USAid
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Don’t know enough to be certain, but this may be right.
The usefulness of USAID spending in Africa - which mostly went to public health issues & is a tiny fraction of the federal budget - was in its generation of substantial goodwill & pro-America feeling on a continent that is already a geopolitical battlefield. We are competing against everyone from Islamist terrorists to the Russians & Chinese. And we were holding our own, despite the fact that China has invested far more heavily. If anything, we should've kept the health spending & added substantial infrastructure funding.
Ask yourself why the Chinese are spending so much time & money building influence in Africa if it is just a useless backwater? Hint: those rare earth minerals come from somewhere.
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JFK knew... USAID was first a defense strategy, and second a humanitarian effort.
Either way this is F***ed up. Why can't indigenous people in a region they have been living for thousands of years sustain themselves without the aid of Multi National relief agencies? Africa is the most handout receiving continent of the world.
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JFK knew... USAID was first a defense strategy, and second a humanitarian effort.
Either way this is F***ed up. Why can't indigenous people in a region they have been living for thousands of years sustain themselves without the aid of Multi National relief agencies? Africa is the most handout receiving continent of the world.
JFK knew... USAID was first a defense strategy, and second a humanitarian effort.
Either way this is F***ed up. Why can't indigenous people in a region they have been living for thousands of years sustain themselves without the aid of Multi National relief agencies? Africa is the most handout receiving continent of the world.
Not really. Throughout the Cold War the USSR was aggressively pursuing targets of opportunity for influence throughout the Third World and southern hemisphere. The Marshall Plan had successfully checked Soviet expansion in Europe. Communist success in China and North Korea had attained immediate political objectives in Asia. That left African and South America ripe for Soviet mischief making.
USAID and similar foreign aid and technical assistance agencies in other Western states were essentially capacity building programs to contain global Soviet influence.
Sort of a collective Marshall Plan Phase II.
