Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.

That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.

And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".

The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.

USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S., just a highly visible one.

Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:

- Dollar hegemony & financial infra

- Cultural exports

- Universities & research

- Private sector (including tech)

I'm somewhat ignorant on this subject (by design, my mental health cannot afford too much pondering on that which I cannot control)

but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?

That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?

Two games: Domestic and Foreign

Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.

Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.

Local producers cant compete with the aid (nor in trade). The same scheme China runs in the west. On the receiving end you not just stop development but you actively shut down what you had and forget how to do it.

>> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.

> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.

And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".

I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.

Yes, USAID was only one part of US soft power. Everything else you have listed though, the destructionists have done effective jobs of trashing those as well!

In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.

I feel like currently, all four of those points you raised have also been significantly eroded too, and will continue to be for the following decades - countries seem to be rolling back US tech, contracts, dollars, and less people are going to the US for study.

This is all debatably valid, except for the fact that the entrenched system produced massive fraud, money laundering, wagging-the-dog and worst of all, a decade of domestic propaganda and anti-democratic schemes in an attempt to protect the machine from widespread exposure.

Except all of that was widely recognized and reported on at the time. People just didn't care. Lots of people will argue about this stuff until they're blue in the face, but no one is "surprised" by any of the evidence. The malfeasance was going to happen anyway, it's an inevitable consequence of global realpolitik. There's no Rule of Law on the high seas, as it were.

My point really isn't that cynical, it's more optimistic: if you're going to do all that stuff (and let's be honest and admit upfront: we were 100% going to do all that stuff) you might as well feed a bunch of people and garner some good will along the way.

> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.

If you believe this, why did you just go "well, what about China?"

There's clearly a difference between "what about" as a distraction technique (introducing an unrelated argument to avoid having to defend the original) and pointing out the existence of a clearly related issue. This is "youforgotaboutism", if you must label it.

Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?

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