Gordon Brown has condemned Donald’s Trump’s plan to shut down America’s international aid programme.
The US president and his close ally, X owner Elon Musk, say USAID is a waste of taxpayers’ money and should be dismantled.
In a post on his Truth Social page on Friday, Trump said the agency’s spending “IS TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE… CLOSE IT DOWN!”
But writing in The Guardian, former Labour prime minister Brown hit out at “the disaster America has unloaded on the world”.
“An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or above could not have caused more carnage,” he said.
“Recent floods in Asia and droughts in Africa have been catastrophic, yet they have inflicted less damage and affected fewer people than the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of US aid from the world’s most volatile hotspots and its most vulnerable people.
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“Coming alongside President Trump’s plan for a US takeover of Gaza, the US administration’s resolve to shut down its international aid agency sends a clear message that the era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end.”
Brown said the move was “gift to Hamas, IS [Islamic State], the Houthi rebels, and all who wish to show that coexistence with the US is impossible”.
He added: “The shutdown is also good news for China, whose own global development initiative will be strengthened as it positions itself to replace America.
“Desperate people will turn to extremists who will say that the US can never again be trusted. And by causing misery and by alienating actual and possible allies, far from making America great again, the cancellation of aid will only make America weaker.”
The former PM insisted that US international aid “is in the country’s self-interest … because the creation of a more stable world benefits us all”.
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He said: “We all gain if USAID can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, prevent malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, halt the upsurge of IS in Syria and support a fair, humanitarian reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine.
“Only the narrowest and most blinkered view of what constitutes ‘America first’ can justify the disaster America has unloaded on the world.”
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