There are some things Washington should avoid doing even if it promotes American interests.

> Don't act like then entire purpose of USAID and the entire definition of soft power is whatever 0.08% of one year's budget you've been told to hate today.... Supporting democratic elections is soft power.

Don't talk down to me--I grew up around USAID and almost certainly know more about it than you. Nearly all our family friends are USAID or World Bank people. Virtually all of the people talking about USAID didn't know shit about it until it became another vector to play out their impotent rage at Trump.

Interfering in other countries' politics undermines American soft power and the mission of USAID. All the things you and I both like--vaccinations for kids, maternal health, etc.--require working with governments to executive effectively.

Interfering with domestic political affairs completely negates that. Governments will not trust a putative AID organization that is also bankrolling activist organizations in their countries. And approximately zero people in Asia/Africa/the Middle East have uniformly negative feelings about the U.S. meddling in their internal politics.

Fair, I was a bit ungenerous. So you believe - what? USAID shouldn’t engage in politics, and agree enough with a recent viral tweet to use it as your example, and to insinuate that anyone talking about USAID is just acting out their TDS. But also that USAID _should_ be doing the humanitarian work that comprised the overwhelming majority of its efforts and is quite literally being decimated. And that no benefit should accrue to the US? Or none in the form of a more aligned government or political system than history has allowed to take root?

I’ll start with the last point first. Americans should not mess with the political systems of other countries because that does more harm than good both to the other country and to America.

The lesson of the 21st century should be that you can’t speed-run civilizational development. Bangladeshis (to use my people as an example) aren’t just Americans who eat curry. They’re different humans. They do not want and cannot handle what americans call liberal democracy. They lack hundreds of years of predicate social development that made liberal democracy possible in the west. The same is true for Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Chinese, etc.

When America tries to encourage liberal democracy in these countries, it just immiserates the people. The authoritarian but relatively popular government in Bangladesh was overthrown recently by activists. (I was actually planning a trip to see family at the end of the last year and it got scuttled.) This will not lead to more liberal democracy. Instead, it will derail the economic growth we had been enjoying. Crime and instability have already skyrocketed. Islamists, who had been banned, are re-entering politics. Ultimately, the cost of delayed economic development will be something you can measure in hundreds of thousands of dead children.

People in the third world regard America as a villain because of its interference in foreign politics. Despite tremendous effort by USAID in Bangladesh (much of which my dad personally worked on) what everyone remembers about the U.S. is that Nixon opposed Bangladeshi independence because he was worried it and India would be aligned with Russia.

Liberal internationalists are bad people. I don’t think Samantha Powers or Blinken directly overthrew the government in Bangladesh, but their liberal-democracy fetish certainly caused them to pressure the previous government in a way that was not helpful. Not helpful either to Bangladesh, who needs stability and order more than anything higher on Maslow’s hierarchy, or the U.S., who benefited from the previous government’s human rights violations (killing Islamists without due process, etc.)

I don’t think Trump or Elon are great egalitarians. But their self interested approach is vastly superior to that of ideological nutjobs like Powers.