A World without USAID? with Andrew Natsios

I eventually realized that I did not belong in the Protestant Church and I found the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which is mostly converts nowadays from dissatisfied Catholics, but a lot of Evangelicals have converted to the Antiochian Church. In fact, I think a Pentecostal church of 2,000 members in Montana just converted en masse to the Antiochian Orthodox Church, and there are 200 Evangelical churches in California that en masse converted some years ago. That is my church now. I am an archon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. The Ecumenical Patriarchate is sort of the “pope” of the Eastern Church, so I cannot help but take ethical reflections on whatever I do.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is an incredibly interesting background. As someone who was born into an Irish Catholic family and then married into an Indian Hindu family, I always appreciate hearing about the unique journeys people have within their own American experience, but that is a whole podcast right there, so we don’t have to dive into that any further.

Perhaps we could pivot now to how this value system that you laid out has interacted with and informed your own approach to your career and to geopolitics at large.

ANDREW NATSIOS: I am a realist with a small “R.” I want nothing to do with Realism as a school of international relations. I am a conservative internationalist, but for me America has to stand for values, particularly in its development program. However, I also think our aid program protects the national interests of the United States.

What is it we do? We do humanitarian assistance; that is $15 billion. The health programs are $8 billion. That is 55 percent of the budget, but we also do programs in education—$800 million a year in poor countries—and we do economic growth. My favorite programs are the growth programs. There is a billion-dollar agriculture program because we know from the Asia experience during the Cold War that the first thing you do when you want to modernize a country is to increase agricultural production. All countries that have made it into middle-income or upper-income status, like South Korea and Taiwan, for example, started out by developing large agricultural surpluses.

The Green Revolution in Asia was principally carried out by Dr. Norman Borlaug and USAID. Dr. Borlaug told me that before his death. We gave him the Marshall Award at USAID, and I had dinner with him, and he said, “We couldn’t have done this without USAID.” Fifty percent of the USAID budget during the Cold War was spent on implementing the Green Revolution, which tripled food production.

I think doing the right thing morally is good for the world and is good for us. I don’t believe in going into crusades to change the whole world and save the whole world through government spending. That is just not appropriate, it does not work, and it alienates people all over the world, so we have to be more modest. We have to respect local cultures, but we also have to understand that when we do things the wrong way we could hurt people around the world, and if we do them the right way we could save—I am not exaggerating—tens of millions of lives. That is what Americans should be proud of but do not fully understand about USAID.

KEVIN MALONEY: Thanks, Andrew. The examples you provided paint a vivid picture of the positive and potentially negative consequences of humanitarian aid executed maybe in an irresponsible manner.

I was particularly struck by the power of agriculture. It is an aspect of international relations that, while hugely consequential, does not get nearly the attention it deserves as compared with other subject areas or hard-power concerns.

You talked about humanitarian aid from a tactical, “lives saved,” perspective, but you also alluded to the fact that aid programs can be quite strategic for democracies and that such programs align very well with a state’s values and interests. Could you expand on how the investment in aid by a country provides a return on that investment, maybe specifically for democracies?

ANDREW NATSIOS: I will give you one example. I wrote an article some years ago about the relationship between food price increases and revolution and coup d’états. It was circulated I understand in the Pentagon, USAID, and the State Department. It did not have a huge audience, but it was about the coming “food coups.” I said that rapid increases in food prices increase food insecurity and hunger, can lead to famine, but will also cause revolutions and coups, and we don’t know where that is going.

I published this literally three to four months before the Arab Spring, which was not a “spring” at all, but it collapsed Qaddafi’s government in Libya and the Tunisian government. It collapsed Mubarak in Egypt, Yemen, and then went on to Syria. All of those countries were in turmoil as a result of massive food price increases. The price of tomatoes in Egypt went up 600 percent in six months, the price of meat doubled in a year in Egypt, so half the population in Egypt didn’t believe they could feed themselves. That was a fear in the polling data.

There is a relationship between hunger and political upheaval that leads to things that are not in our interest. Is it really in our interest to have a civil war in Syria that killed a couple of million people and ripped the country apart? There is still no government in Libya, and Yemen has been in a civil war. It is not in our interest, but also from a humanitarian point of view this has caused terrible suffering.

KEVIN MALONEY: Building further upon the ramifications of the crises you discussed both from a moral and national interest perspective, I would like to dig deeper into the geopolitical effects of America pulling back its aid efforts and the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle USAID. Whether in the humanitarian aid space or with Ukraine we are seeing aggressive narratives that prioritize nationalism, reject the principle of international cooperation, and advocate for the creation of new geopolitical spheres.

What are your thoughts on this approach to foreign policy and its alignment or misalignment with America’s national interest?

ANDREW NATSIOS: Alex de Waal is one of the leading scholars of famine and a friend of mine at Tufts University, but he is also an activist. He is an expert on East Africa and Sudan, and I was special envoy to Sudan under President Bush and had some hand in the South Sudan independence movement. I had been involved with Sudan for more than 30 years.

Alex wrote a book called Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine and tracked the number of deaths and famines over the last 150 years and showed that during the Reagan administration and beginning after the Ethiopian famine of 1985 that killed 800,000 people maybe—we don’t actually know for sure the exact number, but it is in that range—there were mass graves all over the country and it got into the news media.

Ronald Reagan then established a principle of American foreign policy: “A hungry child knows no politics.” We do not fail to feed people because we don’t like the government. In fact Amartya Sen, the great economist at Harvard Business School who won the Nobel Prize for Economics because of his work on famines, said, “There has never been a famine in a democracy.”

Democracies don’t have famines, it is always dictatorships that do, and some of them among the most brutal in the world. Under Stalin the Ukrainian famine killed 3 or 4 million people. Mao Zedong’s famine during the Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 38 million people, the worst famine in recorded history.

Alex said that there has been a huge drop in famine deaths since the mid-1980s. Part of it is because of economic growth, but part of it is because the humanitarian response system has matured into a very powerful force. The central element of that is USAID. I ran that function for the elder President Bush 35 years ago. We created disaster assistance response teams (DARTs) and created rapid-deployment humanitarian forces to intervene in civil wars and famines.

Alex has said that USAID had a lot to do with the drop in death rates. Those death rates are going to start going up again because we just destroyed USAID essentially, and I don’t think the people who did it understand the consequences of that.

It has political consequences too because, as I told you, famines lead to mass population movements almost always. I wrote a book about the North Korean famine of the 1990s that killed I think 10 percent of the country. More than a million North Koreans actually left North Korea for China to get food to bring back, and it caused absolute chaos in the country. North Korea has nuclear weapons. Do you want a country in chaos with nuclear weapons?

My students did a capstone. We think a second famine took place from 2017 to 2023. It didn’t kill millions of people, but it certainly killed 100,000, and some of their behavior is a function of that famine. I think there is a connection between these humanitarian issues and foreign policy.

KEVIN MALONEY: The Reagan foreign policy principle you quoted as, “A hungry child knows no politics,” is certainly an interesting window into the thinking of a U.S. president regarding this tension between values and interests within the practice of foreign policy. Having served presidents across multiple decades, you certainly have a unique perspective on how that relationship plays out on a day-to-day basis and how it manifests within policy.

Since President Kennedy created USAID in 1961 up through the Biden administration there seemed to be at least some bipartisan consensus around the efficacy and importance of USAID. Today that consensus has been shattered in a mere few weeks. Beyond the day-to-day work of USAID what does the loss of what was one of the few remaining areas of bipartisan consensus mean, not just for America but for our partners around the world?

ANDREW NATSIOS: It is a huge loss, and I don’t think some of the people pushing this narrative understand what the consequences are going to be. The United States had a lot of friends around the world to support us during the Cold War and the post-Cold War world, and we are losing those people now, and instead of attracting them by our ideals and moral purpose we are now bullying and threatening them. In my view it is not wise for the United States to be seen as an international bully.

More importantly, we are in a sort of hot war with China and Russia, although we appear to be moving to collaborate with Putin—I don’t understand that, I am just appalled by it. They call it the CRINK alliance, China Russia, Iran, and North Korea. These are not great ethical powers in the world.

I actually worked with the Chinese under President Hu Jintao in Sudan constructively. They may have been acting in their own national interest, but they were being constructive. The Russians could not care less what happened in Sudan. They were frankly useless, but you could talk to the Chinese.

That has changed under Xi Jinping. The Chinese government has taken a much more aggressive position—not the Chinese people—and I think that is unfortunate because we did cooperate in Sudan in a useful way. I remember when we were trying to get UN peacekeeping troops into Darfur and President Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan wouldn’t agree to it.

President Bush called Hu Jintao and said, “Get your buddy off the seat here and get him to agree to this,” and Hu Jintao actually threatened Bashir, and he reversed himself. He first said: “I will never allow a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur ever. Over my dead body.” Two months later he said, “I have changed my mind, we are going to let the troops in.” So cooperation does work. I think it worked much better under a different regime in China. Now we are not going to call China or Russia on any of these issues, and certainly we are not going to call North Korea or Iran.

I think we are in a period of great danger of an international war starting—Ukraine is the beginning of it. We’ll see.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think we could spend many hours discussing the potential grand strategy implications of the pullback around humanitarian aid.

In the news we have also seen a ton of coverage recently about the frontline effects on individuals and their families. These are people suffering and dying due to lack of medicine, access to food, etc. While these human-level impacts are critically important, I have seen less conversation around what seems to be a point in the middle, between the human level and the geopolitical level, which is, how the future of aid might look in practice if new partners step into the void left behind by USAID.

By that I mean, how do other states differ in their approach to aid? Is there more of an extractive relationship or a literal quid pro quo when you think about other states and their aid programs? Of course, our listeners might say: “Well, there was always an American quid pro quo. There is a soft power quid pro quo, there is a boots-on-the-ground quid pro quo.” What I am particularly interested in on the frontline, local, and human level is how USAID relationships have traditionally worked and how that might now change if new partner governments move into the void.

ANDREW NATSIOS: I will tell you a few stories. Two-thirds of USAID staff are what we call Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs). They are not Americans. They are Brazilians or Peruvians or Nigerians and they work in the USAID mission. The mission is the equivalent of the embassy. The USAID mission director always reports to the ambassador, and the ambassador does their evaluation. They are very responsive to the ambassador.

However, because they are seen as a development agency the mission directors have a lot of influence. I have been to many countries where the head of state will call the mission director for advice, countries in the Middle East, for example, regularly, where they would say: “We need education reform. What do you think we should do? How should we do this? Can you help us with it?”

The mission director then immediately calls the ambassador to keep them informed because they don’t ever want to give the impression that we are independent, we are not independent. If we abolish USAID no head of state is going to call the U.S. ambassador and ask, “How should we handle this education reform?” It is not going to happen, and they are not going to call a lower-level person in the embassy who runs a new aid program, so having an independent aid program increases the influence of the United States in these countries.

If you look at the polling data that is done in Africa on the most respected model for development, it is the U.S. model by far, not the Chinese or Russian model. They do these surveys all over the continent and have done so for years. We are still far and away the model that Africans want to follow for development. Even though they have a relationship with China to build infrastructure, that is not what is driving things. What is driving things is the country they look toward, us, and part of that is because of USAID.

The second thing is, I found out that much of the training ground for local political leaders is USAID’s FSNs. The first female president of Costa Rica worked for USAID as a Foreign Service National for ten years. She got her master’s degree with a USAID scholarship. The first Inca, Quechua-speaking president in Peru, Alejandro Toledo, got a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford, and his wife was a Foreign Service National for many years with USAID.

I could go around the world. I was in Macedonia—Slavic Macedonia, not Greek Macedonia—a week before 9/11, and I met with the FSNs. I asked, “Have any of you ever thought of running for office?”

Two guys raised their hands and said: “We just got elected to parliament, and the reason we got elected is because we work for USAID and everybody respects USAID here, and we kept our jobs with USAID just so we could meet with you. Tomorrow we are going to resign to take our parliamentary seats.” Isn’t it better to have heads of state who used to work for us? They are very favorable toward the United States. I can name you cabinet ministers around the world who got scholarships from us during the Cold War and rose to positions of power.

A health minister in West Africa was making the decision on where to buy vaccines during COVID-19. He got a USAID scholarship when he was young, and he said, “I don’t want any Russian or Chinese vaccines—they don’t check the safety level of their vaccines. I know the Americans do. I only want American vaccines in this country,” which they bought.

Having a whole network of these people—you know what has happened now? Our scholarship program has collapsed. The Chinese do 40,000 scholarships a year. The USAID has been shut down, so there will be no scholarships.

Are we trying to have the Chinese take over the world system? It almost looks like that is what the plan is because our most powerful tool is not intimidation or bullying, it is the soft power of USAID, which is in the interests of the country we are in, but it is also in our interest.

KEVIN MALONEY: One of the things that resonated with me in your comments is that of course there are interests on both sides of the aid relationship or aid equation, but in the way in which USAID has traditionally operated there was an attempt in creating a relationship built around what I would call “respectful reciprocity” versus extraction as a primary goal or aid as a means to achieve a hard security quid pro quo. One example of this would be U.S. grants versus loans in humanitarian aid.

ANDREW NATSIOS: We stopped doing loans in 1982 because the countries couldn’t repay them. Peter McPherson under Reagan said: “No more loans. It’s grants. We’re paying for it. We’re not going to indebt these countries.”

The Chinese aid program through the Belt and Road Initiative—by the way, people don’t realize that that has been scaled way back because so many countries in the Global South couldn’t repay these loans, and the Chinese are stuck now and realize if they tried to collect them they would be making a lot of enemies all over the world. The Chinese have a 90 percent drop in borrowing for the Belt and Road initiative because it is not working. They used to brag that they had a much better development model, but I don’t hear the Chinese saying that anymore.

KEVIN MALONEY: Interesting. We have certainly covered a lot about the value of humanitarian aid, including how the programs work in practice and their impacts geopolitically, but I want to pivot the conversation now to discuss the individuals serving in the humanitarian aid roles. These are people you personally worked with.

We are seeing a lot of misinformation and disinformation regarding these individuals right now. They have been reduced to a number on a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spreadsheet or they face broad character assassination as “lazy government employees ripping off American people and their tax dollars.”

You have led these public servants for many years and I want to give you the opportunity to provide a counternarrative.

ANDREW NATSIOS: When the Ronald Reagan Building was still USAID, there was a big wall with plaques of all of the USAID officers who were killed in the line of duty during the last 60 years. That has all been ripped down now, which I think is a horrendous insult to heroes.

We have heroes in uniform—I am a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, I served in the First Gulf War, my son served in Afghanistan as a field artillery officer, so I have great respect for the military because I come from a military family—but we also have other heroes. They are not given the same recognition, but they sacrifice themselves for us.

More importantly, the bulk of the people who work for USAID programs are not Americans, they are from the developing world. In the Iraq War we lost 250 people murdered—I don’t mean people who died of disease or something. These were USAID workers who were not Americans but who worked full-time on USAID projects; 350 were murdered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. That is a huge number when you think about it for aid agencies.

I might add that in Africa almost no USAID workers were murdered because USAID is revered in Africa. Because there were wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan we got targeted, and we didn’t have any protection because the military’s job was to beat the Taliban and not to protect us, so we had heavy, heavy casualties. I get upset that we don’t get the recognition for all of the people who have sacrificed themselves.

People have this impression that our USAID officers in the field live in mansions and get paid outlandish amounts of money. That is not true. In fact, if you look at how much USAID people are paid in the field versus the Treasury, the State Department, or the Department of Defense—I used to see these comparisons—we are one of the lowest paid of the foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government.

The proving ground or training ground for USAID Foreign Service Officers is the Peace Corps. During the Cold War 40 percent of the Foreign Service Officers in USAID were former Peace Corps workers. You have to have a Master’s degree, Ph.D., or MD to become a Foreign Service Officer in USAID because we hire specialists in the disciplines that we do in terms of programming and work.

They are at risk all the time. Foreign Service Officers themselves get murdered in USAID when they do their work in the field. There are severe restrictions because of the murders that took place in Benghazi and then the embassy bombings in the late 1990s, so it is difficult to get out of missions now when you are in the developing world because of the security restrictions, which I think is a big problem.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think there is a sad irony in all of this—and you talked about it—that there is a prioritization happening around different types of civic service within America. This is not a judgment on any of those types of service, but it is just that there is clearly prioritization happening both politically and around the narratives we are being fed.

During this difficult period, what is the message you would like to provide to former colleagues or students who want to go into the humanitarian aid space, specifically in service of their country? These are people who could have gone into financial services or private medical practice—the list goes on—and surely made significantly more money. In this moment when there seems to be almost a de-prioritization of the values portion of specific public service, what would you say to those wanting to serve in the international aid space?

ANDREW NATSIOS: I think this fight is not over in terms of where USAID is. The administration moved very rapidly at the beginning because they wanted to use USAID as an example of what is going to happen to the rest of the bureaucracy, without considering what the consequences are, and they did it in a very cruel way, going after the career staff, many of whom have sacrificed a much more prosperous and stable life here to work around the world. I think that has been lost on a lot of people.

The real message I have is still to get yourself educated in this and get the degree. The Peace Corps still exists—I don’t know if they are going to go after the Peace Corps or not; there are rumors of that—and that is still a way in as is working for NGOs. Maybe 20 percent of the Foreign Service now are former NGO workers. You need a little bit of experience. USAID officers are hired because they have had foreign experience.

I think the president made a comment that USAID officers were all “lunatics on the left.” We have a lot of missionary kids in USAID. Tom Staal was the mission director in Iraq. He was a missionary kid in Iraq and spoke perfect Iraqi Arabic with no American accent because he was a kid being brought up there for many years. He knew every village and every river in the Tigris and Euphrates, he used to talk well of his father planting date trees when they were kids.

There was a missionary kid in Pakistan whose father was the president of an Evangelical college. In fact it is the elite college now. Most of the Muslim families from the elite send their kids to this Christian college. He is the president of the college now. He was a mission director in Mongolia and Pakistan.

We get a lot of missionary kids in USAID because they know the developing world and they speak the languages perfectly. We also have a lot of Mormons in USAID who, because of their mission experience—I never thought of Mormons as communists before. They are very conservative people, so this image that has been created of who the career service officers are is crazy.

Are a lot of USAID officers more into social justice? Yes, they are, but I have to say the Evangelical Church now is also into social justice. If you go to a lot of the Evangelical churches, these issues are being brought up. That is true also of conservative Catholics. We have a lot of Catholics in USAID. I get a little upset when this image is created.

To be very candid with you, I do think that the Biden administration “went woke” and got USAID involved in a bunch of issues which for me are not what USAID does. Many of the things USAID was attacked on—they listed all these—they were not USAID grants. They were State Department programs that came out of the DOL bureau and they attributed them to USAID, not by accident. I think they did it deliberately and misled the public. I am not going to go through and list them all for you, but I would say at least a third of what they reported was nonsense. It was very annoying to me.

They then announced that USAID sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. Well, it was Gaza Province in Mozambique. If we had sent $50 million worth of condoms, that would be 3 billion condoms. That would have been 33,000 condoms a day per male. That’s ridiculous.

The condoms we sent to Afghanistan did not go to the Taliban; they went to health clinics that USAID built, set up, and trained the people for, and the reason was that there was a famine developing in Afghanistan. Who dies in a famine? Children under five from poor families die first, then pregnant women and lactating mothers. We can’t get a lot of food in because of the Taliban, but we can help women to avoid getting pregnant because if they get pregnant they are likely to die before the end of the year.

People don’t understand anything about famines. We have never had a famine in the United States, so we have no experience with it. My great-uncle starved to death in the Greek famine during the Nazi occupation of Greece; 300,000 Greeks starved to death. It’s like a Jew with the Holocaust. The Greeks have a memory of that horrible famine, and I do in my own family, so I am a little obsessive about stopping famines.

KEVIN MALONEY: The “Gaza condoms” example certainly showcases the fast-paced disinformation environment we find ourselves in. Although a simple fact check would have put this story to bed, it was a highly effective narrative. What does this say about the current state of our civic space and dialogue in general?

ANDREW NATSIOS: There is a perception that there is widespread corruption in USAID and they are accused of fraud and all this. I wrote an article called “The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development.” It was published 15 years ago by one of the think tanks, the Center for Global Development, you can get it online. The point of the article was that USAID is obsessed with accountability. They have compliance officers—accountants, auditors, and lawyers—and they make sure that money is not stolen, food is not stolen, and when it is, we go after them.

I will give you an example. We had a country in Africa where a couple was in charge of the food program, and they were skimming off 1 percent of the food from each bag of wheat or in some cases corn. It was only 1 percent and no one noticed it for year. We finally said, “Something’s wrong here,” and we realized what they were doing.

We didn’t tell them. We invited them to come to a conference in the United States. They got off the plane I think in New Orleans, federal agents arrested them, we sent them to court, they were prosecuted, and they were sent to jail.

I can go through story after story. When we find people stealing stuff, we go after them, and many of them end up in jail, and we have different ways of doing that. The big joke in the aid community is, “Don’t steal stuff from USAID because they will go after you.” They do it from other aid agencies—I am not going to mention which ones—but it is dangerous to try to steal stuff from USAID.

I would say 40 percent of the officers in USAID are involved in these accountability systems. There is layer and layer and layer. I think actually there are too many layers of accountability. Every line item in the USAID budget is approved by the State Department Office of Foreign Assistance. We can’t spend any money in USAID without—that is since 2007, that has been going on a long time.

The Office of Management and Budget has to approve everything, and then four congressional oversight committees approve every single thing. They don’t just approve the annual budget. Every time we do a program it is sent up there, and they go over it and approve or don’t approve.

I have to say that in the last few years apparently from people who are pro-USAID in the Republican Party some people in the Biden administration were not responsive. When we were asked by Congress—Henry Waxman, a liberal Democrat from California, during the Iraq War, said, “Oh, this corruption,” and asked us to print all of the contracts we had for the Iraq reconstruction, 50,000 documents. I sent five people in for a whole month just to copy this stuff. We did what he asked, we sent the stuff up, and he could not find one single thing wrong and dropped the whole thing.

We do go a long way most of the time, but sometimes some USAID administrators are not as responsive to the Hill, and that encouraged some of the abuse against USAID more recently.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is good to get a sense of where the bipartisan consensus might have started to chip away. Obviously this is before the events of the past few weeks specifically regarding USAID. I am appreciative that you are able to provide us with that context.

Andrew, we have covered a lot today, and I want to thank you so much for joining us on the Values & Interests podcast, particularly at this critical moment regarding the future of international aid programs. This has been a truly enlightening discussion, and it is always important for us at the Council to connect directly with experts who have thought about this values and interests equation throughout their personal and professional lives. For that we thank you and look forward to speaking again in the future.

ANDREW NATSIOS: Thank you.