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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

That's a breathtakingly ignorant assertion. The "strings attached" to U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S. They are things like economic reforms and measures to limit corruption. There is definitely an ideology behind it, and its paternalistic, but it's not empire building. It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but by teaching them to live and govern themselves like we do.

(Source: my dad spent his career doing USAID work; grew up surrounded by USAID, World Bank, etc., folks.)

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>It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but by teaching them to live and govern themselves like we do.

That sort of comparison is going to only get you into trouble. Foreign aid is very often tied to foreign policy, especially security policies like maintaining bases, to keep "friendly" regimes in power, to "tied" aid, etc.

Certainly, not everything is Machiavellian about it, and ofcource people recognize the huge benefits and impact it has had in uplifting poor people, lets also not forget that there is a whole lotta grey in there.

Breathtakingly ignorant? Wow. I have seen foreign aid in the third world and a lot of it is pretty self serving from the first world (including the US). Examples: US aid to fund a cure for malaria except they were only interested in solutions that would work as short term protection for the US military, not long term protection for the people actually suffering from chronic malaria. The WHO (in this case pushed by individual Americans) pushing locals to switch a national park over to mining interests resulting in multinationals coming in, screwing the environment and taking all the profits. I think your dad might have been viewing the world through ideological glasses.

No need to call others' opinions ignorant when you have another one. Here's a good book dealing with foreign aids, among other things:

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

I use "ignorant" quite deliberately; the opinion of U.S. foreign aid as having strings attached to benefit the U.S. is literally ignorant of what U.S. foreign aid projects and funding look like.

I haven't read the book, but de Mesquita is addressing something different, the fact that foreign aid can enable bad leaders to stay in power by giving them a flow of benefits they can use to reward cronies and placate the populace: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10DeMesquita.html. That may well be true, but it's a criticism of foreign aid in general; note that de Mesquita is associate with the Hoover Institution, which believes that government-to-government foreign aid is inherently misguided: https://www.hoover.org/research/better-approach-foreign-aid.

De Mesquita does not contend that U.S. foreign aid is a form of "empire building" intended to make recipient countries dependent on the U.S. or confer direct economic benefits to the U.S. (Even if the U.S. is driven by the possibility of indirect benefit from having more capitalistic countries on the world stage, along with a stable world order, that is something quite different from seeking an "empire").

IIRC, he claims that foreign aids directly help autocratic rulers stay in place, by giving them means to pay off their vital support. So he says that it clearly prevents uplifting people or teaching them democracy, since they are the first victims of dictatorship.

I'd go even further than that and say that foreign aid helps keep badly-run democratic governments stay in place (e.g. in Bangladesh). Being skeptical about whether foreign aid achieves the desired effect is very different than saying that the U.S. provides foreign aid for purposes of "empire building."

Exactly. The US just hopes the money will be used for the welfare of the country and hoping for some soft power when it's required. On the other hand, the Chinese are just loaning the money and making other countries explicitly owe them.

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