"Huge recipients of U.S. foreign aid -- Egypt, Pakistan, and the like -- voted no more in tune with American values than similar countries that received no, or less, U.S. foreign aid. Instead, their votes correlated closely with those of Cuba, which wasn't a big foreign-aid donor.
That finding, surprising at the time, remains true. Four of the largest U.S. foreign-aid recipients today -- Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, and Afghanistan -- all take contrary positions on issues of critical importance to the White House. South Vietnam once got gobs -- gobs upon gobs -- of U.S. foreign aid. That didn't help much. Likewise with Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Zaire (now the "Democratic" Republic of the Congo), and other "friendly" (read: graciously willing to take U.S. money) countries.
The conclusion seems clear: The relationship between "the United States' ability to positively influence events abroad," as Nye puts it, and the amount of U.S. foreign aid a country receives is unclear at best. For decades now, the United States has been the No. 1 foreign-aid donor -- it has given the most money to poor countries -- so it can't move up any on that scale. But this hasn't translated in making America the most popular or most influential country around the world. Quite the contrary."
I'm starting to be more and more skeptical of "soft power" myself. Especially when it seems to be used as an excuse to act upon our impulses to do good, rather than a real tool to promote American agendas AND do good. It seems, sometimes, as if we are a nation of dysfunctional d0-goodism, dumping billions of dollars of aid into places like Afghanistan where it ultimately fuels corruption and does little for the people. Less might be more, sometimes. The problem with "soft power" is that we indiscriminantly use that concept to dump aid with little measure of ROI (return on investment). And I'm even now beginning to think that we de-legitimize countries where we dump aid. Like Afghanistan.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments welcome, just be polite.