Trump foreign policy has raised familiar concerns about the decline of American influence abroad. But while most critics of the Administration focus on things such as Russian influence, climate change, and North Korea, it is the Trump take on humanitarian assistance that is perhaps the most revealing and the most concerning.
Take the recent flooding in Iran as an example. In March and April of this year Iran suffered some of its worst flooding in decades. In southwestern Iran buildings and roads were destroyed, thousands of people displaced, and 70 lives lost. US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, offered assistance in a way that seemed designed for rejection: offering condolences while making dubious negative claims about the Iranian government’s urban planning and emergency preparedness efforts. Naturally, this backhanded political posturing cloaked as a humanitarian “offer” was rejected by the Iranian government, with the ultimate result being that the United States, the world’s second largest humanitarian donor, stood idly by while thousands suffered and US sanctions hampered relief efforts.
The situation was quite different in 2003 when a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck near the city of Bam in southeastern Iran. The US was quick to respond; sending supplies, deploying a team of response personnel and temporarily lifting sanctions to facilitate the delivery of assistance. George W. Bush, not known for compassionate foreign policy or nuanced statesmanship, said, “What we're doing in Iran is we're showing the Iranian people the American people care […] it's a good thing to do, it's right to take care of people when they hurt.”
Bush was able to say this and provide support because US foreign assistance laws are written in such a way as to give great flexibility to the President in exactly this type of scenario. The Foreign Assistance Act gives the President authority to provide humanitarian support to any country, regardless of the state of diplomatic relations, precisely so that politics need not interfere with humanitarian relief.
With so many juicer topics for the media to choose from, the mishandling of floods in Iran barely registered on the cable news cycle. But Pompeo’s statement belied more than inept diplomacy, it revealed a fundamental failure to understand the value and purpose of US foreign aid. A failure that has been consistently demonstrated in other policy decisions like the removal of aid from Palestine and Central America, in the clumsy attempts to use humanitarian aid as a tool for regime change in Venezuela and the recent revision of asylum policy at a time when global displacement is higher than it was after World War II.
Prophecies of America’s declining influence abroad have been around almost as long as America has had any real influence abroad. These prophecies have come from all points in the political prism of American politics and have been both birthed from the legitimate concerns of thoughtful policy makers and used as flimsy scare tactics to woo half informed voters. Prophets of doom point to failures of both protocol and policy as harbingers of dark days ahead for America and for the democratic values she supposedly represents.
Since these charges of declining influence and tarnished reputation have been leveled against nearly every American president in history, it is hardly surprising that they were brought against the current President almost as soon as he announced his candidacy. Indeed, the current administration appears to even welcome certain aspects of this criticism, seeking to create an image of America that is a force so strong it is beyond the use of mere influence or reputation as political tools. The current President envisions a world where American might is able to shape the international landscape to its liking by whim alone.
To point out that this fanciful approach to foreign policy is probably having the exact opposite effect is particularly unoriginal at the moment. But while the death knell of American influence is sounding more like a fire alarm these days, it is worth asking what this alleged decline actually means.
Of course, the long term impact of the Trump presidency on American influence abroad and what that will mean for the world at large won’t be fully understood for sometime, but there is at least one area where it is already having very real and tragic effect: humanitarian assistance.
While humanitarian assistance has always been a very small aspect of US foreign policy (accounting for less than a thousandth of the federal budget) it has, for generations, been an issue of consistent bi-partisan support and the one area of foreign policy that raised the needs of real people above politics and national self-interest. Sadly, it seems that even this is now under threat.
In the Trumpian worldview, aid (even humanitarian aid), is reduced to mere transaction and merits are judged solely by the increase or decrease of profit. But the value of foreign aid goes beyond the accumulation of political capital or the opening of markets for American goods. While aid can potentially play a role in doing those things, the real value of assistance, one that has been readily recognized by every other American president since Eisenhower, lies in the demonstration of American values and the ability of those values to shape a better world.
Since America emerged as a bona fide player in global politics after World War I, US foreign policy has often been a confounding mix of naked self-interest and naïve idealism. Both the cynic and the patriot can find plenty to point to in America’s international record. But through the mix ups and misdeeds, and often times in spite of itself, US foreign assistance has also done real and true goodness – programs that have fed starving communities, given shelter and protection to refugees, a voice to the disenfranchised and solace to the suffering. Of course, not all assistance programs are successful, the mere intention of doing good is not enough to actually do the correct thing, but as a professional humanitarian I have seen these programs first hand. I’ve seen the difference they can make and the hope they can inspire.
It is indeed right and good to take care of people when they hurt. Our failure to do that now, in what should be the most basic and straightforward of human obligations is not merely a failure of foreign policy, it is a failure of values and of morals that should upset even the most cynical and jaded among us. It would be naïve to think that the hard realities of national self-interest weren’t the most dominant force in international politics. But for a country whose government is supposed to be of the people, for the people, and by the people there should be a point at which people matter more than politics. The scariest part of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is not that this is yet another red line they have crossed but that it appears to have never existed for them at all.
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