How Marco Rubio helped bury American soft power
This is why his boss once called him "Liddle Marco."
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Elon Musk, with Donald Trump’s enthusiastic support, kicked off his tenure as President-Unelect by taking a blowtorch to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the government organization that provides humanitarian aid in more than 120 countries. Secretary of State Marco Rubio currently presides over the flaming ashes, but not so long ago, he was vocal advocate for the agency.
In February 2017, Rubio posted on social media, “Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”
Now, in his new role, Rubio is demonstrating why Trump used to regularly skewer him as “Liddle Marco.” During a recent Fox News appearance, Rubio contradicted his past position and parroted Musk’s rhetoric by deriding USAID as a “global charity.”
“They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a US government agency,” he said.
It’s become commonplace these days for Republicans to abandon everything they once believed to gain favor with Trump, such as their NATO allies. But Rubio’s flip-flop on USAID reinforces Trump’s triumph over the last vestiges of neoconservatism.
Democrats unanimously voted to confirm Rubio, but if they hoped he might rein in Trump’s worst impulses on foreign policy, they were sorely mistaken. Rubio, who ran for president in 2016 as a child of the Reagan revolution, is now a loyal foot soldier for his boss’s short-sighted “America first” foreign policy, including the effort to dismantle USAID and put whatever husk remains under the purview of his state department.
Trump undos 60 years of soft power in less than a month
USAID was officially established in 1961 when Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act, and President John F. Kennedy, through an executive order, united several development aid programs into one agency.
The agency’s impact over the past 60 years has been substantial. It expanded medical care in impoverished nations and played a key role in global vaccination efforts that eradicated smallpox and drastically reduced worldwide polio cases. It helped control the global AIDS epidemic. The agency contributed billions in food assistance, which prevented mass starvation Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen. It protected the Amazon rain forest and curbed cocaine production in South America. USAID funded programs that have educated children and provided clean water.
This altruism served a larger strategic purpose. USAID built on the Point Four Program, which President Harry S. Truman announced in his inaugural address on January 20, 1949. The Truman administration argued the US could win the “hearts and minds” of the developing world through technical assistance programs. Back then, the government understood that the best way to counter communist propaganda was to actively improve living conditions and show what truly free societies could offer.
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Challenging the Soviet Union’s influence during the Cold War, USAID was part of what retired Ambassador Ryan Crocker calls a “three-legged stool” of defense, diplomacy, and development. The civilian infrastructure and social welfare programs that USAID built supported American security efforts. USAID has been credited with maintaining the Camp David Accords, which established peace between Israel and Egypt. USAID promoting women’s rights and education in nations with significant gender inequality. (Trump and the GOP have claimed to care about women’s rights, but only as a pretext to dehumanize trans people.)
This has all been achieved at a modest cost to the US taxpayer. USAID's funding is consistently less than one percent of the total federal budget or roughly 0.3 percent of total federal spending. That’s quite a bargain, considering the vital role USAID plays in sustaining America’s “soft power.”
Soft power fosters goodwill to achieve foreign policy objectives. Instead of a “carrot and stick” approach, soft power builds collaborative networks and establishes trust and international rules that make democracy appealing. In contrast, “hard power” relies on coercion and intimidation through outright force, the threat of force, economic sanctions, or direct payoffs.
It’s no wonder Trump hates USAID.
After all, MAGA only appreciates hard power. Consider Trump’s imperial ambitions toward Canada and Greenland, which he seeks to forcibly add to his real estate portfolio. Trump has imposed (or at least threatened to impose) retaliatory tariffs as a cudgel against nations who resist his will and has threatened to withhold federal disaster aid to US states unless their Democratic leaders accept his conditions. Trump has even proposed that the US “take over the Gaza Strip” and forcibly relocate the “1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza,” an open declaration of intent to ethnically cleanse.
Conservative nationalism existed prior to Trump, but it was always a fringe coalition within the GOP, whose post-Cold War foreign policy promoted the US as a global leader (to sometimes disastrous results, such as George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq). Ronald Reagan believed in prioritizing “American interests” but appreciated that undercutting Soviet influence in other nations was critical to those interests. Trump’s foreign policy, however, is the result of someone who pathologically can’t comprehend mutually beneficial relationships. It’s why he has threatened to withdraw from NATO unless his administration can use it as a shakedown operation. Trump’s version of America is a cruel bully willing to sucker punch supposed friends if they can get away with taking their lunch money.
Rubio initially seemed a surprising choice for Trump’s Secretary of State. He had a reputation as a foreign policy interventionist, someone who Trump or his sidekick Vice President JD Vance might call a “warmonger.” As recently as 2022, Rubio sent a letter to President Joe Biden requesting that the administration prioritize USAID’s funding as part of a “comprehensive strategy to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) expanding global influence and the increasing threat it poses to US security interests and those of our allies and partners.”
But choosing a mainstream Republican and former neocon like Rubio as secretary of state and making him a spokesperson for his callow isolationism was Trump’s own demonstration of hard power.
America’s abdication
USAID, like any large government program, could be streamlined. But that’s not what Musk or Trump are interested in. Instead, they have unlawfully eviscerated the agency with casual disregard for the outright chaos they’ve inflicted.
Musk doesn’t hide his contempt for USAID. He’s called the agency a “criminal organization” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Meanwhile, Trump insists that USAID has "been run by a bunch of radical lunatics."
While defending Musk’s illegal dismantling of USAID, the Trump administration has spread lies and distortions about supposed “waste and abuse.” Musk himself acknowledged last week that claims he and other administration officials spent weeks spreading about USAID funding “condoms for Hamas” were BS.
Even assuming that what Trumpers have been saying about USAID spending is true — and it isn’t — the fact is that their supposed examples of “waste” total just $400 million, or less than one percent of USAID’s annual budget. But Musk didn’t wait for the facts before gutting the agency, and the impacts are already being felt throughout the world.
Soup kitchens are shut down in Sudan. Hospitals in Thailand are turning away war refugees suffering from life-threatening illnesses. HIV/AIDs treatment programs have experienced serious disruptions. Food, grown by American farmers, that could feed 36 million people is at risk of spoilage. US-funded Ukrainian groups can no longer supply firewood to residents on the front line of Putin’s war.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Rubio said, “Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, every policy we pursue must be justified by the answer to one of three questions. Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?" Ironically, this question is more relevant for Trump and Musk’s drastic USAID cuts, and the answer is a resounding “no.”
The US has waved a white flag, surrendering its global soft power, and our adversaries are rushing to fill the gap. After the USAID bailed on a landmine clearance project in Cambodia, Beijing quickly provided $4.4 million in funding. China’s overall influence has steadily increased in Southeast Asia over the past decade, and it could gain ever further among former USAID beneficiaries, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Cambodia.
Abruptly ending programs that the US entered into in good faith erodes trust and presents an image of the nation as fickle and unable to lead regionally or globally — a bad actor that only cares about its own interests. It’s easy for this reputation to cement when the US president is Donald Trump and Americans willingly elected him twice. Musk doesn’t help America’s reputation, either, as the world’s richest man callously boasts about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” (And the wrecking ball Trump and Musk took to USAID also hurt American USAID workers, many of whom were suddenly stranded in dangerous hotspots abroad without a plan to get them home.
Frauds all the way down
The few remaining mainstream neocon Republicans are too timid and feckless to call out Trump and Musk, even as they’re made to look like fools.
Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader John Thune insisted that USAID wasn’t closing down and told reporters the Trump/Musk administration had "the right to review funding and how those decisions are made and what priorities are being funded.” But as Thune well knows, Musk has no interest in doing anything beyond wrecking things.
Sen. Tom Cotton, like Rubio, was a prominent neocon who has now bowed to MAGA. Cotton stated in 2021 that USAID would "play an important role" in an overall “beat China strategy,” but just last week, he regurgitated Musk’s anti-USAID propaganda, posting on social media, “USAID was a vanguard of the global left. That's why the media and Democrats are melting down over saving money that was being sent overseas by US taxpayers.”
Ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration might delay the inevitable, but USAID’s fate was sealed the moment that not even a single elected Republican was willing to defend it against Elon Musk. If there is no bipartisan consensus regarding America’s responsibilities as a global power, it will cease to remain a global power. In less than a month’s time, Rubio has presided over America’s willing abdication as leader of the free world. It’s a shameful legacy that cuts against everything he once proclaimed to stand for.
That’s it for today
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At a time in which so many people in the world need the support of us, our “leadership “ has chosen to turn our back on the suffering and hopelessness of them. What a display of the lack of compassion by not only the wealthy at the top but also all of the spineless Republicans in Congress- and meanwhile, the rest of the world watches, keeps score, and rightly considers us to be untrustworthy.
Republicans are in the grip of a collective insanity. If you are the least bit corruptable and you are in the trump/musk orbit, you go full dark maga. We are seeing the manifestation of constant of hatred, rage and resentment combined with lust for power. This is as evil as it gets.