Africa, China, and Trump’s World-Spanning Gamble on Foreign Assistance

The AIDS mitigation program PEPFAR was among the U.S. initiatives impacted by President Donald Trump's decision to freeze U.S. aid programs. Image by the U.S. Embassy in Uganda. CC BY 2.0

By Cobus van Staden

The Trump administration’s decision to halt and review U.S. foreign assistance to developing countries instantaneously turned the United States from many countries’ biggest helper into their biggest problem. In the process, he kicked off a massive experiment.

The research question is something like “What constitutes U.S. international influence?” In other words, does the United States’s leadership especially in the developing world depend on hard power, be it sanctions, tariffs, or military might? How much of the global buy-in to this leadership depends on the U.S.’s support for health, education and development?

The costs of running this experiment will be immense. In my country (South Africa) alone, a whole system providing HIV care is now falling apart. This is U.S. money, and the U.S. can do with it what it wants. But the haphazard yanking of a wide range of medical and other programs without giving countries the chance to adjust is already causing chaos.

The U.S. tends to understand its foreign assistance as something it gives away and other countries receive. Whether the giving is framed as altruism or strategy, and whether the receiving is seen as grateful enough, doesn’t change the assumed one-way nature of the exchange.

But, of course, the U.S. also gains from foreign assistance. Most concretely, the bulk of U.S. foreign assistance is paid to U.S. entities, so the suspension of those contracts have U.S. implications.

Assistance also buys attention from individual governments and multilateral organizations like the UN. They must take on board the U.S.’s opinions about numerous issues because it holds the purse strings. This has become so normalized it’s difficult to imagine a different reality.

The Trump administration is running an experiment to see what a world without this logic looks like. In the short term, the outcome will be decidedly for worse: disease, disruption and democratic decline will likely increase in many places. In the long run, it brings up an interesting question: how will the U.S. keep the world’s attention?

It has massive military power, but there’s a limit to how many wars one can fight at once. It has huge economic leverage through the dollar and its market, but Trump is already testing domestic economic disruption through tariffs on the U.S.’s main trade partners. The more tariffs are piled on, the less any particular one will matter amid the wider inflation spiral. And many Global South countries don’t trade enough with the U.S. for this leverage to work anyway.

In terms of cultural influence, the scene is also interesting. Hollywood, gaming, and the music industry remain strong, but they’re not the unipolar influence they used to be. Many Africans adore Beyoncé, but Africa doesn’t depend on her for glamour – they have their own upcoming Beyoncés. Also, pop culture is the province of the young. Africa has a bona fide youth wave hundreds of millions strong, and even in its poorest moments, it has always been a pop music superpower. As Trump narrows immigration pathways, the U.S. will soon be a country of old people.

And while U.S. streamers and tech companies remain massively influential, they don’t necessarily tell American stories. Netflix’s biggest hits in Africa are international hits like South Korea’s Squid Game and, increasingly, African series.

These realities mean that the axing of foreign assistance will overlap with the canceling of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at home to change how the rest of the world understands the American story.

This is, of course, part of the point of conservative initiatives like Project 2025. Underlying many of the Trumpian initiatives is the larger project of rewriting what “America” means, and many conservatives frame it as a recapturing of a national essence.

However, from the other side of the telescope, especially in the Global South, I bet the story will quickly become “The U.S. was never serious about democracy/human rights/inclusion anyway. Those were simply window-dressing. Got it.” An even more common takeaway will be, “Anyone who trusts the United States is a fool.” Once those stories are embedded, they’re not going away.

Two things will likely follow: first, affected countries will look around for alternative partners to try and save whatever they can. These may be Europe, but they’re more likely to be China, Russia, Türkiye, and Co. China will particularly benefit simply because of its combination of deep pockets, technical competence and political predictability.

Second, the world will simply move on. It may be more of a hobble than a stride, and many will die en route, but it’s movement, and it’s movement away from the U.S. As Kenya’s former president Uhuru Kenyatta put it: “This is a wake-up call for you to be like, what are we going to do to help ourselves?”

Each country will find its own set of answers to that question,n and the U.S. won’t like all of them. One reason for the U.S.’s foreign assistance is to set practices and norms that give U.S. entities and citizens a safer and friction-free way to do business. Weakened borders, undermined IP law, increased piracy, blooming new diseases, and mutating old ones are the likely consequences of the abrupt pause in this influence.

There’s no army in the world large enough to contain all these challenges. Foreign assistance was a relatively cheap (less than 1% of the federal budget) way to keep things running along American lines, and the systems it set up in Africa were world-leading. For everything else, from trade to infrastructure to green energy to ideas of what a futuristic life looks like, the continent has turned eastwards to China, the UAE, and others.

Now this central vector of U.S. influence in the Global South lies in chaos. Even if it were fully reinstated tomorrow, the U.S.-Africa relationship will remain broken. Add Trump’s carousel of tariffs, and we’re in for a global soft power experiment for the ages.

Nobody in Washington will care. At first. Everyone in the Global South will care. At first.

And then they won’t. That’s when the experiment becomes really interesting.

Cobus van Staden is the Cape Town-based Managing Editor of The China-Global South Project