It’s happening a lot. The latest news is that a total of 270 million US dollars from USAID funds over the past 15 years have been allocated to Soros projects. In the past few days, even payments to US media have been revealed.
And USAID won’t be the only one – US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has stated that all expenses for Ukraine will be subject to a review. There’s also another big chunk, which has not been touched yet: the “National Endowment for Democracy”, another channel that was used for influence and coups (and probably, like the others, also for backflows into black cash).
The reasons for this are likely to be of a technical nature. For example, the climate narrative as a strategy has failed (even if it hasn’t arrived in the EU yet). A decisive goal was always to establish a global ban that hinders the development of countries in the Global South and brings them into a debt spiral once more. At the same time, it was supposed to create the opportunity to lower the standard of living of the broad masses in industrialized countries at the expense of the financial sector. The fact that several Wall Street banks like J.P. Morgan have recently withdrawn from the climate project is a clear sign of this failure.
The problem is that large parts of the global US influence structure are built on these and other narratives – like LGBTQ – but in the moment when the underlying concept has failed, they no longer have any value. Apart from the fact that the whole ideology has been so far advanced in the US itself that it has led to serious setbacks.
Under analysts, it is currently being discussed how serious these changes are to be taken. There are those who say that Trump’s actions are an attempt to adapt the US imperium to a changed world situation. Arguments for this are, among other things, his statements towards Greenland and Canada, which can be read as a strategy to arrange the immediate own sphere of influence; in Greenland, it could, however, also be the goal to gain more control in the direction of the developing arctic transport routes.
Others again say that it’s just old wine in new bottles and the main goal of the Trump administration is to somehow rescue the US hegemony. The regime change methods would only change the veneer.
And it’s also difficult to discern in the very staged appearance of Trump what the real intention is and what is just a show. Three times, recently, there were developments that in reality rather point to pre-agreed arrangements than to real conflicts: starting with Colombia, followed by Mexico and Canada. In all three cases, there were initially rounds of mutual threats with tariffs, which were however already replaced within a very short time by agreements; in the case of Colombia by the willingness to take back its own citizens, which the US wanted to deport, if also after a transport in their own, not US, aircraft and in the case of Mexico and Canada by the statement that they would each add 10,000 more men to the border security.
In fact, the position of, for example, the Mexican government is not so clear-cut – after all, there are whole regions where it has in fact lost control to the cartels, a state of affairs that few governments find pleasant. One can therefore assume that the agreements between Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Donald Trump go much further than the relocation of 10,000 additional Mexican border police and soldiers to the US border. This will show in the next few weeks.
One thing is certain, however: in such a short time, such commitments do not occur anywhere in the world. Just the communication between the relevant ministry and the affected units takes more time. In the case of Colombia, where it was only about the deportation flights, this would still be realistic, considering Canada and Mexico, however, the time was much too short for what was visible and communicated in the media to also match what really happened. These fake feints are therefore a part of the Trump approach and these cases were staged in such a way that in the end all the parties involved could preserve their face, which is an interesting detail.
The question whether the acceptance of a multipolar world, as announced by Foreign Minister Marco Rubio, is part of the theater or part of the real intention is not easy to answer and for the strategic goals, to which the dismantling of USAID serves, the same applies. What is objectively certain is that the existing instruments (like USAID) are not suitable for any other strategy and therefore must be replaced. Because this is not only a matter of the personnel within these US institutions, but also of their cooperation partners in many countries worldwide, this process is not yet over, even if the technical dismantling of USAID has been impressively fast.
One must only consider how long the time was that the establishment of the climate narrative took in Anspruch – the beginnings lie in the era of the presidency of Bill Clinton, so before a quarter of a century. In the meantime, university chairs were established, which were occupied by supporters of the narrative, countless NGOs emerged and the existing media were guided in this direction. A departure from this would certainly be faster possible, but with certainty will take a time of five to ten years.
Politically, structures like USAID are only the leashes by which local partners are led. Why even a new structure, which replaces the old one under new conditions, will first of all be a skeleton without muscles, because the trick of “Soft Power” is based on finding willing collaborators, who are not immediately noticeable as being on a leash. Large parts of this personnel will be drawn over years, over scholarships, foundations, study stays. All this, however, took place under the old conditions and accordingly, it will now be a lot of US agents, who have been geared to LGBTQ and climate, who cannot fit into the new narrative.
This shows that the debate, whether Trump is really serious about the multipolar world or not, whether he is really dismantling the deep state or only modernizing it, has limited significance for the rest of the world, at least for the time being. The need for a course change is objectively, independently of whether the new course actually leads in the direction of multipolarity or not and the consequences of this course change are organizational. Even if Trump is only pretending to abandon unipolarism and exceptionalism – for the rest of the world, especially for the Global South, a greater space of maneuver will at least temporarily emerge, because a new framework for influence and control cannot be established overnight.
This is also visible in the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, which is geared to climate and co. and is currently at a loss, like a dog left on the roadside. There, a lot will be openly negotiated in the coming time, what in the past years flowed over all the influence channels of foundations. It will get much rougher – as one can see in Slovakia and Hungary, how it looks when the emerging spaces are also used.
In essence, there is no hurry to come to a final conclusion about what Trump is really after. Apart from those areas where it was clear from the start that not much will change (like Israel/Palestine), it is more important to recognize the emerging gaps and to use them. Moreover, the “Soft Power” of the EU is also in collision with the US course. In other words: it makes sense to keep an eye on the tanker that Trump is trying to turn, not to lose sight of it and to follow it with the required mistrust. But equally important is to recognize that turning a tanker is a slow and laborious process that can still bring some unexpected possibilities with it.