The Trump administration faces a choice in the developing world that it has yet to fully confront. It can either continue treating Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean as an afterthought punctuated by warnings about Chinese debt traps, or it can build an actual strategy for competing with Beijing on the terrain that matters most to the countries in question: capital, technology, and market access. So far, the instinct has leaned toward the former, and the closure of USAID, whatever the political noise it generated, was in fact a step toward clearing space for the latter.
Decades of evidence have demonstrated that foreign aid does not produce growth.1 Aid can cushion a famine, fund a vaccine campaign, or rebuild a road after a hurricane, but it has never been the mechanism by which a poor country becomes a rich one. Over time, USAID deviated from even that modest development mandate, becoming less an instrument of economic and humanitarian development and more of a conduit for exporting left-leaning social and political preoccupations to societies that had not asked for them and often actively resisted them. Shuttering the agency in that form was not an abdication of American interest abroad, but rather an overdue correction.
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