American soft power makes us great

Demonstrators gathered on Capitol Hill on Feb. 5, 2025, to protest the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

With the supposed goal of “making America great again,” the Trump administration has paradoxically spent weeks gutting programs and dismantling institutions that have exemplified American greatness for decades.

Its Orwellian attacks on everything from the refugee resettlement program to foreign assistance are being deployed under the guise of cutting waste. Yet tactics like the illegal firings of inspectors general, the takeover of our Treasury’s payment system by Elon Musk, the targeting of FBI personnel who investigated the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the withdrawal of security details for previous administration officials who have spoken out against Trump hardly demonstrate responsibility or austerity. Rather, these actions reflect the administration’s true agenda: purging potential resistance to a new autocratic regime, seizing power beyond their constitutional authority, and usurping resources outside the executive branch’s purview.

If you ask Americans across the political spectrum about when America’s quintessential “greatness” peaked, they’ll likely reminisce about the post-World War II period or recall the 1980s-90s when the U.S. seemed to have triumphed in the ideological battle of democratic capitalism over Soviet-style communism.

It’s no coincidence that during those periods, we were extensively utilizing foreign assistance — or U.S. soft power — to perpetuate democratic values abroad and advance related national security and development priorities. After World War II, we championed the Marshall Plan to rebuild a devastated European continent, ushering the creation of the world’s most effective security alliance in NATO. This forged economic ties, helping the U.S. become the world’s wealthiest country. As the Soviet Union eased its authoritarian grip on Eastern Europe and its various republics clamored for independence, U.S. assistance allowed democratic activists to build free countries from the ashes of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance.

Until the Tea Party’s rise and Trump’s far-right takeover, Republicans held the mantle as the party of promoting U.S. soft power abroad. When I arrived in Washington, D.C., for graduate studies in 1990, leaders like Bob Dole, Richard Lugar, John McCain and others were considered go-to champions by advocates of U.S. foreign assistance.

I spent much of my career running democracy programs at organizations with funding from USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. State Department. I started my professional life working for the Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union program at the NED, an independent but Congressionally-funded grant-making organization established after President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 Westminster Palace address. In that historic speech, he called for the U.S. and its allies, “to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”

With less than 1% of U.S. federal funds, our humanitarian infrastructure has promoted democracy, fought disease and mitigated hunger — making the world safer and more prosperous. The deep success of U.S. and European Union foreign assistance is confirmed by the fact that most of the 18 Eastern European countries and the Baltic states established stable democracies and joined the EU and NATO. Elsewhere, U.S. foreign assistance has also generated powerful alternatives to China’s strategic investments in anti-democratic innovation and the rejection of human rights.

And this programming is vastly cheaper than military spending. For example, the 78-day NATO air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 cost over $5 billion, massively eclipsing the price of a decade’s worth of peaceful democracy-building efforts spanning Eastern Europe.

I returned to Colorado in 2014 to lead Spring Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports the integration of newcomers. The efforts of thousands of smart and hard-working individuals promoting U.S. interests as staffers of USAID, NED, the State Department or of the many nonprofit organizations funded by those agencies, limit the need for individuals to flee their countries as refugees or asylum seekers and eases the strain on nonprofits like mine as we proudly serve them in the U.S.

Congress receives extensive reporting and briefings about the programs run by USAID and the other agencies that have spread U.S. soft power for decades. Its members, both Republican and Democratic, already have the budgetary power to effect changes they’d like to see in those agencies. They should reassert their authority as an equal branch of government to do so without the misguided and damaging steps taken by the Trump administration to decapitate the vital foreign assistance infrastructure that has contributed so much to making America great.