Amidst the outcry about the damage and destruction to so much of the federal government structure in the US, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that there are downsides, sometimes highly egregious ones, to so many of the gargantuan systems that have grown alongside American might over the past century-plus. As the astute folks at A Growing Culture remind us, in many cases we’re actually seing “the dismantling of a system designed to manage the very crises the U.S. helped create.”

Their case in point: USAID. The acronym slyly suggests “aid” but of course it actually stands for “United States Agency for International Development.” And anybody who’s paid attention to the various critiques of “development” thinking in recent decades knows that there’s a Trojan horse quality to a lot of the US’s seemingly benevolent activities abroad.

Much of what’s rightly being bemoaned about USAID now – health research, support for climate resilience, education for girls and women – was put in place not out of altruism, although there are countless altruistic people working within those programs. Very often these are attempts to deal with the fallout of failed or self-interested interventions, like the undermining of local and national food systems after an overwhelming influx of cheap US commodity grains. A Growing Culture’s run-down of how that has played out in various places around the world is well worth reading.

The Trump administration is taking a wrecking ball to globalism and American soft power and any presense that the US wants to help out less fortunate people and places. But in a weird way, this is also creating an opportunity to expose where it always was pretense, or at least only the thinnest veneer of actual generosity. “The tragedy,” the authors conclude, “would be to let this moment pass without reimagining what comes next.”