"date":"2019-03-04T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=128728"},"modified":"2019-03-11T11:50:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T11:50:41","slug":"trump-has-turned-foreign-aid-into-shabby-political-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/trump-has-turned-foreign-aid-into-shabby-political-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Has Turned Foreign Aid into Shabby Political Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stalled relief supplies for Venezuela at the Colombian border are a stark illustration of Trump\u2019s crudely transactional approach to aid.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

20 Feb 2019 – <\/em>In their grey livery, the US Air Force C-17s shuttling into Camilo Daza airport in C\u00facuta, Colombia, look more belligerent than friendly \u2013 which is, perhaps, the point.<\/p>\n

In the city itself, the planes\u2019 cargo \u2013 boxes labelled USAid and intended for distribution by the Venezuelan opposition<\/a> just across the border \u2013 are accumulating in the town\u2019s warehouses.<\/p>\n

It is an optic that matters because on the edge of a genuine humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela<\/a>, the Trump administration appears to be creating the illusion of a secondary crisis.<\/p>\n

With its air force flights, accumulation of stalled aid in the stand<\/a>off<\/a> with the regime of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, who is refusing to allow the aid across the border, it is a piece of highly politicised theatre with its cut-price echoes of the Berlin airlift<\/a> of 1948-9 when the Soviet Union blocked transport links for supplies to Allied-controlled sectors of the city.<\/p>\n

It is a stark illustration (if one were needed) of how the US does aid in the Trump era, a period characterised by a transactional world view and a foreign policy that seems often more in service of the US president\u2019s personal standing than America\u2019s position as a global player.<\/p>\n

While US aid policy has been politicised since the post-war Marshall Plan, no US president has been so obvious and crude as Trump in their approach to using assistance for global leverage.<\/p>\n

If the Trump administration\u2019s method can actually be called doctrine \u2013 as opposed to a series of attention-seeking and ego-driven impulses \u2013 it has revealed itself in the past two years to be unconcerned with much pretence of generally accepted humanitarian principles, instead often favouring gesture politics even at the expense of wider US foreign policy interests.<\/p>\n

From the very beginning Trump has defined US development aid as entirely transactional, reiterating in the UN general assembly<\/a> last year: \u201cThe United States is the world\u2019s largest giver in the world, by far, of foreign aid. But few give anything to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Trump\u2019s approach is jarring it is because historically presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have recognised the importance of US assistance.<\/p>\n

Arguing for establishment of USAid in 1961, it was president John F Kennedy who proposed the formula that it should not simply be driven by moral considerations but by recognition that \u201cour [US] security would be endangered<\/a> and our prosperity imperilled\u201d by continued widespread poverty and instability.<\/p>\n

And the high point of US aid giving in the decades after the Marshall Plan \u2013 at some 0.6% of GDP \u2013 would come not under a Democrat but during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who would echo Kennedy in stating \u201cthe ultimate importance to the United States of our security and development assistance programs<\/a> cannot be exaggerated\u201d.<\/p>\n

And while Trump has often threatened more than he has delivered in many other arenas, on the issue of US assistance he has a record of following through on his threats, not least against the Palestinians where he has slowed crucial aid<\/a> to a trickle to force the Palestinian leadership to come to the negotiating table on his much-vaunted Middle East peace plan.<\/p>\n

That is not to say that the Trump approach to foreign assistance has not seen push-back. He was forced to retreat last year from reported plans to bypass Congress and roll back billions of dollars<\/a> from the US foreign aid budget.<\/p>\n

All of this casts a harsh spotlight on the real meaning of the current accumulation of aid on Venezuela\u2019s Colombian border.<\/p>\n

The reality is that the US flights into C\u00facuta represent more than what Nathanial Myers, in a 2015 paper<\/a> for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, dubbed as a worrying and short term-ist trend towards \u201chard aid\u201d. He argued that it threatened to undermine \u201cthe traditional developmental mission increasingly recognised as central to future American security\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rather, the flights look something more shabby: a dangerous stunt utilising aid for other purposes, alluded to by UN spokesman St\u00e9phane Dujarric, who told reporters in New York last week: \u201cHumanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any other objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a New York Times leader suggested earlier this week: \u201cTrump is only incidentally speaking out in support of the downtrodden. His chief motivation appears to be to rally his far-right base by proclaiming himself a warrior against \u2018socialism\u2019 \u2013 an evil he identifies not only with the radical policies of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, Maduro\u2019s predecessor and mentor, but also in the platforms of some Democratic presidential hopefuls.\u201d<\/p>\n

As US assistance in the Trump era barrels towards an ever darker place, its tools seem daily more authoritarian than democratic.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Peter Beaumont<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Feb 2019 – Stalled relief supplies for Venezuela at the Colombian border are a stark illustration of Trump\u2019s crudely transactional approach to aid. The flights look something more shabby: a dangerous stunt utilising aid for other purposes, alluded to by UN spokesman St\u00e9phane Dujarric: \u201cHumanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any other objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":127669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,65,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-anglo-america","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}