More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world

Revisiting The Ugly American, the way foreigners think about us, and the way we see ourselves

I am beginning to despair for my country. Under its new, triumphantly befuddled leadership, the United States is suddenly turning its back on the world with a vengeance, cuddling up to the worst dictators around—like Vladimir Putin—and threatening its longstanding peaceful allies, like Canada and Denmark, when they refuse to fall into line with insane directives from the huckster in charge. But even that is not the worst of it.

Killing off U.S. foreign aid is the lowest blow of all. As a former Foreign Service Officer, I shudder at the long-term implications of ending foreign aid to poorer countries. Disemboweling the USAID agency, which I have long considered the best and noblest part of the U.S. government, and just about the only truly altruistic thing we did as a government—both for its practical results on the ground in foreign countries and for its embodiment of the American spirit of generosity—is simply unconscionable.

On my first Foreign Service tour, I worked alongside many USAID contractors in Jamaica—where their efforts were valued far more than anyone in Washington seems to comprehend, 40 years later. I may not have agreed with the aims of every project I saw in Jamaica—and admit that some of them were probably less effective than U.S. leaders might have hoped—but I am convinced not one dime was ever wasted, or stolen. The folks who worked for USAID there cared about the lives of the poor but proud Jamaicans they were helping, teaching them to help themselves, and to be better citizens of their own country.

A 2010 report by the Congressional Research Service gave a snapshot of earlier aid to Jamaica, which had begun after independence in 1962; it declined somewhat under the first Michael Manley administration in the 1970s, when it was aligned more with Cuba, before resuming under Edward Seaga’s Reagan-friendly government after 1980. (More recent reports are no longer available, since the USAID website has been disabled.)

Over the years, Jamaica has received considerable amounts of U.S. foreign assistance. Over $500 million was provided in the 1990s, while from FY2000-FY2006, U.S. foreign aid averaged almost $23 million annually. Most of this aid was Development Assistance (DA) and Economic Support Funds (ESF) for USAID to implement a variety of development projects. More recently, U.S. assistance to Jamaica has declined somewhat. From FY2007 through FY2010, U.S. assistance averaged about $12.7 million annually.

Aid to Jamaica during that period also included assistance in combating HIV/AIDS, as well as continuing to provide industrial assistance under the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, including:

… support to assist Jamaica with port and border security measures and to increase the counternarcotics and counterterrorism capabilities of the Jamaican security forces and their capability to protect Jamaican waters … (while) about 70 Peace Corps volunteers in the country were working to help in youth projects, HIV/AIDS education, water sanitation, and environmental education (in 2010).

[See “Jamaica: Background and U.S. relations,” July 2010, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41318 .]

It has been a wise and productive program for 60 years, doing much to help Jamaicans overcome difficult problems the country faced in agriculture, security, crime, and health, without demanding a quid pro quo. But now, ordinary Jamaicans will suffer when this aid—which also did so much to bolster America’s reputation among the 2.8 million islanders—is suddenly halted. And just who does that help?

It is just one example of many successful U.S. programs across the globe, but one dear to my heart. As a private citizen today, I am alarmed. For I simply cannot conceive of a more stupid or counterproductive move by any government that pretends to lead others—particularly my own government, which I once admired but now find alien, inhuman, and empty-headed.

I weep, frankly, for the suddenly-dark future of my country: falling victim to greed, avaricious, banal greed, and sheer nasty envy, following petty, doltish men and women who lie about everything that matters and expect us to think that is normal. Like pigs rutting in a pigsty, grunting and stuffing themselves on our tax dollars and squealing for more—but only for them, to satisfy their insatiable lust for power. Like something out of Animal Farm, with apologies to George Orwell.

Not a single person in this new administration seems to care, or understand what it is to feel compassion for those billions of underprivileged people around the globe who will be doomed now to suffer. They do not care because they are smug, and heartless, and have forgotten what it is to be human—having sworn allegiance to the trough of the First Pig—and to share their wealth with those who will not survive otherwise.

To the millions of Africans who will no longer receive the life-sustaining drugs they had once received, in a miraculous gift from heaven, through PEPFAR, the brainchild of former President George W. Bush.

To the millions of citizens in struggling countries in South America and the Caribbean whose allegiance will now be transferred to the far more canny thugs in Xi Jin Ping’s China, because that is where their only assistance will now come from—and the strings that Chinese money brings with it.

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The sudden move prompted me to find and reread a 1950s bestseller, The Ugly American, which was linked to the establishment by President John Kennedy of USAID in 1961. Nearly 70 years after it appeared, it remains an eye-opening book—a sharp challenge to U.S. citizens to stand up for their beliefs. with something besides the bullets and napalm we would later send to Vietnam.

The publication of that novel set off a firestorm in Washington, prompting then-President Dwight Eisenhower to establish a commission to reexamine the international aid being provided abroad by our government—and led directly to President Kennedy’s efforts to create the new agency in November 1961, six months after signing an executive order creating the wildly popular Peace Corps, asking Americans to volunteer to serve overseas as citizens where needed, often in the same countries later to receive official U.S. aid. (Fast forward 64 years: nearly a quarter of a million U.S, citizens have since served honorably in the Peace Corps, in more than 140 countries.)

The 1958 bestseller that set a complacent Washington on fire with change. Courtesy W. W. Norton & Co.

I vaguely remember first reading The Ugly American as a teenager in the early 1960s, but I did not read it closely enough back then—nor did I bother to see the rather mediocre movie by that title released in 1963, starring Marlon Brando as the Ambassador and Pat Hingle as the title character. Nor did I realize what a tremendous effect the book was already having on Washington. The catch-phrase itself was preemptively adopted as a sort of code for how foreigners tended to see Americans abroad, although the novel’s authors, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, used it only as a physical description—not disparaging, simply descriptive—of one memorable character, Homer Atkins.

In the book at least, Atkins, a millionaire U.S. businessman who works with his hands, freely admits he is physically ugly, but is determined to help Asians help themselves—whether in Vietnam or Sarkhan, the fictitious Southeast Asian country where most of the action takes place. He and his wife choose to live in a poor village, alongside poor villagers, and gradually endear themselves to their neighbors by setting a quiet example of neighborliness and practical assistance. He helps them build a cheap pump to carry water up long distances; his wife solves a disfiguring social problem by helping bent-over housewives learn to sweep with a longer broom by showing them a longer reed as a broomhandle. Simple solutions to problems long unsolved in their tradition-bound culture. They were the unofficial forerunners of Peace Corps volunteers.

Even those who have read the book may not focus clearly on the authors’ unorthodox “factual epilogue,” which explains much of the reason why they wrote the book. It was a different era, of course, just before the United States began its doomed military involvement in Vietnam—back when U.S. advisors were still “assisting” the French efforts against Communist subversion in Indochina. The Ugly American was never intended simply as an anti-Communist treatise or propaganda tool, but it was clearly aimed at warning American leaders that whatever we were doing in Indochina—and by extension, in other countries (Africa, for instance) where Communist insurgencies were anticipated, or already underway—was failing, and failing badly. The Communists—the Soviet Russians—were spending far less, but winning hands down.

We were simply not winning the hearts or minds of the people with our expensive dams and highways, which they usually did not need—instead of providing simpler assistance with modernizing agriculture and learning, small step by small step, to improve their daily lives.

U.S. leaders apparently needed a swift kick in the backside from people who had been on the ground in Vietnam and elsewhere, and saw the warning signs of careful and very successful Russian planning, at the grassroots level. The “Ugly American” of the book lived out in a village and struck up friendships with the people he wanted to help—and almost unbelievably, earned their trust, first by observing cultural niceties and bothering to learn a little of their language.

It was sharp-eyed fiction at its best, based on carefully-researched, factual truth, with a clear point: Americans who wish to help others must first understand the people they help, and ask them what they need. But talk to them in their own language, not ours. In 1958, fewer than half of all America’s diplomats were fluent in the language of any of the countries in which they served, according to the authors’ epilogue—including the often witless, corrupt ambassadors who went out as political appointees.

What the United States needed instead, the authors argued, was not more high-minded representatives who “cannot speak the language and [can] have no more than an academic understand of a country’s customs, beliefs, religion, and humor” and as a result, “receive only a limited and often misleading picture of the nation about them,” but instead

… a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working, and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and—in some lands—their health. They must go equipped to apply a positive policy promulgated by a clear-thinking government. They must speak the language of the land of their assignment, and they must be more expert in its problems than are the natives.

Over the years, the term has long since come to be expanded and misused, covering almost all Americans, if particularly loud, obnoxious tourists who throw their money and bad manners in every direction and cannot understand why they are not admired—or even liked—but ridiculed.

I never agreed with that characterization of our tourists—but I do remember that few American tourists whom I met overseas ever went abroad to learn much, if anything about the history or the culture of the places they saw. Or bothered to get to know local citizens. Most tourists went instead to sightsee, take photographs, have fun, and spend money—their perfect right, of course—but not to educate themselves or broaden their minds, and rarely to learn the language. They did not expect, or even try, to make friends with the natives, and were often afraid to try. They did not realize they were being watched, and often pitied.

Worse, many—though not all—of the officers and ambassadors the United States was once sending abroad were little more than glorified tourists, in the authors’ opinions: spending too much time at cocktail parties with other Americans, friendly foreign diplomats, and the richest, most influential local citizens they could find to rub shoulders with. While learning very little useful information in the process …

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Whatever the term used to mean, I can tell you what it means today, and who the true Ugly Americans are: Donald Trump and his deranged zealot-acolytes, like Pete Marocco, who believes Serbia’s Christian nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina—modeled frighteningly after the Ku Klux Klan, active veterans of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990s—are the model for the future in Europe. The rest of the spineless minions who follow Trump so blindly—Lindsey Graham and his fellow Republican sheep, bleating in the Senate—have now thrown up their hands and cheer, insisting that he was elected to do whatever he and his appointees are doing. No argument allowed.

During Trump’s first term, Marocco proved so distasteful, even to MAGA leaders, that he was forced out as a minor staff member at USAID—after being ousted from jobs at three other federal departments, including State, where he technically works now. According to Rolling Stone magazine, he was reportedly photographed storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, although in fact, he was never charged with that offense, and furiously claims those recent reports are part of a smear campaign aimed at discrediting him. [See “Government Goons,” February 4, 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-marocco-usaid-jan-6-1235256698/ .]

But Marco Rubio—the gutless wonder who pretends to serve as Secretary of State, and named himself acting USAID administrator until a more suitable leader could be found—has recently seen fit to resurrect Marocco as his deputy in actual charge. The best man he could find, apparently—a dead ringer in physical appearance, unfortunately, for a Neanderthal in a suit—and a sad joke on the unimpressive Rubio. Now Rubio, between timid trips abroad to do nothing but channel half-witted orders from on high, sits fiddling nervously in his lavish seventh-floor offices at State while Marocco gleefully—and maliciously—burns down USAID.

At Elon Musk’s insistence, the State Department Rubio inherited is already shrinking. More than 700 senior staff, including 450 career diplomats, have reportedly resigned or put in for retirement since January, and the intake for untrained replacements will probably be one-third of that, or less. Of course, fewer officers will be needed in Trump’s Brave New World; at least a dozen U.S. consulates around the world will shut down this summer—to be replaced, almost certainly, by Chinese or Russian consulates, although neither he, nor Marco Rubio, nor Elon Musk much care about that outcome.

But there will almost certainly be more Trump-like ambassadors worldwide, with no relevant background and only money or political favors on their resumes. Witness Kimberly Guilfoyle, erstwhile fiancee of his oldest son, who is out to win the hearts and minds of a friendly and important NATO ally as ambassador-designate to Greece. Her flamboyance and loud, abrasive personality will likely win few admirers in a country that has come to expect a serious, respectful U.S. ambassador as a working ally, not a braying caricature or former lingerie model-cum-FOX News personality.

It recalls the bad old days of the 1950s … when ambassadorial appointees needed no visible qualifications to join the federal payroll … and proved their suitability as role models on almost a daily basis.

But this is 2025, and the Incredible Shrinking State Department is in free fall. Trump’s “Little Marco” opponent in the 2016 campaign has suddenly emerged as “Miniscule Marco.” His once-promising political career is over; he just doesn’t know it yet. He is irrelevant. He reminds me of Amos Hart, the sad, cuckolded husband from the musical movie Chicago, who sang “Cellophane Man.”

Everyone gets noticed, now and then
Unless, of course, that person it should be
Invisible, inconsequential me

Cellophane, Mister Cellophane
Should have been my name, Mister Cellophane
'Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me and never know I'm there …

Little Marco chose Pete Marocco to gut USAID and avenge his hurt feelings from 2020. Courtesy J. Scott Applewhite/AP.

Marocco’s actions have already run afoul of at least one federal judge, who recently refused to allow a related move he began—in concert with Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—to eliminate the separate African Development Foundation, an independent U.S. agency created by Congress in 1980. What will happen next is anybody’s guess. So stay tuned. When Marocco finishes, he may just take Rubio’s job. [See “Judge Temporarily Halts Trump administration,” March 5, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/african-development-foundation-doge-00216463 .]

He is not the only USAID official who wants to eradicate the legacy of the aid agency. According to the New York Times, acting executive secretary Erica Y. Carr this week “told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning,” despite an even older federal law explicitly forbidding such action without clearance from the National Archives.

The email [from Carr] told employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safes and personnel document files on Tuesday [March 11]. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Ms. Carr wrote, according to a copy of the email …

It is unclear if Ms. Carr or any other official at U.S.A.I.D. got permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy the documents. The Federal Records Act of 1950 requires U.S. government officials to ask the records administration for approval before destroying documents.

[See “USAID Official Orders Employees,” March 12, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/us/politics/usaid-shred-burn-documents.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20250311&instance_id=149720&nl=breaking-news&regi_id=66543734&segment_id=193180&user_id=9e758cd9bf637abc0a14a155f872e540 .]

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Going forward, there is little hope now that USAID—or traditional American generosity and common sense— will survive the slash-and-burn tactics Trump has unleashed. Court rulings may delay the inevitable, and force Trump to allow previously-authorized payments—for work already performed by contractors—to resume, for instance, but that is of little consequence for the future. No funding will be likely in the next fiscal year, which begins October 1.

And if Trump has his mindless, steam-roller way, the possible government shutdown after March 14 will end only when everything he wants, and nothing else, is given to him in the continuing resolution for the rest of the current year. Meaning no more funds for USAID, at all, ever. Eliminating the equally troublesome Peace Corps—all volunteers, paid almost nothing, except a pittance for expenses—cannot be far behind. Two of John Kennedy’s finest legacies are thus headed for the ash heap.

It is no secret that one reason for Trump’s complete disdain for USAID and foreign aid in general lies in his vindictive churlishness toward the last Biden administration and the last USAID administrator, Samantha Power. The brilliant author, journalist, and ex-U.S. ambassador to the UN under President Obama—with a wicked sense of humor and a salty mouth—is married to Cass Sunstein, a famous law professor.

Together, the Democratic power couple of the twenty-first century represents everything Trump is not—classy, intelligent, well-educated, witty, accomplished, and widely admired—and indeed, a resounding rejection of everything the peevish president sought but failed to get done in his first term and is now determined to accomplish in his second, come hell or high water.

Even more annoyingly, under former President Joe Biden, the USAID Administrator was granted a “permanent seat on the National Security Council (NSC), a more prominent role than under previous Administrations, during which the Administrator attended only certain NSC meetings that addressed the agency’s work and other development-related issues,” according to the Congressional Research Service report for FY 2023.

That gave Samantha Power a platform and voice on major policy issues well beyond USAID’s typical portfolio—a move which undoubtedly pleased the outspoken former UN ambassador, accustomed to serving on the NSC alongside major Cabinet secretaries.

Eradicating the last agency Power headed—and dropping its new seat from the NSC entirely—is therefore key to obliterating her despised legacy. That includes discrediting her energetic work in humanitarian relief around the world from 2021 to 2025—along with her tireless efforts toward inculcating “diversity, equality, diversity [DEI], and accessibility” (DEIA) firmly into the USAID mission worldwide.

Nothing, of course, seems to infuriate Trump more than DEI, which he has banned from any mention in any government printout, website, or handbook. Likely to follow is a ban on any mention of Samantha Power—now officially an “un-person” in the old Soviet playbook, as revamped by Vladimir Putin and loaned out; her official portrait has probably been taken down already and shredded.

With that in mind, it might be instructive to take a look at exactly USAID did in its waning years, under her leadership, before the book is closed and burned. The USAID website and its annual reports are now off limits to the public. But for starters, readers can still find the full CRS report on USAID, at least for the 2023 fiscal year, at the Congressional Research Service website—at least for now—which is https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10261 .

You are free to or disagree with its contents, but you should take the time to read the selected excerpts which follow:

In FY 2023 (the most recent year for which complete data are available), USAID managed more than $40 billion in combined appropriations, representing more than one-third of the funds provided in the FY 2023 Department of State. Foreign Operations, and Related Operations (SFOPS) appropriation and international food aid provided in the Agriculture appropriation.

In FY 2023, USAID provided assistance to approximately 130 countries. The top 10 recipients of USAID-managed funds in FY 2023 were, in descending order, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Syria. Reflecting USAID’s poverty reduction mandate, 70 of the 77 World Bank-determined low- and lower-middle-income countries received USAID assistance in FY 2023.

USAID programmed 40% of its funds in Europe and Eurasia in FY 2023, the majority of which were for Ukraine.

Beginning in the early 1990s, health was consistently the largest USAID sector by funding, bolstered since 2004 by billions of dollars in transfers from State’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and since 2020 by emergency assistance to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. In FY 2022, humanitarian assistance surpassed health as the largest sector. This followed year-over-year increases in humanitarian assistance in response to natural and human-induced humanitarian crises.

…

Ukraine. Since February 2022, Congress has appropriated more than $46 billion in emergency funds for accounts solely or partially managed by USAID to address the war in Ukraine. Funds have been obligated for direct financial assistance to Ukraine; humanitarian assistance; and development assistance in the agricultural, governance, and energy sectors, among other purposes.

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Perhaps a future president with nobler aims, less anger, and even a modicum of compassion will restore America to its rightful place as the world’s big-hearted leader, offering benevolent aid to the unfortunate citizens of the poorer countries we are now set to abandon.

For now, we must leave that to our former allies, particularly Canada, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, and the rest of the EU and Europe, including the United Kingdom. In 2023, all the members of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) gave out $223 billion in ODA (overseas development assistance), about a quarter of which went to Africa, the world’s saddest continent.

The U.S. share of that figure was roughly $60 billion, according to OECD charts and data [see https://data.one.org/analysis/official-development-assistance ]—although as a measure of national income, it means we grudgingly gave less than 0.25 percent of our national income, tied for 21st place with Slovenia, Spain, and Czechia—and far from the OECD-agreed goal of 0.7 percent of national income.

The rest of the world still gave about three times as much as we did. Worth noting is that only five nations—Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark—gave more than 0.7 percent, followed closely by Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, all at or above 0.58 percent. Canada, just above the 0.37 percent average for all ODA donors, still shamed the far-wealthier United States.

Despite the frequent complaints by short-sighted U.S. critics that all foreign aid is wasteful, we have always given far less than we could have—a tiny portion of our federal budget, less than one-half of 1 percent of our actual expenditures—and far too often, begrudged even that.

And now, thanks to hypocritical lackeys like Pete Marocco, Erica Carr, and Marco Rubio, and the incomprehensibly greedy, self-important man they so willingly serve—the whole new tribe of Ugly Americans, who have earned the title and serve it—we will give nothing, while our leaders pat themselves on the back for rewarding billionaires at home with tax cuts while millions starve and die beyond our shores.

Under the guise of America First, a stupid slogan which died in the face of Nazi Germany’s attack on Western civilization—but has somehow come back to life in the minds of witless social media influencers like Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino. This is a guiding philosophy? My Aunt Fanny. It’s the biggest scam ever perpetrated. It is shameful.

Trump’s minions will take smug pride in giving—or selling—arms and bombs to a few warlike countries, but no offsetting food, no medicine, no development assistance. Nothing that they truly need—and could actually benefit from—but plenty of profitable (for us) new ways to kill themselves and their neighbors …

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Finally, in a very personal note, here is a question I have lately begun to wonder about, and my own start at an answer:

Will the rest of the world make up the difference when the United States steps back from foreign aid?

Perhaps they will try. I hope so, as a citizen, and applaud them if they do. As a committed Christian, I pray so. But they cannot do it all.

To counteract our misguided leaders, I think it will now be up to increased private giving by Americans. I am convinced we must all rise above the petty greed of our fraudulent new government by “tithing” from our own private wealth to charities which serve the rest of the world’s starving populations.

We must make up this new deficit, if we are to hold our heads high as Americans, and reclaim the self-esteem we are fast losing. We can rise above the petty greed of the new Ebenezer Scrooge in Washington and his gargoyles, the ridiculous new Ugly Americans—but it will take a major effort.

Prepare to dig deep if you still believe in the American ideal of generosity. Find a good charity, and give until it hurts—and do it proudly. You might start with the late President Jimmy Carter’s legacy foundation, the incredibly generous and constructive Carter Center—one of my favorites; make him smile again from up above. And remember to support your faith organization’s overseas charitable agencies.

But don’t stop there … keep going. Find hardworking well-known, trustworthy 501 ( c ) 3 charities that focus on specific goals and don’t charge huge administrative fees —Save the Children, Feed the People, the list goes on. Give like your life depended on it.

We are citizens of this world, and our lives are all intertwined. We must share the bounty we have received with those who have nowhere else to turn, regardless of what our current leaders tell us.

It may be the only way to begin recovering our national pride from the Ugly Americans who are shamelessly shredding it.

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