Donald Trump said he was going to do it. His foreign policy and his defence team gave due warning that they’d do it. And yet, as Marco Rubio smashed a fist into the solar plexus of an already battered Ukraine, there’s still stunned surprise.
In a memo sent to embassies and agencies who rely on US funding, to a tune of $72 billion at last count, the new US secretary of state ordered a stop order on American world wide aid funding for up to 90 days.
Excluded from this move are Israel and Egypt. They’re fine.
Ukraine is a democracy that’s been identified by the highest court on the planet, the Internmational Criminal Court, as being the victim of war crimes. But aid from the US, both civilian and military, appears to have been cut overnight with the sweep of a pen.
As the memo was being digested around the world, one aid agency head was quoted by the Reuters news agency as calling it “lunacy”.
Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who is now president of Refugees International, said. “This will kill people. I mean, if implemented as written in that cable … a lot of people will die.
“There’s no way to consider this as a good-faith attempt to sincerely review the effectiveness of foreign assistance programming. This is just simply a wrecking ball to break as much stuff as possible.”
But it’s worst than that. Rubio’s edict, which is intended to being all foreign aid operations around the world into line with Trump’s foreign policy objectives, directly serves the interests of Vladimir Putin.
Anticipating this dramatic freezing of foreign assistance the outgoing administration of Joe Biden rushed through an additional $2.5 billion in emergency military aid for Ukraine last December. Of that, the New York Times reported, half would come from existing US stockpiles and the rest to be spent on newly bought weapons.
Biden also signed off on $3.4 billion in financial aid support for the Ukrainian economy. One project, agreed on December 5 last year, involves US aid of of $825 million to Ukraine’s energy sector. These are emergency funds to, literally, keep the lights on while Russia targets the nation’s power grid.
All of that support is now either in doubt, or frozen for weeks and possibly months, at a time when Trump wants to drive a “peace deal” between Ukraine and Russia and force both sides into negotiations.
During the Cold War groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and western politicians sympathetic to the communist ideology of the Soviet Union were derided by the KGB as “useful idiots” who were accidentally serving the interests of the Kremlin.
Ukraine is on the back foot militarily. After three years of war its troops are exhausted, its government under Volodymr Zelensky is weakening, and its ammunition dangerously low as Ukrainian blood turns the farmland of the east into mud.
If ever there was a strategic blow Putin would love to see an ally deal Ukraine, it would be to undermine its morale, threaten to garotte its arms supplies, and signal to its fighting forces that they’re being abandoned.
Trump’s frequent derision of Nato, the cornerstone of western security against Russia, while Russian officials, including Putin, have signalled their designs of the Baltic states (all Nato members) and even Poland, suggests that the US president is firmly in Camp Kremlin. Western Europe is now vulnerable too.
Trump has long maintained that he has sympathy for Russia’s invasion, because of Ukraine’s desire to join Nato, and that he was minded to cut aid spending for Kyiv. Now he’s done that.
With such malice aforethought one can only conclude that Trump’s no idiot. He can no longer be considered an ally either.
