On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order to freeze all US foreign aid for 90 days. That move, cloaked in the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, was the opening salvo of a larger campaign to gut programmes deemed incompatible with his 'America First' doctrine. The ensuing review disproportionately targeted longstanding initiatives administered by USAID, many of which had demonstrable impacts in education, health and governance across the developing world.
Global UGRAD Pakistan was one such initiative. It offered Pakistani undergraduates the chance to spend a semester in an American college or university, helping them to not only expand their academic horizons but also nurture cross-cultural understanding. Thousands of alumni from across Pakistan returned home with strengthened confidence and a sense of global citizenship.
In many ways, this was diplomacy at its finest: people-to-people connections forged not by policy, but by lived experience. A programme that for 15 years served as a bridge between young Pakistanis and American campuses has now fallen victim to Washington's misguided shift inward — a casualty of massive overseas development budget cuts that slashed multi-year aid contracts by a staggering 92 per cent, amounting to $54 billion.
This is nothing more than a misjudgment of soft power. Where bombs and sanctions fail to sway hearts and minds, educational exchange quietly succeeds. It is difficult to quantify the long-term benefits of a Pakistani student's semester abroad, just as it is hard to measure the cost of closing that door.
Foreign aid has always been an investment for the US. By gutting programmes like Global UGRAD Pakistan, the Trump administration not only weakens the global US standing, but also undercut the very ideals it claims to defend.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ