Many countries have realized that there’s nothing “free” about American foreign aid, and they don’t like the price. From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:
American influence might rebound in the Global South since a large part of why many of these countries started turning away from the US since the start of the century was due to it violating their sovereignty by funding “NGOs” that meddle in their affairs.
One of the Executive Orders that Trump just signed suspends some foreign aid for 90 days, specifically “development assistance funds to foreign countries and implementing non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors”, in order to assess their “efficiencies and consistency with US foreign policy”. It remains unclear at the time of writing whether the State Department’s subsequent “stop-work orders” will affect military aid to Ukraine so that possibility won’t be covered in this analysis.
Most foreign aid programs have been exploited to meddle in other countries’ affairs by funding anti-government and even in some cases anti-state movements that later orchestrate Color Revolutions. Even if they’re not taken to that extreme, they at the very least create problems for the implementation of those countries’ domestic and foreign policies by artificially manufacturing grassroots opposition to them, which manipulates perceptions of their popularity and can thus influence national elections.
