That the current presidential administration in Washington is taking steps world-wide to close down, essentially to kill off, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is possibly the most shocking, and longest-reaching, foreign-policy step that could possibly have been taken.  One of the historical Cold War agencies founded after World War II to help the United States compete with the Soviet Union, USAID was created by President John F. Kennedy in November 1961, and it soon became the “public face of American diplomacy” around the world, along with the U.S. Information Agency that for nearly five decades, from 1953 until 1999 when most of its elements were folded into the State Department, implemented press and information as well as culture and education relations with foreign publics abroad, often from offices, libraries, and other U.S. information centers outside of the high-walled and heavily secured U.S. embassies  

For about three decades, American government foreign-service experts implementing U.S. government assistance programs abroad became, for the general populations of those countries, the Face of America.  Tens of thousands of people in foreign countries had the opportunity to meet American citizens, USAID workers, face to face, whereas many fewer of them ever would have been able to meet the traditional U.S. diplomats working in the U.S. embassies.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan “privatized” USAID, essentially turning it into a pass-through for U.S. foreign assistance funds to U.S. private-sector organizations that then raked into their own coffers about 30% of those U.S. funds designated for the populations of foreign countries as part of their “standard operating costs.”  The remaining relatively small number of USAID direct employees became, at least to a certain degree, “green-eyeshade specialists” working in Washington and in U.S. embassies abroad to manage the private-sector implementers out in the field at the real ground level. 

This “privatization of assistance” caused headaches for U.S. ambassadors abroad, because the newly designated private-sector implementers, U.S. private citizens, quite often liked to consider themselves – and to portray themselves to the public – as unrelated to the U.S. embassy in the country where they were working and, in fact, would often try to keep as much distance as possible from the embassy.  To oversimplify, they often saw themselves as “good citizens” and too often perceived the official U.S. diplomats assigned to the embassies as “out-of-touch government flunkies.”  Because of this kind of perception, these often young private-sector implementers too often saw themselves as exempt from the security requirements and, sometimes, travel restrictions that they believed “limited,” even isolated, the U.S. diplomats working inside the U.S. embassies.

To a certain degree, what I have just described here is “inside baseball” and seldom surfaced between the private-sector U.S. assistance implementers and the citizens of the countries where they were working.  And in a sense, that was really the glory of USAID:  it created broad swaths of people-to-people relations abroad that, more often than not, spread a positive vision of America.  

In the current world of foreign affairs, Russia and, especially, China have certain degrees of education, culture, and development programs but nothing close to the broad extent historically implemented by the United States.  Closing down USAID and sending home from abroad the thousands and thousands of U.S. private-citizen implementers will take away this unique “soft diplomacy” and put Washington more on a par with Moscow and Beijing, at least in the way that citizens abroad perceive those three “great powers.”

It's still much too early to know how the United States will now present itself – and be perceived – abroad.  What is clear, however, is that we – the U.S. government and the American people – truly have come to the end of an era.  

May the soon-to-be-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development, and the people-to-people diplomacy it represented, rest in peace.  And may a positive new form of people-to-people diplomacy emerge as soon as possible to present the United States, and the American people in general, in the best possible light around the world.