We just concluded a long Zoom conversation with one of our nieces. She has worked in ten nations for the Norwegian Refugee Council and is now stationed in Jerusalem. She reads a daily summary of all the major conflicts around the world and has daily contact with her colleagues in Gaza. She has some but less contact with her collegues on the West Bank.
Her colleagues in Gaza tell her that they know that they are going to die but not when or how. Her colleagues on the West Bank say that "it will be gone in a year." I understand this to mean that by then Israel will have taken hold of all of the land. I do not understand where those whom Israel is displacing will go. Sounds like they will stay, albeit with virtually nothing of what they once had.
That our niece, a Canadian, is distressed about what is happening to her homeland and to those where she works doesn’t come close to reporting her thoughts and feelings. But she is also perplexed. Why, she wonders, is the United States shutting down its global network of "soft power" projects from which it benefits so much?
Two misunderstandings are frequent. One of them is that the United States is giving poor people around the world a lot of money. This is not so. The amount of money that is spent this way amounts to 1.2% of the federal government’s most recent budget.
Another misunderstanding is that the United States gets nothing in return. This, too, is not so. The U.S. is not a charity like, say, the Red Cross, that selflessly sacrifices for others. It puts its money where it thinks it will be mutually beneficial. For every dollar the U. S. invests this way, it benefits in ways that are worth many more dollars. The ROI is excellent.
Of course there are problems that need to be addressed. But the time to do this is when the new budgets are being developed so that recipient groups can plan accordingly. Making these changes in the middle of budget years when people are rightly depending on them is causing much confusion, pain and ill-will around the world where people feel that they have been betrayed.
Our niece has colleagues in other agencies who cannot pay their rent because the United States owes them much money in salary and benefits and, apparently, has no intention of paying them what it promised.
Team Trump believes in regionalism rather than globalism. Some shifts in that direction will probably be helpful; however, a complete transformation is impossible. One can almost hear Reinhold Niebuhr again chuckle at the “irony of American history” wherein it tries as hard as it can to go it alone but finds it impossible to shrink that much.