President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order Monday to put a hold on nearly all foreign assistance worldwide, effective immediately. The US State Department's Secretary Marco Rubio sent a cable to all US diplomatic posts on Friday outlining the move, which threatens billions of dollars of funding from the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for programs worldwide.
Foreign assistance has been the
target of isolationist Republicans who don't understand that foreign aid is America's most powerful soft power tool. State Department officials, including those at the US Embassy in Beirut, are reeling at the move because cutting off aid to the Lebanese Army might derail the newly installed administration of President Joseph Aoun, himself the Lebanese Army's former chief.
The order calls for for immediate “stop work” on existing foreign assistance and pauses all new aid. It is sweeping in its scope. Essentially all foreign assistance appears to have been targeted unless specifically exempted. That means lifesaving global health aid, development assistance, military aid, and even clean water distribution could all be affected.
Naturally, the order exempts foreign
military financing for the Zionist colony in Palestine, a.k.a. Israel, and its vassal Egyptian subsidiary under the leadership of the dictator Al-Sissi. Other countries that receive foreign military financing,
like Ukraine or Taiwan, are not exempted and will suffer the consequences of being abandoned by Donald Trump's administration.
“It’s a global freak out at the moment,” a humanitarian official said Saturday.
InterAction, an alliance of international nongovernmental organizations, said in a statement Saturday that the freeze “interrupts critical life-saving work including clean water to infants, basic education for kids, ending the trafficking of girls, and providing medications to children and others suffering from disease. It stops assistance in countries critical to U.S. interests, including Taiwan, Syria, and Pakistan.”
The move will inevitably lead to dangerous vacuums that China and other adversaries of the US will quickly fill. Another humanitarian official said the pause is incredibly disruptive and said the specifics are “as bad as can be.”
In
his executive order, Trump claimed that the US “foreign aid industry
and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many
cases antithetical to American values.” He knows that the entire world takes the dumb Americans for suckers - he said it many times that the US is the laughingstock of the world - and he's being vindictive by shutting off the money tap, but he's also being stupid because the only power the US has over other countries is money (short of disastrous military interventions that the US has failed time and time again).
As the Lebanese Army stands to counter Iran and Hezbollah's three-decades long grip on Lebanon, as part of the ceasefire agreement with Israel, depleting the Lebanese Army's supply of armament is critical and could derail the ceasefire agreement. Trump's order might in fact be to specifically derail the agreement in order to advance Israel's expansionist agenda in the Lebanese south. The Israeli army was bound to withdraw completely from south Lebanon as of yesterday January 26, 2024, but it has already failed to honor its terms and has now postponed its withdrawal to February 18, 2024 after killing 22 Lebanese citizens trying to return to their villages.
Those idiotic Lebanese and Lebanese-Americans who supported Trump's campaign should now be taking stock of the mistake they made. In fact, where in the world is Massad Boulos, the much vaunted Lebanese-American senior - but a ghost - adviser to Trump? Not a word. Not one appearance. Instead, Trump sends a Zionist envoy to "negotiate" with Netanyahu on how to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and deport the Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt.
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