It’s time to rethink development assistance as a useful soft power tool

By the time I arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2014 for my third tour as a foreign service officer with USAID, I had already spent a decade working in the country with different U.S. government organizations. Something that particularly struck me during that tour was the contrast in how the United States engaged with Afghanistan compared to some other countries. Our goal in Afghanistan was to create conditions for the country to benefit from its own natural resources and to advance on a path to increased stability and prosperity. Yet, at times, it seemed that our security and civilian assistance created conditions for others to profit from our investment of dollars and lives. While the U.S. Agency for International Development, as the largest donor of development and security assistance, provided billions toward building Afghan institutions, worked with our allies and our Afghan partners to create jobs, and deployed thousands of soldiers to work with the Afghan army to stabilize the country, China was negotiating deals for copper, lithium, and other valuable minerals. Several years later, I arrived in Nepal to lead USAID’s mission there in the midst of strict COVID-19 lockdowns and difficult negotiations over a $500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact to expand electricity access, as well as our own $659 million development agreement. The goal of our assistance, as one of Nepal’s oldest bilateral partners, was to help build a more prosperous future for all of its people, within the context of high unemployment, weak economic growth, and a fragile natural environment. Disinformation, however, often fueled by external groups, spread widely during the negotiations. Our motives were questioned. Some accused us of providing aid only to build military bases. And the government seemed less interested in our projects than it was in our funding, to be channeled through their national budget. When I spoke at different forums about our work, I was asked what benefit the U.S. sought and why we would want to help Nepal at all. Those were all very good questions, which many of us have had to answer as we represented our country at embassies across the world: What are the objectives of our development assistance? Who benefits? Who pays the costs? And to what extent does it support our national and foreign policy objectives? With the dismantling of USAID and its aftermath, much is being written about the history of foreign assistance, often pointing back to when President John F. Kennedy created the agency, declaring a “Decade of Development.” Now six decades later, the contents of his address to the U.S. Congress, and the objectives and principles he set forth for their implementation, sound both current and far away. The principles — a single agency with unified administration and operation, long-term planning and financing, special emphasis on loans and domestic resource mobilization, attracting the highest quality staff from all parts of the nation — were aspirations that felt current until recently, many of which we have been able to meet only partially. The context, however, echoes from a very different time, when U.S. power and influence were on the ascent, when we were setting the agenda and the rules of the world order, comfortably in a position of global leadership. The U.S. has often supported other nations and their people in times of need, as part of its perceived leadership responsibility, based on aspirational values of compassion, generosity, and fairness. However, at its core, foreign assistance has always been a tool of soft power, rooted in American national interest, reflecting the principles emanating from our own system of government and domestic context. In the 1960s, the setting was a bipolar world in the midst of the Cold War, alongside a domestic struggle to reach our own ideals of equity and fairness. For the two decades following the 9/11 attacks, our focus was dominated by the Global War on Terrorism and countering violent extremism, with growing portions of our national budget devoted to external efforts and reduced relative investment in domestic health and welfare. Today, the country is engaged in a global competition within an increasingly multipolar world, with the rise of China’s military power and soft influence, and shifting and increasingly transactional alliances. This evolution is taking place amid uneven but significant global development fueled by expanded trade, advancing technologies, and increased investments by foundations, philanthropic organizations, and foreign direct investment, and where former aid recipients are becoming donors themselves. Domestically, the context is one of deepening polarization, inward focus, and fragmented decision-making. Within this new and rapidly evolving context, our development assistance no longer carries the same leverage, does not have the same power, and is not delivering the same level of results for our partners or for ourselves. As an instrument of soft power, its evolution has not kept up with the changes in America’s power and global standing. That leads us to new questions, the most basic of which are: Does U.S. development assistance broadly remain an effective tool of soft power? Can the U.S. still rely on it as a tool to achieve our national and foreign policy goals? And if so, how does it need to be most effectively practiced within the current and evolving context? For as long as many of us have been working in development, we have anticipated, with some apprehension, a potential merger of USAID into the State Department. It has finally happened. However, the way this merger is playing out, where one organization, currently in the midst of a restructuring and in disarray, is swallowing the programs and funding of another that has been haphazardly dismantled, is not one that is conducive to developing responses to these critical questions. Yet, these are questions that deserve thoughtful and creative responses; answers that don’t just tweak the deficiencies and the bureaucratic challenges of the present, nor try to recreate a past that no longer exists. For the U.S. to continue to claim its place in this new world order from a position of strength, we need new definitions and tools of soft power, and we need to shift how we view our relationships, moving away from development assistance that is based on an unequal power relationship between a donor and a recipient, and toward one that is rooted in mutual respect, mutual benefit, and equal partnership. Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of any affiliated organizations, past or present.