Trump’s DOGE strategy while good for MAGA, at least on the face of it and on paper as we await to see where the chips will fall has its downside, and here IAM restricting myself to withdrawal of foreign funding or cutting down.
As someone said on this forum USAID funding of projects has other security dimensions; it is what in diplomatic parlance they call soft diplomacy. It is employed to leverage power over recipient powers for example.
For the US to retain it’s superpower status it must have states allover the world that it can control and use. These relationships are maintained through supporting the governments either directly through budget deficit aid or civil society funding. Embedded in this relationship is access to markets and government projects that end up benefitting US corporates and it’s allies (a’he who pays the piper ’ situation).
By withdrawing or cutting down on aid US will leave her allies and partners exposed to influence by other global powers such as China and Russia which will affect US’ corporates at a disadvantage. The same repercussions will be felt in the security sector. Pundits say for example that when Trump during his first term cut back on military spending and US engagement in the Middle East, Iran and her laptop militias were able to build there capacity enough to attack Israel and that’s how Gaza happened, and expensive undertaking to clean up Trump’s mess.
Africa can take advantage of this moment where we are under no influence and are not tied to global power politics to chart our own independent path or we can wait for the next superpower to come knocking with a few cents and demand our kinyambis. Trump’s MAGA and DOGE are what Obama would call a good crisis only and only if we see the opportunity and capture the moment, as the ancient Greeks would say, Carpe Diem!