Opinion Guest Essay
This Isn’t the Donald Trump America Elected
Feb. 9, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
Listen to this article · 8:59 min
By Ben Rhodes
Mr. Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer. He served as a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.In 1962, not long after President John Kennedy created U.S.A.I.D., the federal agency tasked with administering foreign assistance, he welcomed its first mission directors to the White House. He noted the difficult politics of sustaining foreign assistance but called it essential to America’s role as leader of the free world.
“There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave,” he said of their imminent deployments, “or parades when you come back.” The reward was the work itself and the larger cause of freedom it served.A nation’s foreign policy is a good window into its psyche.
The America that created U.S.A.I.D. had an expansive view of itself in the world: defending freedom, buttressing international institutions, waging battles for the hearts and minds of peoples across the world — an effort that dovetailed with the civil rights movement at home.
The America that is cannibalizing U.S.A.I.D. has a very different sense of its place in the world: threatening conquest of smaller nations, withdrawing from international institutions, casually proposing ethnic cleansing in Gaza — a worldview that complements the mass deportations and erasure of diversity programs at home. A nation growing smaller in size and self-conception.
Source Links: Opinion | This Isn’t the Donald Trump America Elected – The New York Times
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