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by openasocket 112 days ago
> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.

I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.

Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.

> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.

Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.

> Another problem is the US is broke.

USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
2 comments
heisgone 112 days ago
I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective. The justification outlined for USAID is that it was "softpower". While this is true, we have to admit it's limitations. As you said, it was only 45B. You don't shape the world with such small amount of money. So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID.
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openasocket 112 days ago
> I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective

By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?

> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID

That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.

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heisgone 112 days ago
It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.

The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.

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openasocket 112 days ago
> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.

So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?

What do you think is the moral thing to do here?

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bjourne 112 days ago
What polls are your referring to? Can you cite any?
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