DONALD TRUMP is adding new dimensions to the culture wars that so animate his critics and supporters alike. The more-or-less abolition of USAid has thrown the US’s erstwhile allies in Europe into a tizz.

Over 12,000 USAid staff are due on gardening leave but the uncounted number of locally engaged staff — employed wherever US foreign policy interests are endangered — is possibly larger.

Trump says he wants to purge USAid of the “radical lunatics” running it and his media mouthpiece trotted out a whole series of exotic programmes which offend his sense of what is proper and permissible.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the White House daily press conference that USAid had spent $1.5 million to advance diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) in Serbia’s workplaces; $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.

And his consigliere-cum-enforcer in the government machine, Elon Musk, took to his own X network to characterise USAid as a “criminal organisation.” In this he is, albeit tangentially, approaching the question with some truth.

In as far as the epithet “criminal” can be legitimately levelled against USAid it is not for its sponsorship of transgender cultural projects in faraway places but more because of its auxiliary role in projecting imperial soft power alongside the more obviously coercive instruments of US foreign policy.

USAid deploys an enormous budget, until now topping $50 billion and in accounting terms comprising about 40 per cent of foreign non-military aid distributed globally.

Whether intentionally or not Trump’s assault on this arm of the US state is proving a major disruption to the exercise of US soft power in ways which alarm the foreign policy establishment and the military intelligence apparatus alike.

USAid emerged as a partial successor to and enhancement of the Marshall Plan which, with conditions, allowed for the recapitalisation of war-damaged European infrastructure and industry.

This European recovery project was not simply a humanitarian aid programme but was intimately involved with a wider project to develop trade — especially transatlantic trade — and enhance European economic integration in support of federalist impulses. It was also aimed at countering Soviet influence and domestic communist activity, most especially in countries where local resistance to the Nazis and domestic fascists meant communist parties had emerged as powerful forces.

The US Economic Co-operation Administration, the institutional base of the European recovery project, was highly active, especially in Britain where this European federalist project (favoured by Winston Churchill and, with less emollient language, Oswald Mosley’s European Movement) was opposed even by right-wing Labour leaders.

In the post-war decades changing Labour’s position became a main covert activity of a veritable constellation of US organisations active in foreign affairs. It is this field of operations that the poisonous co-operation between the US Office of Strategic Services (later the CIA) and the US trade union centre AFL/CIO was shadowed by the behind-the-scenes collaboration of the TUC with the Foreign Office, Britain’s intelligence organisations and a cabal of British Labour and trade union leaders.

In China, Russia and the former Soviet republics and the former socialist states the projection of US soft power has engendered resistance. Russia expelled USAid programmes and staff in 2012. 

China accused the US of weaponising aid as a “bargaining chip” to promote the interests of the US state and corporates: “Throughout the past 70 years, the primary goal of US foreign aid has always been to serve its own interests and safeguard its own security. Goals such as promoting global poverty alleviation and development have always given way to US strategic goals, which disguise the real intention of US aid,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says on its website. 

US theorist Hans Morgenthau, the grandaddy of academic realism in international relations, argued that “foreign aid is no different from diplomatic or military policy or propaganda.”

According to the speaker of the Georgian parliament, in 2024 — an election year in the former Soviet Georgia — local NGOs harvested $41.7 million in USAid cash and the domestic NGO sector is outraged at a transparency law.

Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Bolivia have all banned USAid.

The Washington Post reports that the suspension of USAid has had a dramatic effect on both Ukrainian and Russian “independent” news outlets: “Ukraine’s independent media, a collection of small regional outlets, muckraking investigative websites and internet news platforms, have been reeling since the announcement, with some organisations saying that they are just weeks away from slashing staff or closing down entirely.”

Starting tomorrow the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC) gets under way. The following week the German federal elections take place with the country deeply divided over relations with Russia. 

The MSC is the forum — founded at the height of capitalism’s cold war confrontation with socialism — where politicians and their favoured pundits worry at the threats to the imperial order.

Its bipartisan image is this year compromised with both the AfD and Bundnis Sarah Wagenknecht excluded.

The event is front-loaded with a worthy debate about “global governance, democratic resilience and climate security” but the main business will take place on Saturday where the present challenges to the “international order” will be discussed.

Trump’s destabilisation of this order, the rise of the Brics and the promise of a tariff war if countries fail to accept the US president’s diktat are the worry. And Sunday sees an even more troubled discussion about Europe’s role in the world.

Among the bigwigs assembled in Munich will be Ursula von der Leyen, just back from the EU commissioner conclave in Gdansk in Poland.

At the invitation of Poland’s incoming EU presidency the commissioners heard Von der Leyen spell out the EU’s priorities: “More than ever, we have to spend more, we have to spend better, and we have to spend together. Modern warfare requires scale, technology and co-ordination — too big for any one of our member states to handle alone. But this is where joining forces with European co-operation delivers,” she said.

She emphasised the need for public and private funding, better interoperability of gear and equipment, lower costs, more innovation and simpler legislation. She also reminded that the commission will present its white paper on the future of European defence by mid-March.

Von der Leyen’s anxieties are triggered by economic and political worries that the changing relationship with the United States will intensify further the European crisis that is the blowback from Western sanctions on Russia.

In 2020, the EU was Russia’s first trade partner, accounting for 37.3 per cent of the country’s total trade in goods with the world. Some 36.5 per cent of Russia’s imports came from the EU and 37.9 per cent of its exports went to the EU.

In 2019, the EU was the largest investor in Russia. The EU foreign direct investment (FDI) outward stock in Russia amounted to €311.4 billion, while Russia’s FDI stock in the EU was estimated at €136bn.

The sanctions imposed on Russia have drastically reduced this but most particularly Germany’s manufacturing sector has been badly hit by vastly increased energy costs as cheap Russian oil and gas has been replaced by expensive US imports.

Of course, EU transatlantic trade with the US is substantially bigger but if import tariffs add to the comparative cost of European exports the European economic crisis becomes increasingly unmanageable without major social explosions and increased fissures between EU states. 

Yesterday the Polish presidency convened an urgent meeting to discuss Trump’s surprise 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium imports while the day before Von der Leyen threatened a “firm and proportionate” reaction.

The dilemma is becoming more apparent. Von der Leyen combined a pragmatic plea: “There are jobs, businesses, industries here and in the US that rely on the transatlantic partnership” and “we want to keep the transatlantic partnership strong,” with the explicit threat that the EU will continue to protect its own interests.

In a bid to avoid the crossfire the Labour government’s mannered distance from the European stance proved pointless when Trump insisted that the tariffs were to be universally applied. There are, he said, “No exceptions, no nothing … and frankly it may go higher.”

When asked if Britain would get an exemption, the president simply replied: “We have a huge deficit with the UK. Big difference.”

Trump is proving to be the big disrupter of inter-imperialist relations. The crudity and openly transactional nature of his approach is driven by the depth of the crisis and increasingly reveals the contradictions in the so-called “international community.”

With the foundations of Britain’s increasingly illusory “special relationship” with the US dissolving the new British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson said of Trump: “I don’t believe that his tariffs are actually directly targeted at us” and added: “I don’t think we should be overreacting.”

If there was ever a time when an independent and ethical foreign policy grounded in opposition to war, for nuclear disarmament and the dissolution of military alliances, with an equitable relationship with the global South and targeted on combating climate change, it is now.

And there has never been a Labour government less likely to adopt this approach.