The U.S. Retreat from Global Leadership

Slashing USAID isn’t austerity—it’s an act of self-harm

The sweeping changes at USAID mark a significant departure from 70 years of U.S. leadership as a leading humanitarian benefactor, abandoning postwar ideals of global solidarity for transactional diplomacy. The decision severs a lifeline for millions and risks further destabilizing fragile regions like the Horn of Africa.

The Trump administration has canceled 83 percent of active U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs—5,200 out of 6,200 multi-year contracts—cutting $54 billion in humanitarian aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced these cuts after a six-week review that dismantled long-established development initiatives. The remaining programs will now constitute less than a fifth of the USAID portfolio and will be absorbed by the State Department. The move undermines a cornerstone of U.S. global influence.

Since its inception in 1961, USAID has strategically weaponized generosity, leveraging food shipments, vaccines, and disaster relief to counter Soviet expansion, combat extremism, and secure alliances with nations worldwide.

Today, USAID provides essential support to millions worldwide, with programs focused on addressing humanitarian crises, combatting diseases, and alleviating malnutrition, among other pressing global challenges.

Now, prioritizing “efficiency” over empathy, the administration risks ceding influence to rivals.

This isn’t austerity—it’s amnesia.

The U.S. is abandoning the very tools that once helped keep crises at bay and allies close. From Ethiopia’s halted polio campaigns to Somalia’s collapsing food pipelines, the human toll is immediate. The strategic damage—retreat from leadership in a multipolar world—may prove irreversible.

Soft Power

For six decades, USAID operated as America’s quiet super-power, operationalizing its founding mandate to “promote stability, curb extremism, and bind nations to democratic ideals” through targeted development.

The agency’s legacy is etched in modern history. Its “Food for Peace” program not only averted famine in 1960s India but strategically thwarted communist alignment, catalyzing the Green Revolution that rendered the nation agriculturally self-sufficient—a dual triumph of ethics and realpolitik.

By the 2000s, the PEPFAR initiative became the largest health intervention by any single nation, saving 25 million lives from HIV/AIDS and converting African skepticism into enduring diplomatic goodwill.

When the UN adopted the Millennium Development Goals, USAID’s networks delivered measurable impact: Supporting rural health clinics in Ethiopia, training a generation of Kenyan tech entrepreneurs, and helping to lift more than 1-billion people globally out of extreme poverty by 2015.

USAID’s strength lay in its dual-purpose design.

In post-genocide Rwanda, it rebuilt judicial systems while subtly encouraging francophone elites to pursue English-language trade partnerships, aligning the nation with U.S. economic interests.

In Somalia, education programs funded by the agency reduced Al-Shabaab recruitment in targeted areas, demonstrating that education could counter extremism as effectively as military action. Even vaccine shipments both protect health and win hearts and minds, embodying the symbiosis of altruism and influence.

This strategic alchemy allowed America to project power without deploying troops, turning aid into a lever that lifted lives while securing alliances. In an era of rising authoritarianism, USAID’s model remains a masterclass in soft power: The art of advancing national interests by elevating global dignity.

Regional Instability

The collapse of U.S. aid exposes governance fragility in the Horn.

In Somalia, where 70 percent of the population relies on humanitarian assistance, the government allocates a mere $0.80 per capita annually to healthcare—less than the cost of a single antibiotic dose.

Ethiopia epitomizes this paradox: while USAID funded 89 percent of its vaccinations, the regime diverted 47 percent of its 2025 budget to military spending, prioritizing war over welfare.

“The state here is a fiction,” observes a Jigjiga-based analyst, thinking partly of Somalia. “Remove foreign aid, and it evaporates.”

The human toll will likely be catastrophic: 64 million people—nearly 20 percent of global humanitarian needs—now face famine, displacement, or disease, with Sudan and Ethiopia accounting for 78 percent of the crisis.

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The UN’s $7-billion appeal for the region is only 32 percent funded. Without urgent investment in Ethiopia’s drought or Sudan’s collapsed healthcare infrastructure, entire communities will vanish.

Systemic collapse is already metastasizing.

The Trump administration’s termination of $1 billion in health funding stripped 3.5 million HIV patients of antiretrovirals, triggering a projected 620,000 deaths—a mortality rate eclipsing the 1990s AIDS peak. Ethiopia’s HIV clinics, once a PEPFAR success story, stand abandoned, leaving 400,000 patients without antiretrovirals as infection rates double in Ethiopia.

In Sudan, 1,200 shuttered USAID kitchens have left 1.2 million without food, while Ethiopia’s polio resurgence jeopardizes global eradication efforts. With 83 percent of USAID’s Horn of Africa staff laid off, crisis response mechanisms are crippled.

This isn’t austerity—it’s a detonator, igniting a chain reaction of destabilization that will reverberate far beyond the region.

Security Shortfall

The retreat of U.S. influence could hit regional security frameworks.

In Somalia, the U.S.-backed African Union mission, which keeps Al-Shabaab in check, faces funding shortages, risking its operational effectiveness. This may allow Al-Shabaab and ISIS to exploit the chaos and potentially topple Somalia’s fragile government, akin to the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan. A collapse in Mogadishu could lead to increased domestic attacks and instability in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.

Additionally, Al-Shabaab may be collaborating with Yemen’s Houthis, threatening Red Sea trade routes while funding its insurgency through an illicit charcoal trade, generating about $100 million annually.

In Sudan, Wagner’s initial collaboration with paramilitary factions intensified the civil war. However, recent report suggest Russia have shifted their allegiance to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) to secure naval bases along the Red Sea, following the Kremlin’s loss of air and naval bases in Syria.

Meanwhile, Sahelian juntas, insulated by Russian security guarantees, are rolling back civil liberties and accountability mechanisms.

Authoritarian Expansion

The Sahel and Horn of Africa, once a focus of Western security and development efforts, are now at the heart of a geopolitical realignment.

Military juntas in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad are rejecting Western alliances, expelling French troops and U.S. advisors while forming security pacts with Wagner and seeking Chinese investments.

This shift, driven by declining Western influence and rising anti-colonial sentiment, enables authoritarian powers to exploit governance vacuums, combining resource extraction with militarization to reshape the region.

Russia has capitalized on Sahelian coups by deploying Wagner mercenaries to support juntas in exchange for lucrative mineral concessions. In Niger and Mali, they secure uranium and gold mining rights while training militaries to suppress dissent—a transactional model that bypasses Western human rights conditions.

Meanwhile, Moscow is negotiating a Red Sea naval base in Sudan to control vital shipping lanes near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which 12 percent of global trade passes.

This dual strategy of military entrenchment and resource monopolization undermines U.S. counterterrorism efforts and empowers autocratic regimes prioritizing survival over democracy.

No Strings

China’s $4.3 billion Addis-Djibouti Railway represents its strategy as a key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project criticized for facilitating lithium extraction from Ethiopia’s conflict-ridden Oromia region to supply China’s electric vehicle industry. Concurrently, Beijing’s “String of Pearls” ports in Djibouti, near a U.S. base, extend its commercial and military influence across the Horn.

Unlike Western aid, which ties funding to governance reforms, China imposes no political conditions, enabling regimes like Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s to adopt BRICS initiatives and use Chinese drones to suppress dissent, drawing criticism from opposition groups.

This geopolitical shift represents a new chapter in a series of security and economic realignments that undermine democracies, weaken counterterrorism efforts, and render the global order increasingly unpredictable.

 The Sahel and Horn of Africa have transitioned from Western “state-building” initiatives to testing laboratories for authoritarianism.

This erosion of multilateral norms serves as a stark warning: As democracies reduce their engagement, authoritarian powers are reshaping the rules of global influence, converting crises into opportunities for entrenchment.

Moral Bankruptcy

The Trump administration’s gutting of global aid has shattered the postwar liberal order, trading humanitarian imperatives for cynical indifference.  

The USAID withdrawal is not only neglect but a deliberate complicity in authoritarianism. America’s shift to transactional diplomacy aligns with the coercive tactics of China and Russia.

China’s “Health Silk Road,” an extension of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), focuses on developing health infrastructure in partner countries. However, it often comes with transactional demands, as evidenced by China’s vaccine distribution practices, which prioritize countries willing to relinquish valuable mineral rights.

For instance, Zimbabwe was compelled to surrender 60 percent of its lithium reserves in exchange for COVID-19 vaccine doses, effectively entangling the nation in a neo-colonial resource scheme.

Meanwhile, Russia uses humanitarian aid as geopolitical leverage. During the recent Russia-Africa summit, President Putin announced grain donations to several African nations, effectively branding Moscow as a benefactor while promoting a multipolar world that reduces dependence on the West.

The U.S. retreat has spurred allies like the UK to slash foreign aid budgets in favor of military spending, while the EU struggles to support Ukraine amid multiple crises.

The moral bankruptcy is twofold: Abandoning humanitarian duties while propelling exploitation. By auctioning vulnerable nations’ sovereignty, the West undermines its ideals and rules-based order, accelerating starvation, pandemics, and entrenched predation.

Reversing this demands confronting complicity in indifference—not just restoring funds.

Inevitable Blowback

The pressing question now is not whether humanitarian systems can adapt, but whether the U.S. can reconcile its moral hypocrisy with the consequences of abandoning global leadership. Refugee crises, pandemics, and state collapses—forces indifferent to borders—are not distant risks but direct blowback for severing aid.

When famine in Sudan leads to mass migration to Europe or when contagious diseases like Ebola erupt into unchecked epidemics, the Global North will confront the reality that its austerity incubates the chaos it claims to deter. America’s ledger will expose a Faustian bargain—saving on aid today only to spend trillions on border security, pandemic response, and counterterrorism tomorrow.

The false sense of savings disappears when a single outbreak costs the global economy $11.5 trillion, as seen with COVID-19, or when destabilized regions become staging grounds for attacks on democracies. Abandoning aid will not save resources; it instead gambles humanity’s safety on the false belief that walls can stop the storms we create

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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Main photo: USAID-hosted trade fair in Afar, Ethiopia to raise awareness about water, sanitation, and hygiene practices. USAID, 17 June 2024.

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