America First Is America Alone: The Destruction of Global Health, Trump-Style

America First Is America Alone
The Destruction of Global Health, Trump-Style

By William deBuys


(TomDispatch) The totalitarian playbook that Donald Trump seems to follow lacks a chapter. Power-crazed the president may be, but he fails to grasp soft power. Wise military and diplomatic minds understand it well. George C. Marshall, the nation’s top general through World War II and later secretary of state and secretary of defense, lent his name and his energies to the greatest exercise of soft power in American history, the Marshall Plan. Such was his stature that, with help from President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, he persuaded an isolationist post-World War II Congress to approve the costly program and so secured western Europe from Soviet political control, while defining the preeminent battle line of the Cold War.

....(snip)....

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was a lineal descendant of the Marshall Plan and an embodiment of soft power. Its abandonment and ultimate destruction by the second Trump administration marks a watershed moment in the projection of American influence globally. Next to its headstone in the graveyard of institutions, one might also place a marker for the era that publisher Henry Luce once labelled “the American Century.” Like a married couple, the agency and its century deserve to be buried together, their lives having been intertwined and their dates nearly the same.

The Murder Was Not Premeditated

A possibly ketamine-pumped Elon Musk, brandishing a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, proved an apt image for the Trumpist demolition of government institutions this year. The hideously misnamed Department of Government Efficiency, then led by Musk, performed no meaningful analysis of which government functions were essential to preserve, let alone which civil servants had the expertise and experience to make such functions viable. Employees were simply fired en masse in the bureaucratic equivalent of a meat-cleaver amputation (no scalpels involved).

....(snip)....

The humanitarian consequences of USAID’s destruction have not gone unnoticed. Issue-specific websites have sprung up to tally the cost in money and lives. The New York Times, Washington Post, and other leading news outlets have published dispatches from impacted areas documenting the harm being done. Esteemed journals like the Lancet and Science have published reports from on-going field studies predicting dire outcomes. When I’ve brought such sources to the attention of ostensibly intelligent members of the MAGA faithful, I’ve been told that the estimated losses can’t be modeled, or that ChatGPT says the models are flawed, or that domestic humanitarian needs should take priority over foreign ones. Sound familiar? It’s climate-change denial in a new suit of clothes. ................(more)

https://tomdispatch.com/america-first-is-america-alone/