Trump has turned foreign aid into shabby political theatre
Source: The Guardian
Trump has turned foreign aid into shabby political theatre
Stalled relief supplies for Venezuela at the Colombian border are a stark illustration of Trump’s crudely transactional approach to aid
Peter Beaumont
Wed 20 Feb 2019 14.25 GMT Last modified on Wed 20 Feb 2019 14.29 GMT
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It is an optic that matters because on the edge of a genuine humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela, the Trump administration appears to be creating the illusion of a secondary crisis.
With its air force flights, accumulation of stalled aid in the standoff with the regime of Nicolás Maduro, who is refusing to allow the aid across the border, it is a piece of highly politicised theatre with its cut-price echoes of the Berlin airlift of 1948-9 when the Soviet Union blocked transport links for supplies to Allied-controlled sectors of the city.
It is a stark illustration (if one were needed) of how the US does aid in the Trump era, a period characterised by a transactional world view and a foreign policy that seems often more in service of the US president’s personal standing than America’s position as a global player.
While US aid policy has been politicised since the post-war Marshall Plan, no US president has been so obvious and crude as Trump in their approach to using assistance for global leverage.
If the Trump administration’s method can actually be called doctrine – as opposed to a series of attention-seeking and ego-driven impulses – it has revealed itself in the past two years to be unconcerned with much pretence of generally accepted humanitarian principles, instead often favouring gesture politics even at the expense of wider US foreign policy interests.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/feb/20/trump-has-turned-foreign-aid-into-shabby-political-theatre
