On the first anniversary of the dismantling of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, Thomas and Aimen trace the history of the organisation and ask whether USAID’s collapse represents a failure of liberal internationalism itself, or simply the end of one particular way of organizing American power in the world.
They discuss:
- Trump’s 2025 executive order and the effective end of USAID
- USAID, anti-communism, and the CIA
- The Clinton-era debate over whether USAID should survive at all
- USAID in the War on Terror: Iraq, Afghanistan, and counterinsurgency
- The Arab Spring and the shift toward NGO-mediated governance
- Corruption in USAID
- What the end of USAID tells us about the end of the unipolar era
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.
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