The Bulldozer Revolution, Now Against US Soft Power

Trump signed an Executive Order last month to suspend all foreign aid, except for emergency humanitarian aid, for 90 days pending a review of these programs’ efficiency and alignment with US foreign policy. He also accused what he described as the “foreign aid industry” of “serv[ing] to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.” This preceded the ongoing radical reforms at USAID. USAID, which stands for the US Agency for International Development, is tasked with disbursing the bulk of the country’s foreign aid and executing associated programs. Initially conceptualized as a means of advancing American soft power during what can now be called the Old Cold War, it was gradually hijacked by liberal-globalist ideologues, who then exploited it to proselytize their radical socio-cultural policies across the world. This includes aggressively imposing LGBT* onto traditional societies (*the organization is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation). The problem isn’t just that USAID promotes such programs, which could easily be suspended, but that it supports many more wasteful ones that thus requires a full audit to figure out what to cut and what to keep.

Over the decades, USAID deviated from its founding goal of directly improving the lives of foreign populations through physical development and relief projects to lecturing them about how to live their lives, which also included political programs for undermining recipient governments.

As could have been predicted, the CIA occasionally exploited USAID to infiltrate spies into foreign societies under the cover of being aid workers and to promote initiatives aimed at destabilizing their authorities. Along a similar vein, the DC elite – which tends to be Democrat and therefore aligned with the liberal-globalist worldview that USAID came to espouse – got rich off of consulting and implementation contracts, which makes USAID a cesspool of corruption for laundering public funds. This last point is important for explaining why the second Trump Administration decided to block USAID employees from the premises during the ongoing audit and place this independent agency under the acting control of new Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump’s first term saw members of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, which can collectively be referred to as the “deep state”, sabotage his foreign policy at every turn. USAID officials were among those who did so.

For that reason, USAID had to be purged alongside the rest of the “deep state” in order to ensure that Trump stands any chance of implementing his second term’s envisaged foreign policy, with this process being advanced through the “Department Of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) led by Elon Musk. DOGE’s formal task is to identify and slash irresponsible government spending, which necessitates him and his team having access to all information about everything that the US Government (USG) is funding. That in turn enables them to expose this cesspool of corruption, some details of which are now circulating across his social media site X but shouldn’t be surprising for anyone who follows former State Department official-turned-whistleblower Mike Benz on that platform. What’s so genius about DOGE’s modus operandi is that there’s substantial public support for optimizing the use of taxpayer funds so Musk and his formal boss Trump are able to purge large parts of the “deep state” on that pretext.

As regards USAID, this will likely see it stripped to the bones and rebuilt according to the initiative’s original vision, namely as an instrument for tangibly improving people’s lives abroad so that they then like the USG even more as a result. Consequently, most socio-cultural programs will likely disappear and be replaced with a return to physical ones like disaster relief, food aid, and poverty alleviation. The political aspect, however, will likely remain even though the substance of such programs might change.

Instead of championing the Democrats’ liberal-globalist worldview, the paradigm through which it’ll encourage foreign recipients to interpret everything will predictably be the conservative-nationalist one embraced by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement that took control of the Republican Party.

In practice, this could most immediately see greater support for Christians, their communities, and churches in Latin American countries as well as some African and Asian ones too. Other forms that this could take might promote the benefits of what Trump calls “free, fair, and equal trade” with the US, which could be advanced to encourage them to pressure their governments into lifting whatever tariffs they might have on American goods and services. Likewise, existing programs that warn about the alleged problems connected to China’s Belt & Road Initiative could be promoted in parallel, with the goal of these complementary efforts being to advance the US’ economic interests.

On the political front, some of the programs investigating foreign corruption might be retained, but only in those countries that the Trump Administration wants to pressure through these means. Other campaigns could include promoting the merits of regional military cooperation so that the US no longer has to carry as heavy of a burden for defending those countries in alignment with Trump’s vision. The common thread between whatever might soon come is that they’ll all advance his foreign policy agenda.

These changes and more amount to what can be described as the USG’s soft power revolution in that the past few decades’ worth of strategy is being discarded in favor of returning to USAID’s roots.

Whether USAID’s independence is restored, the organization remains under the control of the State Department like at present, or some other bureaucratic change occurs, the functions that it was meant to fulfill will be optimized in line with its original mission in furtherance of the US’ national interests. These aren’t ideological like most of the “deep state” and their Democrat figureheads convinced themselves was the case, which was taken to an extreme to promote LGBT and other radical ideologies, but will be perceived from now on through the Neo-Realist paradigm of International Relations. This simply refers to the notion that power and interests, the latter of which importantly include access to resources, drive competition between countries and will continue to do so due to human nature. There’s more to it than just that of course, but the aforesaid oversimplification provides a starting point for neophytes to understand the paradigm change that’s taking place whereby the US will return to its Old Cold War-era grand strategy that was much more characterized by geopolitics and geo-economics. The past two Democrat administrations’ obsession with a so-called “rules-based order”, which is just all about gaslighting to disguise double standards that advance the US’ ideological interests, will be history.

In its place a much more pragmatic approach towards foreign policy will emerge that openly incorporates power and interests, some of which might even be explicitly declared to remove any ambiguity depending on the particular issue’s sensitivity, into decisionmakers’ associated calculations. While it’s true that this was still being applied to an extent even under the liberal-globalist Democrats, it’s now expected to take center stage, thus making the US’ foreign policy more predictable. Rubio claimed in a recent interview that the US will only start doing what everyone else continued to do this whole time while his country “assumed the responsibility of becoming the global government” at the expense of its national interests. He presented this as its response to multipolarity, but the downside is that this recalibrated approach risks dealing a deathblow to the post-World War II order like Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov just warned about.

Great Power competition could therefore intensify.

Looking forward, the rest of the world and in particular the RIC – Russia, India, China – triangle that forms the engine of contemporary multipolar processes should brace itself for American foreign policy becoming more effective in all respects, though provided of course that Trump implements his agenda. In that scenario, the USG’s soft power revolution brought about by its radical USAID reforms can lead to a revolution in International Relations, though it might make the world more dangerous instead of safer.