The way soft power is used is by doing good things, while simultaneously sowing discontent among the populace that these things aren’t being done by the local government, who is likely either being cut off at the hamstrings by U.S. and multinational lending policy. It also serves a domestic purpose of convincing activist liberals that the system is salvageable, after all, we spend all this money doing good things, clearly all we need to do is vote the bad people out and reform or get rid of the bad elements. They don’t really understand that the reason we spend so much money is that the person that we help today is tomorrow’s informant or even just saying "They’re not that bad, they helped get running water to ‘such and such village’. Mind you, depending on geography a project like that would really cost only 6-10 thousand dollars, pennies in terms of what we spend controlling the elite levels of power and the value of the labor and resources we extract.

Often it is less subtle than that, like just slipping a shipment of weapons through with a shipment of food. Why do you think Israel accused Hamas of wanting aid trucks to come in simply to secure weapons? Well, they do it all the time, so why wouldn’t their enemy?

So yeah, it is totally possible that removing USAID money will lead to the deaths of that many people. But at the same time, it was just the open hand with the fist in the other.

As I understand it, it’s a bit like the mafia running a protection racket. They provide protection from a destabilized environment they create and provide just enough “Assistance” to maintain dependency and prevent competition from stabilizing the region.

unknowable, but while immediate results are unlikely to be that drastic, the long term vaccination and medicine distribution dropout, unless substituted, will be catastrophic (people don’t immediately die without medicine, they do get however worse and worse, vaccines will reverberate over decades if continued to be missed and not substituted)

The food ‘aid’ was also market dumping to destabilize any local agrarian development iirc.

So yeah like that other poster said about it being a racket.

The reason it was funded was soft power, but the CIA realized forever ago that the easiest way to get Intel out of poor people in the global south is if they need food or medicine they’ll fucking tell you whatever but al Qaeda or the local government as you’re giving them vaccinations and food.

So usaid did do a lot of food distribution and medical stuff.

I think we’ll see long terms effects in a year or so