White House Chronicle

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Requiem for America’s Helping Hand in the World

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I have seen the U.S. Agency for International Development in action — in Bolivia, Botswana, Pakistan and in Eastern Europe — and I can say that it is sometimes ragged and sometimes wasteful, but overall it is a great value for the money.

It is the face of America in 100 countries and its work is independent of the State Department, which has been one of its strengths.

The purpose of State is to represent American policy abroad and all that it entails. The purpose of USAID is to extend a helping hand.

It is the agency which shows the world through its actions our goodness, our decency, our humanity. USAID makes a difference, whether it is fighting AIDS, Ebola and malaria in Africa or helping electrify the Americas.

I have chanced upon — and that is the word — USAID at work in my travels. In Bolivia, I saw a village enjoying the luxury of electricity for the first time. In Pakistan, I saw trucks of American grain going into an Afghan refugee camp — the only source of food for the inhabitants.

I have heard from my family about the work in Southern Africa, about the treatment of AIDS, malaria and other diseases, where it is most needed. My father suffered from malaria, and I have a special feeling for its ravages.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, has a special feeling for Egypt, where she has lived. She has noted the impact of USAID in Egypt, where it has helped build schools and train teachers, helped create jobs in agriculture and tourism, helped provide access to clean water, helped reduce child and maternal mortality, and helped eliminate polio.

USAID has probably convinced more people that the United States is the good guy in the world than most diplomatic efforts or even the reporting of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia.

If the work of USAID ceases, as Elon Musk has engineered, or is subsumed into State, people will die and Russia and China will fill the vacuum. They won’t fill it with the same human touch, but they will be there and we will be gone — and our good works and influence with the departure.

I grew up in Zimbabwe and even before President John F. Kennedy created USAID, there was general hostility to the idea of foreign “do-gooders.” In those days, the do-gooders were volunteers and the churches. The white community worried about ideas of democracy and equality that would upset the balance of privilege in colonial society.

Later, in the countries I know best (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and South Africa), that fear and resentment was transferred to the international aid community. The dethroned white ruling class spread the word that foreign aid was corrupt, wasteful, and ineffective. American conservatives signed on.

Did Musk — who is irrational and pathological in his hatred of USAID and wants it abolished, and has  gone a long way to achieving that aim — absorb these prejudices when he was growing up in South Africa?

Musk and President Donald Trump have presented no evidence, sought no information nor commissioned a study on USAID’s efficacy. Based just on hearsay and a paranoia that the world is out to cheat America, take its money and otherwise kick sand in its face, they are dismantling one of our pillars of statecraft.

It is an abiding myth among MAGA conservatives that foreign aid is a sinkhole, corrupt and indefensible. I have seen otherwise. But you can’t see if you don’t look.

Remember the Marshall Plan, the expensive but so worthwhile rebuilding of devastated Europe after World War II? It is cherished here and in Europe as an act of American magnanimity and statecraft that was unique in its scope and its preparedness to use American wealth for the good of others.

The plan paid off as one of the smartest investments we could have made as a country. It is an extreme example of the effectiveness of soft power.

It convinced Europe of the fundamental goodness of the American project and enabled more than 70 years of openness and sharing, convincing generations that America had certain values of human concern that would always prevail even when there were disputes.

In trashing USAID — and what mindless trashing it has taken! — the United States has opened the door to Russia and China to take on the good-guy mantle and to manipulate global opinion in their favor; and to make an always dangerous world into a more hostile one for the United States.

Without food and medicine, staples of the USAID efforts, the poorest and most wretched will suffer unspeakably. In Africa, where Musk and I grew up, people will die.

There is a ghastly irony that they will do so at the hand of the richest man in the world, acting for the richest nation in the world.

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.