Rym Momtaz, Thomas Carothers, and Richard Youngs examine the impact of Trump’s cuts to U.S. foreign aid and assess whether Europe can fill the gap in international democracy support.
One of the Trump administration’s first moves has been the dismantling of USAID, an agency that has been critical for international development and democracy promotion.
Rym Momtaz sat down with Thomas Carothers and Richard Youngs to discuss the implications of U.S. cuts to foreign aid and Europe’s role in keeping the global democracy agenda alive.
[00:00:00] Intro, [00:01:11] Trump’s Cuts to USAID, [00:10:07] The Need to Rethink the International Democracy Agenda, [00:20:33] Europe's Defensive Approach to Democracy.
Thomas Carothers, March 3, 2025, “Does U.S. Democracy Aid Have a Future?,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Thomas Carothers, February 4, 2025, “The Heartless Upheaval of American Foreign Aid,” Emissary, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Thomas Carothers, March 3, 2025, “Prospects for US Democracy Support During the Second Trump Presidency,” European Democracy Hub.
Thomas Carothers, Richard Youngs, May 2, 2024, “European and U.S. Democracy Support: The Limits of Convergence,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Richard Youngs, February 26, 2025, “European Reactions to the U.S. Retreat From Democracy,” Carnegie Europe.
Richard Youngs, February 26, 2025, “No world order: Europe needs more radical thinking for the Trump era,” The Conversation.
Richard Youngs et al., January 23, 2025, “European Democracy Support Annual Review 2024,” Carnegie Europe.
Richard Youngs, Elene Panchulidze, December 2, 2024, “Playing Defence: Europe and Democracy,” Survival.
Richard Youngs, September 25, 2024, “The European Union is becoming too obsessed with defence,” The Conversation.
Rym Momtaz
Hello and welcome to this month's Europe Inside Out. I'm your host, Rym Momtaz, the editor in chief of Strategic Europe, Carnegie Europe's blog, where twice a week we publish punchy, short analyses on all things strategic in Europe. Today, we're delving into the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, in the first couple of weeks of the Trump administration, its very real impact on countless humans across the world, its impact on American foreign policy, and in particular on democracy aid and whether the Europeans can step up before China and Russia fill the void.
To help us unpack all these issues, I'm delighted to welcome Thomas Carothers, director of Carnegie's Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, and Richard Youngs, senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Welcome to you both.
Rym Momtaz
Before we delve in, a bit of background so that our listeners who may not have followed closely know what we're discussing. By the first week of February, two weeks after Donald Trump's inauguration, the recently created Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, otherwise known as Elon Musk's Department, took a chainsaw to the USAID in the name of cutting waste.
USAID is arguably one of the most effective instruments of American soft power after Hollywood, music, and fast food. It's an agency that works to improve health, reduce poverty, and promote human rights and democracy in lower-income countries. It was created by John F. Kennedy six decades ago, has enjoyed bipartisan support, and has a budget of less than 1% of the US government's overall annual spending while employing 14,000 people worldwide.
Thomas, I'd like to start with you. What are the most important and impactful USAID programs that have now been stopped?
Thomas Carothers
Many people would point to USAID's work on global health. This is vaccines for people around the world. This is tracking diseases like Ebola in Africa. It's HIV prevention—prevention in Africa and elsewhere. And many other really fundamental issues that affect people's lives. But it's not just health. It's food aid in many places, not just giving food to people, but helping people develop agricultural systems that are productive. Food, health, shelter, refugee protection, education. I could go on, but it's many things that are fundamental to people's lives around the world.
Rym Momtaz
Why was it such a priority for the Trump administration to take it apart?
Thomas Carothers
They came into power with a decision to carry out a crusade against the federal government in the United States. This is a long-time wish on the part of the right wing of the Republican Party, which has become the Republican Party now. They've been hankering for 50 or 60 years to take a chainsaw to the federal government. So they came in with a president who, because of his whole preoccupation with what he likes to call the deep state, was ready to turbocharge this instinct and give it a sense of grievance and vengeance to it. So that combination of a long-time wish of U.S. Conservatives or very Conservatives to go at the government, together with the President, who really dislikes the federal bureaucracy, has given them this animus. Why aid first? It's an easy target, has less public constituency in the United States. Conservatives have long felt that international aid is just a welfarism abroad. They don't like welfarism at home. An easy target, one that they consider ripe for the plucking. And enough of a budget, although it isn't that significant in their overall U.S. budget, it's bigger than trivial. So enough to say, look, we saved X billion dollars by cutting this off.
Rym Momtaz
You explained quite well all the ways that it's such an effective, life-saving in many ways program and agency. But can we say that all of its programs weren't wasteful, that there weren't some programs that raised some eyebrows or could have been done differently?
Thomas Carothers
One of the favorite ways that Conservatives have of attacking the federal government is to pick at one little thing. It's like there's a huge salad bar, and you go and you find that grape over there that has a little bit of mold on it. You say, look at this salad bar full of moldy food. Of course, if you spend $40 billion a year in 60 or 70 countries with thousands of partner organizations. Was there a little bit of money somewhere that probably wasn't well spent? Of course there was. But let's go over to the Pentagon, where close to a trillion dollars a year is spent, and any of the serious studies of Pentagon spending find enormous waste and fraud in U.S. military spending. The idea that USAID was somehow a cesspool of corruption and waste is ridiculous. I worked at USAID. In fact, USAID is the most scrutinized, bureaucratized audited. It had over 60 audits last year of different types. If anything, I would say the wrap on USAID is it's too controlled, it's too bureaucratic, it's way down by this constant scrutiny. They could have attacked it for saying it's cumbersome, it's slow.
True, true. So let's make it more efficient. Instead, they invented this fantasy that somehow it's a swamp of corruption, which just isn't true.
Rym Momtaz
Richard, I want to bring you in, and I'd love to get the perspective you're hearing in the comments you're hearing, in the feedback you're hearing from the European side of this equation and the European partners of USAID. How did they perceive what just happened?
Richard Youngs
They're shocked. These are quite salutatory, serious developments from a European perspective. Many European donors are actually trying to adjust their own aid projects to try and salvage some of the most vital projects impacted by the U.S. cuts. But there's not a lot of money around on the European side. Many European donors have actually been cutting their own development budgets over the last few years. European governments are facing pressure from their own right wing, seeing pressure in the European Parliament, have seized on the Trump cuts to argue that aid is indeed wasteful. They're employing exactly the tactics that Tom describes in the US. There's a lot of pressure against the development aid budgets in Europe as well. The member states are cutting their budgets, the German, the French, the British, the Spanish, the Swedish, the Dutch, the Danish, the whole range of European donors implementing a softer version of what we're seeing in the US. The EU money, the commission money is a little bit more protected because it's on a longer-term cycle. But what we're seeing now is a very, very important moment, which is the negotiations over the next seven-year period budget in the EU are beginning, and there's a lot of pressure on the aid budgets.
I think in the next phase, we're likely to see aid budgets at the EU level, lowered slightly. We know why that's the case. There's a lot of pressure on European governments, on the EU institutions to pump more money into defense. This is where the impact of the Trump administration is having its most strongly felt impact in Europe and in a way that's draining or risks draining more resources away from development aid. We all agree that's necessary, but I don't think we should forget that on a day-to-day basis, the development aid gives the EU a lot of its soft power leverage. It is important, and even though it's necessary for the EU to look at enhancing, boosting its military capabilities, I think it is worrying that the EU seems to be on, as I say, on a trajectory of implementing a softer version of what we're seeing from the United States.
Rym Momtaz
Let me actually just read a comment that a spokesperson for the EU Commission gave to Euronews about this. They said that the scale and complexity of current global needs require a joint response. Everyone in the international community must shoulder their responsibility. The funding gap is widening, leaving millions in need, and the EU cannot fill this gap alone. Richard, is it just the EU? I mean, it's the EU and also member states, right, that are, despite these pressures that you're describing very well, still have money. I mean, these are some of the wealthiest countries in the world. Are they actually saying that they can't step up to the plate at this moment?
Richard Youngs
If you put the commission money, the EU money, together with all the member state donors, then the EU as a whole, plus UK, Norway, Switzerland, European money is the biggest, by far the most generous in terms of overall aid donations. The issue is actually not just overall amount, it's the way in which the development aid is spent. It's quite a vibrant debate amongst European donors now about whether the EU is spending its money in the most effective way. The EU's own Court of Auditors has been quite critical of some of the EU's aid projects. The big increase in recent years in European aid has been in humanitarian assistance, and this is good news. Here, the European donors become lead players in some of the most serious and tragic crises around the world, in Syria, in Sudan, and so on and so forth. But the fact that humanitarian aid has become such a mainstream pillar of European aid means that EU aid has become a little bit less political. It's covering emergency situations and doing a good job in that, but perhaps being focused less- in a less targeted way on the underlying root causes of the instability and security and governance issues that rebound on Europe's own interests. I think that is an issue going forward.
Rym Momtaz
I want to ask you because my specialty is geopolitics and it's the transatlantic relationship. Obviously, over the past few weeks, it's become very obvious that we're at a turning point. There's going to have to be a real renegotiation, redefinition of the terms of the defense bargain, the security bargain between the US and the Europeans. But I want to ask you if you're also seeing, given that you study democracy and governance, if you're also seeing that we're at a turning point when it comes to liberal democracy, we're seeing more and more far-right or populist movements get to power, whether it's in the US or in countries in member states of the European Union, and is what we're seeing in terms of the drop in support for funding for these development. Is that also part of the current zeitgeist, which is a move away from that and a move toward taking care of more national issues and not looking beyond one's borders? Maybe, Thomas, you can go first.
Thomas Carothers
It's certainly a turning point in terms of how much the United States cares about democracy and human rights in the world and tries to do something about that. No question. Donald Trump does not care about the state of democracy in the world. But does this mean it's a turning point for democracy globally? That's a different, in some ways, a harder question. Democracy has been in something of what analysts like to call a recession for the last 15 years. But that recession has stabilized over the last several years, and we've been in a kind of middle ground. Now, it could be if the US puts its fingers on the scale of autocracy, that's going to push us further along a democratic recession.
Rym Momtaz
And you're seeing signs of that.
Thomas Carothers
Well, it certainly has animated some governments, like the governments in Serbia or Hungary or Slovakia, who see this moment and say “Aha! This is the moment where our way of doing politics is in the ascendancy, and that liberal democracy stuff is on the down.” Will it affect the state of democracy in India, in Indonesia, in South Africa, in Turkey, in Brazil? These are harder and deeper questions that we're going to be tackling at Carnegie, but really haven't been answered yet. But clearly, if the United States is on the wrong side of the equation, it's bad news for global democracy.
Rym Momtaz
Richard, what do you think?
Richard Youngs
Yeah, indeed, bad news. The cuts in democracy aid are probably the most serious from a European perspective. The EU as a total gives roughly the same, about €3 billion a year for democracy projects, roughly the same as the United States. So it would need to almost double its investment in democracy projects completely to cover the U.S. cuts, which it's not going to do. It will step in to try and save some of the most valuable democracy and human rights work and to protect organizations, many of which are at risk now of closing down because of the USAID cuts. So the EU donors are trying to look for ways to use as much flexibility as they can, but they're not going to compensate entirely for the shortfall. And that will add to the strains on democracy around the world. I agree with Tom, it's not in itself the driving cause of the turning point. Analysts and policymakers have been talking about democracy standing at a turning point for at least 10 years. So I think this just reinforces the strains and stresses that democracy is already suffering around the world. What we're talking about, Tom, myself and others in our program in Carnegie, is that these aid cuts really crystallize the need for us to rethink the whole international democracy support agenda, and it has to look different in the future if it is to survive in any form.
European governments are actually already talking about this room. This is quite interesting because this relates to your point about the bigger geopolitics of democracy. They realized that their aim to build strategic partnerships with other democracies around the world now becomes more important and needs to be invested with much more substance than it has up to now. But whether those other democracies, those non-Western democracies, are really going to be interested in supporting this agenda remains to be seen. I think that's one of the most vital factors in future global geopolitics.
Rym Momtaz
But this actually raises a very important question about soft power, because soft power, to me, at least, has been a massive pillar of why the collective West, Europe and the US, has been so successful, really, since the end of the Second World War. Does this mean today that at least the US is saying “We no longer want to practice soft power, or at least we want to change the soft power that we're practicing.” Because, Thomas, when I think about, for example, the speech that U.S. Vice President JD Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference a few weeks ago, he came out swinging in favor of, I would say, not exactly liberal movements, political movements. Some of them are literally neo-Nazi movements, like the AfD in Germany. Is this the new U.S. soft power?
Thomas Carothers
I don't think there's an organized framework for it yet. What's happening in that case, what you're seeing a lot is the exportation of U.S. domestic obsessions to other countries. One obsession of the MAGA folks here in the United States is the idea that they were silenced, that they've been excluded from the political space, that President Trump was deplatformed from Twitter after the events of January 6, 2021, and other things.
Rym Momtaz
So MAGA, Make America Great Again, of course, the slogan from the Trump campaign.
Thomas Carothers
So they take a particular domestic neurology, like a raw nerve point. Then they take it abroad. They see the same thing as happening here in Germany. They say, well, hold on a minute. Germany has a little bit of a different political history. The AfD, presumably, is a little different from you. Couldn't they negotiate this in their own terms in their own political culture? No, they want to come in with their idea and do that. Certain people abroad play up to them and say, I'm President Milei in Argentina. I know what it's like as a person who's struggling for freedom in Argentina to face this exclusion and criticism.
So certain foreign partners are very clever at saying, oh, exactly the same thing here. We feel your pain. Even the South Korean far right, which called for martial law in South Korea, was featured at the recent CPAC conference here. And they said, oh, our heroic allies on the far-right in South Korea. And you're like, wait a minute. Martial law in South Korea and the extreme far right in South Korea, why do you assume they're natural partners? Because this same overarching narrative that the right has been excluded. There isn't a framework to really rethink American public diplomacy, generally. Instead, we have so far as just the episodic instinctual reaching out on a certain set of issues and pushing nerves and trying to push hot buttons in other countries.
Rym Momtaz
And CPAC, of course, is the conservative Political Action Committee, a convention which has become this yearly, let's say, festival of conservatism in Washington, DC. Richard, what does that mean from your perspective?
Richard Youngs
I think it means now the situation is not one that calls for us simply to compare U.S. approaches and European approaches, that there are alliances forming across borders, some of which are very liberal in nature and some of which are illiberal. These illiberal trends are growing within Europe as they've grown within the United States and other countries around the world. So I think in the future, the democracy agenda will need to be taken forward by these networks of liberal actors in all states, as all countries suffer their own illiberal pushbacks as well.
And I think one of the big challenges goes back to the way that you frame the question about soft power, because I don't think the challenge of supporting democracy and human rights is just about soft power, actually. I think one of the problems, at least from the European side, is that the democracy agenda has been seen as something that's nice to have, a few people running a few nice projects on human rights and democracy, but not really vital to the main core of European foreign and security policy. And I think that needs to change because these political trends, what's going on within countries around the world, increasingly has an impact on the geopolitics of interstate relations.
And unless we get that relationship right, then I think the EU's aspirations to be a geopolitical power will not reach fruition.
Thomas Carothers
I mean, a good example, if I can just butt in here, is Georgia. Which way Georgia goes politically in the next 6-12 months? Does it go with the government that's incumbent or does it go in a more pro-democratic direction? A significant geopolitical ramifications in the near neighborhood of Russia or Moldova. Which way does it go politically? These are vivid, real issues that are, yes, maybe some of the tools of supporting democracy are soft in the sense you help investigative journalists do their work, you support human rights defenders fighting against repression and so forth. But the consequences are real and hard. We need to be careful not to just relegate democracy's support to that marshmallow domain of soft power. Yeah, well, it's a tough world these days. Sorry, we're not eating marshmallows were chewing on nails. Well, democracy is a nail in many places, and it's sticking in a lot of people's mouth. We need to get real about this issue, and that Trump people need to understand that by seeming not to care about this in many places, they're going to miss something. But let's not forget something. When Donald Trump, on February 19, reached deep into his mind to criticize Zelensky of Ukraine, what did he call him?
He didn't say “the worst thing I can say about you as you’re a democrat.” He says “the thing I can say about you is you're a dictator.” And so somewhere in his mind is still the idea that A, dictators are not good, and B, they're not good partners in the United States. And the fact that he refuses to call Putin a dictator also shows that still in the American psyche, even among people who say they don't really care about democracy abroad, it shouldn't be featured in U.S. foreign policy, there is that attitude. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that both the United States and Europe are so steeped in a democratic tradition in our foreign policy. That's not just about soft versus hard, but that's about our basic position in the world. I don't think we've fully lost that yet.
Rym Momtaz
From where I stand, I've been seeing that liberal democracy is really struggling. It's struggling because generations of people who were born in liberal democracies take it for granted, for example, in Europe, but also in the US, have been now voting for and electing people who are illiberal democrats. There's a real issue there because there's a feeling among a growing part of the population in these countries, whether it's Europe or the US, that liberal democracy hasn't delivered on its promises, whether it's more equality, better standards of living, or more security or cultural security. I think that these are the hard questions that we also have to talk about when we're talking about democracy. In addition to the geopolitics. It brings me to the question of, if you're China and Russia, what are you thinking when you're watching this spectacle, whether it's Trump dismantling USAID or Vance supporting the AfD, when we know that Russia, very explicitly, and China in a less explicit way, one of their main targets and objectives is to undermine liberal democracy?
They've been trying to do that through the soft belly of our informational systems and other parts of our systems. Maybe Richard, you can go first.
Richard Youngs
I think the European line on this is quite nuanced, actually, because it's true that the issue of democracy is infusing European geopolitical thinking a bit more in the way that Tom was suggesting. But European governments and the EU as a whole are giving now much more priority to protecting Europe's own democracy. So the democracy agenda is becoming a more protective one. It's not so much about transforming other countries, societies, and political systems, but about protecting core norms within Europe. And that presents a bit more of a robust challenge to Russia, China, and other countries whose aims have been to try and undermine democratic norms.
The EU has been a little bit slow in moving up to that challenge. But if you look at most of the most significant policy developments related to democracy at the EU level over the last three or four years, they've all been aimed at making the EU more robust to external threats to democracy, which is very much needed and necessary. But it shouldn't take our eye off the fact that most of the problems affecting European democracy come from within and a result of European governments' own actions in restricting civic liberties.
So not all the problems can be blamed on external powers, even though the shield and protective force needed against these malign external influences are very important and very much needed.
Rym Momtaz
That being said, what do you think China and Russia are thinking right now?
Richard Youngs
I think that, of course, they'll be delighted by the cleavages opening up between Western governments and the divisions between the liberal and illiberal camps within Europe and the US. But as I say, if this leads to the EU, individual European governments becoming a little bit more robust in their geopolitical approach to democracy issues, then that may present them with a slightly tougher challenge than they’ve faced in the past.
Rym Momtaz
Thomas, how do you assess what China’s, for example, next move will be or what Russia's next move will be ?
Thomas Carothers
The demise of U.S. foreign assistance, it opens a lot of opportunities for China. It isn't so much that China would like to replace the US role on, say, health in Africa or education in Africa. They don't really want to do that. Their foreign cooperation programs are aimed differently, infrastructural development, loans for different kinds of things beyond infrastructure and so forth. So it isn't they're going to step into the shoes of the programs that were dismantled. But they have a line now which says: there are reliable partners in the world and there are unreliable partners. Some people leave you in the lurch, some people stay with you. Which side are we on and which side are they on? It should be pretty clear to you by now.
So it's more about friendship, relationship-building, and long-term influence that comes with that. With respect to Russia, I don't tend to associate giddiness with a characteristic feature of the personality of most people in the Kremlin. But lately, the statements that have been coming out of the Kremlin have been bubbly with giddiness. They just almost can't believe that Donald Trump seems to be reading from their talking points.
And so this is a moment of great opportunity for them in the sense of trying to win narrative battles in Central and Eastern Europe over who's legitimate and who's not legitimate as political actors, the role of political meddling and influencing when the Trump administration says “we've been doing too much political meddling abroad.” Again, makes the Russians giddy with happiness. Exactly what they've been saying as they go about their own political meddling every single day of the week. And so this is music to their ears.
Rym Momtaz
Richard, Thomas, I really want to thank you because I think you have given a lot of food for thought to our listeners about the way perhaps the United States today is maybe deliberately or not deliberately, maybe taking an axe at one of its most successful tools and instruments over the past few decades. It opens up a lot of questions, a lot of challenges for the EU member states, but also for other democracies outside of the global West. It certainly opens up some opportunities for more autocratic governments like China or Russia. Thank you again for joining Europe Inside Out.
Thomas Carothers
My pleasure to be with you.
Richard Youngs
Thank you. Goodbye.
For those who are interested in learning more about international democracy support, I encourage you to follow the work of Carnegie Europe on X and LinkedIn. Our producer is Mattia Bagherini. Our editor is Futura D’Aprile of Europod. Sound editing by Daniel Gutierrez. Sound engineering and original music by Jeremy Bocquet.