More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world

Stiffing our old allies over development money they contributed

Dismantling USAID has become a roller-coaster ride of sorts for the new Trump administration. Having frozen existing contracts previously funded by USAID around the globe and firing thousands of employees, the administration is suddenly facing pushback from federal courts, who have ordered the imploding agency to pay out some $2 billion for work already done—money Elon Musk and his brain-dead Keystone Kops were hastily bragging about having saved U.S. taxpayers, on a long list of exaggerated claims they are forced to “revise” downward almost daily.

The banned handshake logo of USAID, now being dismantled by the Trump administration. Public domain image

Another federal judge—the bane of Donald Trump’s angry existence—has ordered a halt to the gutting of the agency on grounds that the action has been conducted so far in an unconstitutional manner. According to The Guardian, “Elon Musk and the so-called ‘department of government efficiency’ (Doge) likely violated the US constitution by shutting down USAID,” further ruling that the administration must “reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency.”

The sweeping decision by US district judge Theodore Chuang “halted efforts to terminate USAid officials and contractors, and [ordered the administration to] reinstate former employees’ access to their government email, security and payment systems.” [See “Musk and DOGE’s USAID shutdown,” March 18, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/18/elon-musk-doge-usaid-shutdown-ruling .]

Other judges have considered ordering USAID staff—whoever remains after the recent blood-letting—to stop shredding documents and personnel records, as ordered by acting executive secretary Erica Carr earlier in March, although both judges eventually declined to act after accepting the administration’s promise (fingers crossed?) that the controversial shredding of records had stopped.

The actions may have no immediate effect on a separate effort by three European nations—longtime U.S. allies and major dispensers of overseas development assistance (ODA)—to find out what has happened to millions of dollars they had provided to fund joint projects with USAID. Sweden, The Netherlands, and Norway are puzzled about the status of more than $15 million they had contributed to a joint agricultural development program and other projects in low-income countries.

Troubled by the recent chaos over USAID, the three nations want to know how much, if any, has been spent so far, and when they they get back the rest of their unspent money—so they can continue the program without U.S. participation.

Already among the world’s most generous donors, so far they have funneled more than $8 million into a special joint project with USAID called WE4F (Water and Energy for Food), which is intended to help “farmers and others in poorer countries develop innovative ways to grow more food without straining water supplies or depending on climate-damaging forms of energy.” Sweden has invested another $7 million in other joint USAID projects—but has had no answer so far from its inquiries as to how much remains unspent.

“It’s a concern for us, especially as we want our partner organizations to be compensated for the work they have put into the programs,” Swedish government spokeswoman Julia Lindholm told the Associated Press. [See “American’s European allies are trying to pry their unspent money back,” March 23, https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-foreign-aid-sweden-norway-netherlands-d193b14df4a6a01b5b9c9c1d290b3e32?user_email=91ac9b91d9f16d9cb53659ee762e8e3af3dfff538fda7e64d6832d45d17cd261&utm_medium=Morning_Wire&utm_source=Sailthru_AP&utm_campaign=MorningWire_Sun_March23_2025&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers .]

And there may be other former allies waiting in line for a full accounting. If so, no one at the Incredible Shrinking State Department—which now “runs” the former special agency of the U.S. government responsible for dispensing Congressionally-authorized foreign assistance—is answering their phone calls, cables, or e-mails.

Nor is anyone at State responding to Associated Press questions “asking how many foreign governments had money for joint development programs going unspent and unrefunded in the USAID funding freeze, how much money that was in total, and whether the administration was doing anything about it.”

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Meanwhile, Miniscule Marco—the former Florida senator determined to impose a new economic blockade on his arch-enemy, Cuba—is heading off on yet another leisurely foreign trip to lecture allies and neutral nations alike on what actions they must take to please him and his increasingly erratic and vindictive boss—or risk being “yellow-listed” by State as uncooperative, or even more insultingly, having their leaders’ U.S. entry visas canceled.

What, me worry? Marco Rubio strikes an Alfred E. Neuman-like pose in Munich in February. Public domain photo

Rubio is headed for a joint meeting Wednesday in Kingston, Jamaica—his first trip to the Caribbean since being sworn in as Secretary of State—with four regional leaders: Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Andrew Holness; Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, head of the 15-member Caricom group; Trinidad and Tobago’s brand-new leader, Stuart Young; and the new head of Haiti’s embattled Transitional Presidential Council, Fritz Alphonse Jean, according to the Miami Herald. [Read more at “Rubio will make first official visit to Caribbean,” March 21, at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article302478699.html#storylink=cpy .]

The Caricom leaders held an emergency virtual meeting in advance on Friday, grappling with issues raised by Rubio and his dimwitted advance team in recent weeks, including the future of Cuban medical teams currently supplied to many Caribbean countries and how to tweak citizenship-by-investment programs at least four smaller Caricom nations now have in place.

In February, Rubio issued an ominous threat—to 22 nations, including four small Caribbean nations, on a new “yellow list”—against countries issuing passports to the wrong kind of deep-pocketed foreigners—that singles out “purportedly inadequate security practices for issuing passports, or the selling of citizenship to people from banned countries.” Until they resolve unspecified “deficiencies,” those nations risk being reassigned to a new “red” list (11 nations, led by Cuba and Venezuela)—no U.S. travel allowed at all—or a slightly less punitive “orange list” of 10 nations, led by Russia, which requires intensive vetting of visa applicants.

Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, St. Kitts & Nevis, and St. Lucia all offer variations on a theme—“Citizenship by Investment” to qualified foreigners willing to invest at least $300,000 in their property. For small island nations with little more than tourism to fund their economies, it seemed like a good idea—until Donald Trump took office and started offering his own $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy foreigners, that is.

In a separate announcement in March, Rubio then shocked many Caribbean nations by his newly ramped-up attack on Cuba’s longtime practice of assigning its medical workers abroad, which he called “forced labor linked to the Cuban labor export program. This expanded policy applies to current or former Cuban government officials, and other individuals, including foreign government officials, who are believed to be responsible for, or involved in, the Cuban labor export program, particularly Cuba’s overseas medical missions.” [italics are author’s]

Leaders of countries accepting Cuban medical assistance are now subject to losing their U.S. entry visas if they continue participating. (Sorry, no more shopping in Miami or Broadway plays except at the UN General Assembly fall session, y’all.)

While there are no specific figures for how many Caribbean nations are recipients of the Cuban aid, Jamaica’s foreign minister recently reported the current number in her country of 2.8 million as “more than 400.” St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves reported that Cuban dialysis clinics were keeping 60 patients alive in his tiny country—with no other option available.

Rubio is not expected to offer any alternatives to the Caricom nations, since he has gleefully helped gut USAID, and the U.S. is currently withdrawing from the World Health Organization, which will be hard put to provide any stopgap funding. In 2024-2025, for instance, the United States underwrote nearly one-fifth of the total WHO budget, contributing $1 billion in funding—of which about $250 million was its assessed contribution, and the rest voluntary contributions, in large part from philanthropic foundations. [See “US withdrawal from WHO,” https://www.statista.com/topics/13144/us-withdrawal-from-the-who-reasons-and-consequences/#topicOverview .]

Instead, he will offer the usual block-headed Trump insistence that they must do what he says—or pay the extorters’ price: that is, do it alone, without any outside medical assistance at all.

Mottley, Gonsalves, and Stuart Young’s predecessor—Keith Rowley—have already announced they will willingly forgo their U.S. visas if that is what it comes down to. Others—The Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda—have publicly agreed to look into the programs, at least, and determine whether they are worth continuing.

Don’t you point your finger at me, Marco, little boy. Public domain photo

Mottley, at least, is not likely to back down in Kingston. A force to be reckoned with in any setting, she will almost certainly remind Miniscule Marco in person of just what he can do with his pinheaded threats, now and in the future—and may take him to the mat to prove it.

The Cuban program, for which some low-income nations pay as they are able and others pay nothing at all—at least 27 of 62 recipient nations were free in 2017, according to Jacobin.com—extends to more than 50 nations at present, with some 25,000 Cuban doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel currently involved.

Barbados gladly paid its Cuban medical team prevailing wages during the COVID-19 crisis. At least one wealthy nation—Qatar—always pays full-market costs, and supplements it by helping underwrite free care elsewhere.

U.S. pressure has brought some countries to heel since 2017—most notably, Brazil, during the dunderheaded Bolsonaro regime—and more may cave to the relentless onslaught of Marco’s empty-headed and often inaccurate rants. He has railed for years against anything and everything related to Cuba—even falsely claiming, for years, that his parents were forced to flee Fidel Castro’s Communist regime a decade before he was born, until the Washington Post discovered that they left in 1956, years before Castro came to power. Ooops … [See “Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, October 21, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/marco-rubios-compelling-family-story-embellishes-facts-documents-show/2011/10/20/gIQAaVHD1L_story.html .]

Whatever Miniscule Marco thinks of Cuba’s medical assistance program, his viewpoint is in the minority worldwide. Almost all countries who have participated since it began in 1960—all 140 of them—have been more than satisfied with the quality of Cuban-provided medical care, described by some observers as among the best in the world. The program has ramped up considerably since the 1990s, and is now Cuba’s single largest generator of foreign currency.

According to Jacobin.com, “between 1999–2015 alone, overseas Cuban medical professionals saved 6 million lives, carried out 1.39 billion medical consultations and 10 million surgical operations, and attended 2.67 million births, while 73,848 foreign students graduated as professionals in Cuba, many of them medics.” [See “Cuba sends doctors, the US sends sanctions,” by Helen Yaffe, March 21, https://jacobin.com/2025/03/cuba-medical-programs-us-sanctions .]

Today there are different cooperation contracts, from Cuba covering the full costs (donations and free technical services) to reciprocity agreements (costs shared with the host country) to “triangulated collaboration” (third-party partnerships) and commercial agreements, according to Jacobin.com. But Rubio’s new measure does not differentiate between them; they are all damned with the same xenophobic paintbrush.

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Meanwhile, the death count from the cessation of U.S. medical aid abroad has already begun. The first deaths of five HIV patients in South Sudan—who were no longer able to receive the life-sustaining anti-retroviral drugs once made widely available by George Bush’s PEPFAR program—were documented this week by Nicholas Kristof in his opinion piece for the New York Times.

According to Kristof, “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.” But with no one around to administer the drugs, and no new drugs being shipped, Musk’s claim is already a blatant falsehood. [See “Musk says no one has died since aid was cut. That isn’t true,” March 15, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html .]

Former President George W. Bush willed the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR] into existence two decades ago. Almost miraculously, it has since saved an estimated 25 million lives in Africa by supplying cheap doses of anti-retroviral drugs—at a cost of roughly 12 cents a day per patient. In 2022, he and former First Lady Laura Bush were awarded the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition’s “Global Leadership Award” for PEPFAR. (I believe he should have received the Nobel Peace Prize for it, as well, but Iraq got in the way; the Scandinavians, always perversely disposed against leaders who start wars, never agreed.) [See the languishing website, at https://www.state.gov/pepfar/ .]

But all his good deeds are now beginning to unravel. Some estimates claim more than 1.5 million Africans will now die in the next year without those drugs. In Elon Musk’s native South Africa alone, where more than 7 million people are H.I.V.-positive, “the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation estimates that ending PEPFAR would lead to more than 600,000 deaths over a decade in that country alone,” Kristof wrote.

And all because white-as-white-can-be Elon Musk, the heartless soul of the Trump administration, hates his black-majority native country so much, as much as he seems to disdain his first-adopted country, Canada, and dismisses almost anyone of color in the latest country where he has now made so much money—and now, caused so much misery. While his fuming rival over at State nurses his bruises and helps out …

Musk recently erupted in fury after a Breitbart News report quoted the newly-credentialed South African ambassador to the U.S. as calling Musk a “dog whistle” in the worldwide white-supremacy movement—imprudent, perhaps, even at a Webinar. But before Ephraim Rasool—a veteran diplomat who had served for five years in an earlier U.S. posting without any protests—could draw his next breath, he was ordered out the door by globetrotting puppet Marco Rubio, by tweet, while descending stairs of an airplane from Canada, without even the courtesy of a goodbye interview.

Persona non grata in the Brave New World of Donald Trump and his billionaires’ club …

Elon Musk is no gentleman—but a chainsaw-massacre aficionado extraordinaire. Courtesy x.com/elonmusk

The self-styled “Dogefather” doesn’t seem to care how many black Africans might die. They don’t matter, after all. They don’t buy Teslas, poor sods. He is too busy waving his chainsaw, jumping around on stages, and giggling like a deranged Golem on ketamine—with apologies to the unfortunate mythical creature of Hebrew folklore—as he and his mindless goons tear down USAID’s revered legacy. And steal donations from any country foolish enough to collaborate with it, then shred the records … laughing all the way.

Golem, with Hebrew word for ‘truth’ inscribed on its forehead. Illustration courtesy Phillipe Semeria

No Nobel Peace Prize will ever grace the legacy of the Donald Trump administrations, no matter how much he craves that kind of adulation. For he does not possess even the single ounce of unselfish altruism required to qualify—only a perverse jealousy of those who do, like former Presidents Obama and Carter, and others who quietly did truly humanitarian things, like George Bush.

But maybe there should now be a Nobel Death Prize to honor the mass-murdering ilk—Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Slobodan Milosevic, and Pol Pot, all safely consigned to hell, to name just a few intellectual descendants of Adolf Hitler—with a prize decorated with skulls and crossbones, and a warning attached: prepare to surrender your soul as you depart this world. There are already claimants in line: Rodrigo Duterte, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin, all of whom have made Faustian pacts with the devil to eliminate many thousands of expendable souls in a quest for absolute power.

For Elon Musk, five deaths are unfortunate, perhaps only “collateral damage,” in the time-dishonored phrase used as an excuse by those rationalizing their misdeeds as otherwise constructive. They are not necessarily evidence of mass murder. But unless he turns back from the deadly course he has charted, he will eventually emerge as the full-fledged comic-book villain he already appears to resemble.

For 600,000 deaths is different, harder to whitewash as “collateral” damage—and no matter how much he pretends otherwise, that much blood would stain Elon Musk forever. If Elon Musk keeps working so hard at dismantling USAID, and ending PEPFAR, with a little help from his friends and allies, he seems bound to wind up as a well-deserved future recipient of the Nobel Death Prize.

And if Sweden and Norway don’t get their money back from USAID, well, maybe, just maybe that kind of reciprocal justice will prevail one day in the halls of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts and the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Next time: More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world