Why Liberals Shouldn’t Mourn USAID

The demise of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been swift and total. But while liberals have devolved into literal tears over the dissolution of the once-obscure foreign aid agency, they should not mourn its passing if they are truly concerned about America’s “standing” in the world.

USAID, for all practical purposes, was running its own foreign policy. Through strategic grants, it bred dependency that allowed it to in effect take over large segments of the charity/NGO (non-governmental organization) sector around the world. To say it bestrode the world stage like a giant would not be unfair. The Pentagon’s procurement office could learn something from the manner in which USAID utilized everything from newspapers to theaters and even vaccination campaigns to advance its agenda.

Whether that agenda was in the best interests of the United States is, to say the least, doubtful.

The original mission of USAID, which President Kennedy established in 1961, was to advance American influence by advancing American values around the world. During the Cold War, when there was something of a common American culture, socially “progressive” within a civically Judeo-Christian, pro-free market mindset, there was little contradiction between advancing America’s perceived values and boosting American influence.

In a conflict against an atheistic, socialist Soviet Union, the idea that humans should be free to believe what they wished was at once both conservative and “progressive.” When the status quo across much of the world was feudalism or central planning, the idea that anyone, regardless of religion, race, or gender should be able to own property or start a business was both “progressive” and capitalist.

What changed after the 1990s was the values that USAID sought to advance.

Equality is universal. Everyone should be treated the same regardless of background. Equity and DEI, on the other hand, are divisive. These concepts define people based on immutable characteristics like race and sex. By embracing DEI, USAID ceased advancing the shared interests of the United States and the people of the world, and instead chose specific individuals and groups to favor, most notably those dedicated to LGBT or feminist causes and religious or ethnic minorities.

This approach directly conflicted with promoting U.S. influence abroad. DEI by definition conflates progress with backing those who are perceived as “weak.” DEI effectively mandates that USAID champion the cause of minorities against majorities, those without power or popularity against those who have it, regardless of who is in the right or, more importantly, who shares America’s interests.

In effect, DEI mandated that the U.S. not just pick sides in foreign politics, but deliberately chose the weaker side.

This was a recipe for disaster. At best, it created a situation where USAID support was sufficient for minority groups to impose their will on a resentful majority. These “best cases” were recipes for instability, where the majority resented the United States for propping up what seemed to be decidedly un-democratic regimes. Rather than seeing the groups receiving USAID aid as fellow countrymen with legitimate aims, these “out groups” viewed those with American backing as foreign puppets.

In the worst case scenarios, this situation placed the U.S. on the losing side of internal conflicts in foreign lands, ensuring that the U.S. was the enemy of those in power.

Sometimes it even led USAID to fund America’s own enemies. If the DEI mandate is to fund the weaker side, and by the standards of DEI theory the “weaker” side is always the least Western-adjacent, then it followed that the Palestinians were the side to back in Gaza, and Hamas the entity to support. Hence, USAID staff convinced themselves they were somehow building influence with Hamas by funding it, and advancing women’s and gay rights by paying those who murdered women and homosexuals.

USAID’s embrace of DEI did not merely fail to advance America’s national interest. It also failed to achieve the goals DEI zealots set out to accomplish. Supposed “support” for DEI causes has all too often made life worse for each of the groups DEI purports to help.

For instance, without a doubt USAID’s promotion of LGBT causes, material, and activism within Russia annoyed Vladimir Putin. The Russian president could barely conduct an interview with a Western outlet during 2013 without being questioned about the 2013 “Gay Propaganda Law” restricting the distribution of material “promoting” homosexuality to minors.

Putin’s foreign trips were met by protesters waving rainbow flags and often dressed in drag. When the Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in February of 2014, Putin was in Sochi for the winter Olympics, but high-level representatives of the United States and other Western states were absent, with the Obama administration prioritizing solidarity with the global LGBT movement over a chance to disarm an international crisis in the critical ten-day window before Russian forces moved into Crimea.

In hindsight, the Obama administration’s obsession with virtue signaling over Russia’s internal affairs looks myopic at best, catastrophic at worst. Yet, it is worth asking whether the Obama administration was showing solidarity with gay and lesbian Russians or with an astroturfed movement run out of DC.

The irony of USAID’s misplaced priorities is that even if one were to share its woke goals, the agency’s efforts were catastrophic for virtually every group it sought to help, and the Russian gay community is a striking example.

During the early 2000s, gay rights was generally not an issue in Russia, which had a more permissive environment than much of Eastern Europe. Hostility to the gay community was generally associated with Russia’s minorities, especially the Muslim Chechens who had waged a decade-long campaign of terrorism.

U.S. funding changed that. USAID’s dual missions of ensuring the advancement of U.S. interests and woke values meant that when it funded Russian gay organizations, it did so not as representatives of gay and lesbian Russians, but rather as a component of an effort to build up a wider alliance of NGOs, journalists, and cultural groups as a “civil society” that could operate as an opposition to Vladimir Putin.

Gay and lesbian groups were not provided with resources to lobby Putin privately. Instead, they were given resources with the expectation that they use those resources to protest the Russian government generally – not only on issues relevant to their nominal cause, but also on those affecting every other U.S.-funded civil society group. That is why USAID-funded feminist and gay organizations in Russia protested against “police surveillance” of Chechen groups who often tried to assault or murder members of those very organizations.

Russian gay groups faced a choice: Accept grants and funds or reject them and be not just starved of resources, but stigmatized as “Kremlin stooges” by an entire network of “independent journalists” funded by USAID and even by Western media when they appeared to defend themselves.

Even Elton John was denounced for agreeing to meet with Vladimir Putin. But perhaps the most illustrative case of the fate of those who didn’t play along was Anton Krasovsky, a Russian journalist who was feted by the Western press, including The New York Times, after he lost his job for coming out on air. After initially being treated as a hero, he was quietly dropped when he opposed the boycott of the Sochi Olympics.

Meanwhile, USAID’s use of gay issues to mobilize political opposition to the Kremlin resulted in a backlash that fell hardest on the groups who were based in Russia and dependent on Russian donations rather than U.S. taxpayer dollars. By the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, there were few major gay rights groups, or independent media in general, that were not dependent on American funding.

This proved catastrophic when, following the invasion of Crimea, USAID decided that opposing Russia’s claims to the peninsula, claims backed by over 80 percent of the Russian population, was a core component of international norms and values. The final death knell came with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. USAID mobilized its global network of LGBT organizations to advocate support for Ukraine, paving the way for Russia’s Constitutional Court to declare “The International LGBT Movement” an extremist organization.

Not that Russian gays and lesbians are justified in supporting their country’s invasion of Crimea or Ukraine, any more than their heterosexual counterparts. But it undoubtedly makes it more difficult for homosexual Russians to gain acceptance – a stated goal of the liberals now bemoaning the downfall of USAID – if homosexual Russians also repeat Western talking points (legitimate as they may be) about the criminal nature of Russia’s territorial expansion.

Whatever the intentions, USAID’s conflation of America’s national interests with the promotion of gay rights has undermined both, fatally in the case of Russia. By tying America, and the concepts of democracy, the rule of law, and individual rights to not only LGBT acceptance but a promotion of far-left social ideologies toxic even in the United States, USAID rallied the Russian people behind Putin. They found his regime corrupt, sometimes incompetent, but they did not want whatever USAID was promoting.

In turn, by flooding Russian gay rights organizations with funds, then using those funds to force them to adopt positions at odds with Russian opinion and national interest, USAID destroyed the indigenous Russian gay rights movement, replacing it with zombie organizations that could credibly be banned as foreign agents.

It is tale that works the other way around as well.

In Uganda, the United States spent decades building up an infrastructure of newspapers, civil society groups, and NGOs before encouraging Bobi Wine, a celebrity musician, to lead an opposition party. Yet when Bobi Wine’s party balked at pressure to embrace gay rights, that obstinacy was met with threats to terminate all aid unless it embraced a position toxic to Uganda’s electorate.

What was the purpose of spending all that taxpayer money on a political party and the infrastructure behind it if USAID was only going to throw it away by demanding Wine’s NUP party commit political suicide on the altar of American woke politics? In the end, U.S. meddling provoked a nationalist backlash against both American influence and the local gay community, with every single Member of Parliament from the NUP voting to make homosexuality punishable by death. 

It is not just gays. Muslims in India, Hindus in Bangladesh, and Christians in Indonesia have all been victims of nationalist backlashes, which have conflated their demands for rights with U.S.-funded influence operations, even as the U.S. has made itself associated with the promotion of social strife.

Ultimately, an organization must be judged on outcomes, not intentions. USAID’s soft power was immense. Far from being anti-American, it sought to bend everything it came into contact with toward advancing U.S. foreign policy. In a government known for inefficiency and waste, USAID actually did things it promised. But most Americans would consider the things it promised wasteful, and more importantly counterproductive.

It is understandable why conservatives should welcome the demise of an organization that all too often identified conservative values as antithetical to American values. Liberals, too, however, should welcome rather than mourn USAID’s demise. Nothing has done more damage to the causes and people they claim to care about than USAID’s DEI grants and funding. Just as DEI undermined and crippled liberalism at home, it hollowed it out abroad, leaving nothing but tribalism.

There is a role for American aid and influence abroad. USAID’s mission is not without merit, flawed and corrupted as its methods were. That is why replacing it with different agencies with a single mission was necessary. Not just for America, but for the world.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.