Larry Diamond

After U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, one of his very first actions was issuing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. In subsequent weeks, Trump and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – which, despite its name, is not an official government department – moved to more permanently dismantle the underpinnings of decades of U.S. foreign aid policy. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was effectively scuttled, with somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of its programs cut.

The Trump administration framed the cuts as necessary steps to combat waste and fraud. Analysts say otherwise, with experts pointing to the immense importance of foreign aid – both for increasing U.S. “soft power” and, more directly, helping keep the United States secure by defending against transborder threats like pandemics and terrorism fueled by poverty and state failure.

The Diplomat’s Shannon Tiezzi spoke to Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, about the benefits of U.S. aid and why it’s become so controversial.

“If you really want to ‘make America great’ or keep it great or make it greater, I can't imagine a more self-destructive tactic for that overall goal then ending foreign aid,” Diamond says.

To start, could you go over the strategic value of U.S. aid? In the Indo-Pacific, specifically, do you think U.S. development assistance, whether through USAID or other agencies was actually working for the U.S. national interest?

There are two broad purposes to aid. One is more purely strategic, and the other is enlightened self-interest.

The purely strategic angle is that aid – both economic, including humanitarian and developmental, and military – helps to cement and sustain partnerships, and improves the ability to influence partners.

Unfortunately, we're now virtually in another Cold War situation. There’s a world order element to foreign aid that has to do with alignment, alliances, solidarity, and influence – in the better sense of the word, rather than the maligned sense of the word, as it’s being deployed by China, Russia, and Iran. Aid helps in the cementing of partnerships and common purpose for a stabilizing world order.

In the Indo-Pacific region, the goal is to ensure not U.S. hegemony – as the PRC is, I think, maliciously depicting it – but a situation where there is no hegemony, which is why we use the term “free and open Indo-Pacific region.” Aid serves that broad purpose. It’s one of many instruments.

There’s a military dimension to aid. There’s an economic dimension in certain circumstances – more pertinent, probably, to Africa and the poorest countries of the world. But in the era of climate change, humanitarian assistance may be needed by all kinds of partners, even ones that are middle income or higher. There’s a humanitarian element.

On the enlightened self-interest side, the argument goes like this: if states collapse, it’s not going to be in the self-interest of the United States, Japan, Europe, or anybody else that would be providing assistance. We’re already running thin on the resources and patience to stem and resolve civil wars, and deal with the horrible consequences, including the blowback consequences of terrorism, of state failure and state decay.

And in a world that has shrunk more and more because of travel and interconnectedness of various kinds, we need to be on top of public health challenges. We need to get to the source of and eliminate the persistence of deadly communicable diseases, whether it be polio – which is beginning, incredibly, to resurge after we thought we were on the cusp of eliminating it – or obviously HIV/AIDS and God forbid another respiratory virus pandemic, which we could be on the edge of with avian influenza.

If you're not out there on the public health front in a very vigorous and vigilant way – providing assistance and preempting these outbreaks, strengthening the public health infrastructure of developing countries, improving the quality of life, and improving preventive public health – the potential for blowback to all of us, no matter what kind of country we're sitting in, or how high we think our walls are, is very significant.

So on the enlightened self-interest side, you've got a public health dimension too. You've got a security dimension, which includes the dangers of terrorism spreading from radicalized groups that breed in a context of state weakness and state failure. And then you’ve got the developmental possibilities for increasing the flows of good and services by increasing the consuming power of newly emerging markets to buy our goods. Of course there's more competition on the manufacturing side, but this is not a zero-sum game. When countries thrive in a increasingly integrated world, the tide can lift all boats.

You laid out the case for U.S. development aid, and for all those benefits it represents less than 1 percent of the total U.S. government budget. Given that, why do you think that it has attracted so much ire and acrimony from the Trump administration? Why has U.S. foreign aid became such a prominent target of the government cuts that are underway?

I think there are a few reasons why it has been the first target. And I believe a big one is the same reason why, when bigots and autocrats come to power, if you look around the world and study their methods, it's pretty common for them to pick on the LGBTQ community as one of their first targets. Why do they do that? Typically, it’s just an easy target.

These are sexual minorities – 5 percent, 8 percent, maybe 10 percent maximum of the population. And in traditional societies, many of those people are in the closet; they dare not identify as LGBTQ. That makes them an even more vulnerable minority. So if you want to aggrandize your power, you find an adversary that's an easy target. They go after the LGBTQ community because they deem this group to be like the Roma, the Rohingya, and other ethnic minorities, and throughout history the Jews: an isolated, vulnerable minority.

In the context of American foreign policy, U.S. aid becomes that easy target. I think that the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) crowd are looking for some easy scalps and some quick wins, so they can say, “Oh, we've cut government waste, fraud and abuse.” They see foreign aid as as a very easy target, politically, within the United States.

What's the constituency for foreign aid? They've looked at the polls. They see it’s not that popular – but I think that’s because it's not well understood by the average American.

Historically, when asked to identify what percentage of the federal budget is going to foreign aid, in polls Americans tend to choose between 10 and 25 percent. Once you tell them it's 1 percent, and you start laying out the arguments that I've laid out, their attitudes change dramatically. I've seen it in some of the exercises that are done. So I think the MAGA crowd may be surprised, because, as we wage this battle, Americans are finding that aid is a very tiny percentage of the federal budget and it serves our interests in a variety of ways.

The second reason: There is a strong isolationist character to the MAGA movement, and it's more of an impulse than a well thought out philosophy or strategy. Because if you really want to “make America great” or keep it great or make it greater, I can’t imagine a more self-destructive tactic for that overall goal then ending foreign aid. That means ending some of the best things we’re doing in the world to support small producers, improve agricultural productivity, fight deadly diseases, fight corruption and abuses of power, and help people to be freer and more personally secure.

Ending aid is not a strategy to make America great again. It’s a strategy to make America resented and isolated in the world.

The MAGA movement has strong isolationist impulses. We saw what isolationism got us in the run up to World War I and much more dramatically in the run up to World War II. So there’s a long history to the utterly self-destructive – and, I might add selfish and impulsive – nature of this kind of isolationism.

I’m not saying it's in all cases, or even in many cases, consciously serving our adversaries. But that's certainly what it winds up doing. I’ve done the research. I know what China and Russia are saying right now about the Trump administration’s moves to shut down not only the U.S. Agency for International Development, but the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). They’re doing high fives. They’re ecstatic. They can’t believe their good fortune.

It’s like we are in a battle, globally, for who will shape the future of the world: What will be the values? What will be the alliances? What will be the interests that dominate? And you’ve got one side now embarked on a strategy of unilateral disarmament. How could the other side, the authoritarian side, not be euphoric in response?

On that note, many critics have argued that withdrawing U.S. aid will work to China’s benefit. If U.S. aid is permanently scaled back, do you expect China to gain an advantage in the competition for global influence?

People want development. Everybody wants to be economically secure, and everybody wants to become more prosperous if they can be. People who are poor want to emerge out of poverty.

People who’ve recently emerged out of poverty want better jobs, better health, and a better life for their children. If someone comes along and offers them a helping hand with that – by generating economic opportunity and investment, improving the electricity grid, building bridges, building ports, making investments, and stimulating both economic growth and the more efficient flow of people, traffic, goods, and services – you’re going to feel some gratitude for that.

This is why aid delivery, both of humanitarian assistance and other things, typically gets branded: “This was provided to you by the People's Republic of China.” China takes out ads, and they brand what they're doing in a very visible and multidimensionally promotional way. That’s their right.

This comes with a lot of sharp power intervention in the affairs of these countries. It comes with a huge debt bill at the other end of this flow of “assistance,” which countries are now discovering. It comes with a lot of assumptions and intimidation from China. But at the level of people wanting opportunity, wanting better infrastructure, or even just wanting to go see their soccer team in a modern stadium, the inclination is to feel some sense of gratitude

If the U.S. is not there in the game also providing economic development assistance, then China is going to achieve its objective more easily and thoroughly. And its objective in the Indo-Pacific is a kind of hegemony. It’s not going to look like Japan in the 1930s. I think the only landed territory that the PRC really wants to use aggression to absorb is Taiwan, which, of course, they claim to be a part of the People's Republic of China.

But they’ve made their hegemonic intentions clear. They’ve given the region the nine-dash line.

China thinks the entire South China Sea virtually is theirs, and all the mineral wealth in it, and all the fisheries in it – up to the coastal waters of the Philippines and Vietnam. It’s an outrageous violation of international law. And they're doing this around the world. They’re gobbling up the fisheries of West Africa, of Latin America, and so on.

So if we’re not there, they’ve got freer rein to do all this stuff and and we lose leverage. And it’s worse than that.

It’s one thing if you're not providing assistance when people are asking for assistance. There’s disappointment. But when assistance has been provided, and then it’s abruptly, arbitrarily, and – I might say, with the tone that Donald Trump is using – fairly nastily withdrawn, then it’s not just disappointment, it’s resentment. And when a relationship is ruptured and there’s a feeling of resentment and the PRC moves in with propaganda, money, and sharp power influence, including under the table payments to elites, it becomes a development of not only economic but strategic significance.

I’ve been looking at PRC propaganda. The aid freeze feeds into the PRC narratives that the United States and the West more broadly are just in it for their own self-interest; that they can't be trusted; that this is a neo-colonial hegemonic relationship. We don’t want to give credibility to the narratives the PRC has been trying to spin for many years now about Western and U.S. arrogance, selfishness, hegemony, duplicity, exploitation, etc.

We can counter these narratives because they’ve been wrong, and often have been a kind of Freudian projection of China’s own intent. But we can’t do it with this kind of strategy of a peremptory, abusive, and sudden withdrawal of aid.

I don’t say that there's no inefficiency in the delivery of aid through USAID. Most people who know it or work with it feel there’s room for a redesign with an eye toward efficiency and improvement. But this is not about efficiency. This is a project of ideology and vengeance.

The U.S. is one of the primary funders for civil society, media organizations, and grassroots groups working to uphold democratic principles. One of the surprising things under the Trump administration has been to see this aid come under attack from the United States, with Elon Musk and Trump drawing attention to these projects and somehow suggesting that they're malign – essentially buying into China's narratives that this is equivalent to seeking regime change. What does this mean for the future of democracy worldwide?

The isolationists started a campaign against this stream of U.S. engagement in the world a while ago, but it really started heating up last year, and of course, has intensified since. If you read the narratives against human rights, governance, and democracy assistance that have been coming from this crowd, it’s very hard to distinguish between the tone and talking points of these isolationist critics and the tone and talking points of Beijing and Moscow. Both are saying the same things: “This is an effort to affect regime change. This is an effort by the U.S. to impose its ideology.”

It’s just shocking that Americans could be (wittingly or not) adopting Communist and Putin-esque talking points and not feeling ashamed of doing so. But in any case they are, and these streams of U.S. engagement are now under dedicated assault from Elon Musk and the most extreme elements of the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been another critic of it going way back. People like this just think the U.S. shouldn’t be doing anything to advance good governance, rule of law, freedom, or democratic values around the world.

This work will continue, whether the Congress officially allocates money for it or not. It’s kind of like Ukraine: They’re not going to give up just because Donald Trump cuts off funding. But the work becomes diminished and more difficult without the very substantial flows of financial support that have come from the Congress, directly, more or less, to the NED and from the Congress to USAID, which has also provided some support to the core institutes of NED, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the Solidarity Center.

Private foundations are providing some of this support. Many European bilateral aid agencies are providing a lot of support. I’ve long admired the work that Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have done – they’ve been punching way above their weight in democracy, human rights, and governance assistance. There’s the Department for International Development (DFID) in Britain, Germany’s foreign assistance, the Canadian International Development Authority, the Australians, and so on. The Japanese have gotten more involved in this. There’s a Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. There’s a European Foundation for Democracy that is not on the scale of NED, but I hope can be expanded so the work will not be diminished.

I hope that Europe and other actors will be able to expand what they do. But we’re not going to give up. We can’t.