Rubio’s Foreign Aid Overhaul Misreads Aid influence and China’s Role
On July 1, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the end of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an independent aid implementer. In its place, he offered on a substack commentary a new American Foreign Policy aid doctrine, where aid would now focus on trade, investment, and competition with China. In practice, this means slashing most humanitarian programs, folding remaining assistance into the State Department, and ending what Rubio calls the “NGO industrial complex.”
Secretary Rubio’s approach misdiagnoses why U.S. aid has struggled, overestimates what trade can fix, and misunderstands how China operates. By tearing down the scaffolding of U.S. global presence under the guise of strategic realignment, Rubio risks weakening—not strengthening—American influence abroad.
Misdiagnosis the problem
Humanitarian aid is a tool of foreign policy—it serves both strategic objectives and moral imperatives. It has long bolstered U.S. soft power, but more importantly, it is often the only thing keeping people alive in conflict zones. Judging its effectiveness in isolation misses the point. If there is no serious political effort to resolve the wars and crises that create the need for aid, then the failure lies not in the aid itself, but in the broader foreign policy framework.
For decades, both Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to deliver the political outcomes necessary to reduce the demand for aid in the first place. Rubio claims that USAID has little to show for decades of investment and blames bloated NGOs for failing to deliver results. But aid programs are not a substitute for good foreign policy—they are a stopgap when diplomacy, governance, and stabilization fail to materialize. In reality, many aid programs have succeeded despite the absence of a serious U.S. political strategy to support them. The real failure lies not with implementing partners, but with a foreign policy that over relied on military partnerships and counterterrorism operations, while underinvesting in long-term solutions that address the root causes of instability.
In Syria, for example, U.S. aid programs provided food, clean water, and basic services for communities displaced by U.S.-led operations against ISIS. When USAID funds were cut during the Trump administration, NGOs couldn’t pay their staff. Critical infrastructure projects halted. Security guards at camps hosting ISIS fighters and their families walked off the job. Displaced families—many uprooted by the U.S. itself during the D-ISIS operations—were left with no aid or services.
Far from being wasteful, that aid was the only thing holding the system together. It stabilized conditions which enabled the U.S. military presence, gave local authorities the ability to sustain their operations, and helped prevent renewed instability. Removing it didn’t expose inefficiency—it created it.
From Humanitarian to Development
Rubio also claimed that developing nations are “addicted” to aid and now seek a transition from humanitarian aid to development and investment instead. Part of this sentiment may be true in theory—many nations do want development over humanitarian aid—but it does not mean humanitarian aid is obsolete. In places many hit by conflict, crisis, or environmental change, both development and humanitarian aid are necessary. It is difficult for a nation to build an economy on an empty stomach.
Take Syria again. President Trump has eased sanctions to allow the country to begin to rebuild after fourteen years of conflict. In reality, the benefits of sanctions relief may take months or years to reach ordinary people, especially given the extent of destruction across Syria. Meanwhile, Syrians in Syria and in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkiye face life-threatening needs now. The U.S. pulled humanitarian support prematurely, and the ongoing consequences of that action could undercut the administration’s own ambitions to allow Syria to rebuild. The lesson is that it is difficult to wean countries off aid when the Administration dismantled the very structures needed to sustain the transition.
These are not abstract examples. In Northeast Syria, the Kurdish-led authorities in northeast Syria suddenly inherited responsibility for millions of displaced people after U.S-funded programs were eliminated overnight, shaking the foundation of basic services. When these programs were pulled, everything else unraveled—governance, security, even water. There was no private sector waiting to step in because even the private sector groups operating in Northeast Syria were bound to U.S. funding.
Countering China’s Ghost
Rubio presents his aid overhaul as a countermeasure to China’s global rise. But here lies the central contradiction the Trump administration must confront: pulling back U.S. aid from fragile regions doesn’t deter China’s influence—it creates space for it. The irony is that China has shown little interest in assuming humanitarian roles traditionally led by the United States. Aside from a few UN agencies where it holds structural sway, Chinese officials have been explicit in several dialogues I’ve participated in: they will not step in after U.S. aid is withdrawn.
China does not operate humanitarian programs in unstable environments—especially where there is no functioning state partner to engage. It has no appetite for large-scale delivery in high-risk contexts like Syria, Sudan, or Gaza. This is by design. China does not do aid in the traditional sense. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s focus is on infrastructure, long-term investment, and strategic returns—not crisis relief. If the U.S. pulls out of places where it has been the bedrock of stability, there will be no real competition to backfill. Rather, things are just likelt to collapse.
Retooling U.S. aid to counter China’s BRI might sound like a novel approach, but in practice it mirrors what the Biden administration already pursued: infrastructure-centered initiatives like the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), the G7’s Build Back Better World, and USAID-backed efforts to drive connectivity. These strategies aimed to make the U.S. a viable alternative to China without dismantling humanitarian programs. Infrastructure, trade, investment, and tech have always been on the table—and they didn’t require gutting what makes American aid distinctive.
Rubio’s framework may set up U.S. foreign policy to do the opposite. In trying to make U.S. aid more agile—or more “strategic”—he undercuts the very tools that set it apart from China’s model. A smarter approach would ask how humanitarian aid can enable investment—how crisis response can stabilize the ground for infrastructure to take root. After all, the places where the U.S. wants to compete economically are often the very places grappling with conflict, displacement, and basic needs.
More fundamentally, Rubio is tying foreign aid to a moving target: U.S. foreign policy. This introduces greater volatility, not effectiveness. American foreign policy shifts with every administration. Aid, by contrast, has historically served as one of the few steady, bipartisan expressions of U.S. leadership abroad. Politicize it, and that continuity is lost. Rubio may want strategic alignment, but what this is creating is a system that swings wildly with domestic politics. Lasting partnerships cannot be built on that degree of instability.
A Strategy in Name Only
Reforming aid is necessary. But this is not reform. But aid is not just about charity—it is about buying presence, creating leverage, and building trust globally. It gave the U.S. access in places its diplomats and soldiers could not always go. And it offered a vision of global leadership that wasn’t defined by force or military power alone.
There’s an old Pentagon saying: “If all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Similarly, if all Rubio sees in USAID is waste, then every program looks like a problem to be erased. But if Rubio erases too much, he will find he erased the very influence the U.S. is trying to project.