On the one-month anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.
For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.
There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_diplomacy
Curiously, the three other global leaders in Medical Diplomacy are Cuba, China, and Taiwan. One of the biggest critiques of Trump’s cuts to USAID has been “you’re opening up inroads for evil foreign influence peddling campaigns”.
And there’s been a certain confirmation of this, from the African side of the conversation.
In South Sudan, specifically, Chinese diplomats have been aggressively peddling direct aid and coordinating international aid.
Meanwhile, the American administrations have persisted in its campaign of economic sanction as a tool to pressure players in the region