In Ukraine, USAID aids US hegemony

The gutting of USAID will hurt people in need worldwide. Yet as the case of Ukraine shows, the agency has also been used to spread conflict and propaganda.

The Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has imperiled global relief programs that rely on US funding. While the State Department has issued exemptions for life-saving programs, recipients of US foreign assistance, such as HIV treatment groups in South Africa, remain in limbo.

With their rapid dismantling of a major aid program, Trump and his oligarch consigliere, Elon Musk, are hurting lives and livelihoods across the planet, all while further consolidating power in an unaccountable elite circle.

Yet an honest appraisal must also reckon with the fact that USAID is not strictly a humanitarian operation, but a vehicle to destabilize some of the very countries it claims to help. Concurrently, to manufacture consent for US meddling abroad, USAID and related government programs have subsidized propaganda aimed at the US taxpayers footing the bill.

Today, the most expensive and arguably most damaging USAID project has come in Ukraine and Russia, where the agency has been an integral part of a longstanding US government strategic effort to weaken Moscow.