000-tobecategorised

Does Trump’s Attempted “Dismantling” of Spook-Infested, Regime Change Agency USAID Herald a New Foreign Policy Era? https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/will-trump-doge-sink-spook-infested-regime-change-agency-usaid-and-does-assault-herald-a-new-foreign-policy.html by Conor Gallagher February 5, 2025

USAID’s funding often supports media outlets, educational programs, and NGOs that promote pro-Western narratives. https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/1886208239991431607 

Trump’s takedown of USAID, like much of his 2nd term, motivated by vengeance for the Russiagate hoax. The left-liberal-center spectrum that drove Russiagate for 4 years has since forgotten about it, but for MAGA Russiagate is red hot live & a great mobilizer.  https://x.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1886192778608070749 

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1886082749779607997 Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself.

Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of "allies": they don't want - or maybe rather can't afford - vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests.

Western-Backed NGOs: A Hollow Version of Civil Society https://jacobin.com/2025/02/western-ngos-funding-civil-society  Byv
Almut Rochowanski ..deploying their vast fortunes to pursue their own ideas of what ails the world and how to fix it, creating entire countries’ NGO sectors from scratch, micromanaging them with armies of program officers, and, as the ultimate prize, capturing policymaking in the countries targeted by their munificence.. 

After World War II, in parallel to decolonization, NGOs — tellingly, “nongovernmental organizations” — rose slowly but unstoppably to become one of the main players in international development aid, because donor countries did not trust the (Third World) state with social and economic agendas...

Western legislative traditions going back to the nineteenth century reflected the classic civil right of freedom of association and thus provided a regulatory framework for associations in the literal sense: people coming together as members of a club or union, taking action primarily through members’ volunteer activities to benefit each other or the common good, funded by default by membership fees. The NGOs that Western governments finance with their development aid budgets look nothing like this, but more like start-ups run by social entrepreneurs. Instead of members and volunteers, they have bosses and employees organized in strict hierarchies, and hard borders separate those who build lucrative careers managing NGOs from those who benefit from their assistance.

Since last year, the European Commission has been hammering out a new directive on “transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries,” which explicitly includes NGOs as the carriers of such “interest representation.” ..

Without foreign grant funding, the majority of NGOs in the Global South would not exist at all. ... Without foreign financing, the NGO sector would have never generated a high-earning, aloof upper class, similar to that of investment bankers and management consultants in the West.

https://discomfortzone.substack.com/p/western-backed-ngos-a-hollow-version 

https://www.cruz.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letters/20170314_Letter%20toTillersononMacedoniaUSAID.pdf 

“Antiwar” Trump wants the US to ethnically cleanse Gaza. https://jacobin.com/2025/02/trump-netanyahu-meeting-gaza   Two years ago, J. D. Vance wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump on the grounds that Trump was antiwar. In that op-ed, Vance brought up the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in a way that suggested that, by brokering that deal, Trump had brought peace to the Middle East.  in Feb 25,  The United States, Trump said, should “take over” Gaza. “We’ll own it.” Its entire population of around two million Palestinians would leave. The United States would raze all the destroyed buildings, “level it out,” and rebuild the territory from scratch as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/miss-the-trump-foreign-policy-jd-vance-11675699749 

https://thedispatch.com/article/how-j-d-vance-became-the-veepstakes-favorite/ In 2022, Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate nomination by securing the decisive endorsement of Donald Trump, and two years later the 39-year-old senator is the odds-on favorite to be selected as Trump’s running mate.