-Analysis-
PARIS – Once upon time the United States exerted its soft power with a familiar logo: USAID, the American agency for humanitarian and development aid. Not anymore.
Elon Musk, tasked with hacking the federal administration down to size, called USAID a “criminal” and “irreparable” organization. Employees showed up at their offices Monday to find themselves locked, the website erased, and the agency swallowed up by the State Department.
Why start a purge with foreign aid? Because most Americans don’t follow global affairs closely enough to care. Because USAID funded programs that many Trump supporters found unacceptable — think gender issues or reproductive health. And, ultimately, because Donald Trump is interested in projecting strength, not compassion.
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The big surprise of these first two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, which already feel like an eternity, is this: he provokes, disrupts and humiliates, while making no concessions to diplomacy. Confident in himself and in the power of America, he doesn’t believe in anything but the language of force.
BRICS option
The main risk of this strategy is that it plays into the hands of America’s adversaries, primarily China and even Russia. Not everyone is rushing into Beijing’s arms: take Canada, for instance. Shocked by the 25% tariffs, which were eventually put on hold Monday for at least 30 days, the country is experiencing a wave of patriotism in its resistance to its powerful neighbor. But that doesn’t make it an ally of China.
Yet in the Global South, reactions are more decisive. For example, Trump cut U.S. aid to South Africa, accusing the country of confiscating land and doing “horrible things,” in his words. These accusations have been denied in South Africa, but it’s not hard to see where they come from: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, two of Trump’s “oligarchs,” as they must now be called, grew up in apartheid-era South Africa.
Trump thinks that he can impose America’s law on everybody
In the BRICS — the alternative club largely led by China — South Africa is an important voice in the emerging world. It stands for equidistance in international relations, and these Washington slaps play into the hands of Beijing.
Lesser of evils
Donald Trump thinks that he can impose America’s law on everybody, although up until now he hasn’t shown his full strategy toward China, which now is facing a 10% tariff. It looks like the warm-up for the real negotiation.
The bipolar world of the Cold War, between the United States and the USSR, gave way in the 1990s to a unipolar world, with America as the sole superpower. Today, that world is being challenged and threatened, and Trump aims to restore U.S. supremacy not so much through military force, but through economic and technological power.
The risk is that it may already be too late, and that China, already the top trading partner of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, could reap the benefits of Trump’s aggressiveness. The repellent image of imperial America that’s emerging could start to overshadow China’s emerging reputation as a threat to others. By the time America wakes up, it may be too late.
