How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

In the spring of 1979, the Iron Curtain between the US and the USSR was still tightly drawn. The Camp David Accords outlining peace between Egypt and Israel had just been signed, but hadn’t gone into effect. We were a few months from the beginning of the Iran hostage crisis.

In the middle of all that, a college singing group I was in got a strange invitation from a government agency I had never heard of.

Would we like to do a series of performances in the eastern Soviet bloc, the Middle East and northern Africa that summer? Uh, yeah.

It was the trip of a lifetime. We performed in a decommissioned church in communist Poland, on a kibbutz in Israel, outside the pyramids in Egypt, at King Hussein’s palace in Jordan, at an ancient Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia, to the accompaniment of gunshots at a municipal building in Syria. We sang outside embassies, in cathedrals and on streets across parts of three continents. The common thread for the countries we were paid to go to: a good chunk of people in each place were mad at the United States. Our “job” (never officially articulated) was “soft diplomacy”: show folks in the countries we were performing in that maybe Americans aren’t so bad after all.

*Our group performing at the 6th century Aya Irini in Istanbul, 1979. Turkish-American relationships were rocky, but the concert was a sell out (photo Dan Ojserkis)*

In each country we used the same brilliant diplomacy hack. We would start out the concert singing the national anthem of the country in the native language (we had spent the spring doing arrangements and getting coached on accents by native speakers). The audience would stand for their anthem. At the conclusion of that country’s anthem, we would immediately launch in to the US national anthem. Then throughout the concerts, we would sprinkle in a few native songs with our regular repertoire.

*The United States’ primary foreign aid agency is under fire for being political — that’s sort of its job.*

The agency providing the funding for our tour was the US Information Agency, part of USAID, the US Agency for International Development, and our tour was just one of thousands of investments the agency made; one part of a tapestry of strategic efforts the US makes each year with the goal of making the US better loved and safer.

Most of the investments by USAID were and are in direct aid to foreign countries: hundreds of programs in low-wealth countries focused on improving health (think President George W. Bush’s anti-AIDS initiative in Africa, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives so far); disaster relief (think tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka); and poverty relief (think of the rebuilding effort in Gaza).

We do these things, in part, because it is the “right” thing to do – wealthy nations should share some of their wealth (in the case of the US, it is 0.18% of our annual GDP) with struggling countries for the good of humanity.

But we mostly do it because it is in our self-interest, part of our long-standing approach to international relations – the “three D’s” of defense, diplomacy and development. One of the ways you win friends and influence people is with foreign aid. We send aid to Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Israel; one of the side effects is that they let us keep military bases there. We send inexpensive AIDS drugs to Africa or help them build a port; we hope that later on countries there are more likely to choose the US instead of China in the event of a war. We trade freely with Canada; we appreciate it when they send water bombers to help put out the LA fires.

Americans, on average, think foreign aid makes up 31% of the federal budget. In fact it is about 1%. If you compute spending as a percentage of GDP, the US ranks 22nd among the 28 countries in the OECD in foreign aid.

It’s possible Elon Musk is right in his declaration that USAID has become “incredibly politically partisan.” This week the authoritarian regimes of Russia, Hungary and El Salvador have been celebrating the end of USAID’s “democracy building” efforts in their countries. But if leaders think the agency has gone too far with some grants, that should be a relatively easy fix – get rid of the grants that are offensively partisan. Instead, Musk apparently wants to cut the number of people working at USAID from 10,000 to 290, and cancel more than 800 grants and contracts effective immediately. President Trump, after some hesitation, agreed Friday: “SHUT IT DOWN.”

*Informal jam session in Carthage, Tunisia, 1979. Was this “democracy building”? If so, was that a bad thing?*

Normally you don’t go after a pimple with a machete. When we shut off our foreign aid, especially things like food aid and disaster relief, without explanation, we lose friends and alienate people. Those low-wealth nations will look for help elsewhere: China’s version of USAID, the so-called “Belt and Road” initiative (which has already made investments in 147 countries), will make deeper inroads in Africa; Russia would love to see the US stop sending support to Syria. Daniel Shapiro, a former ambassador to Israel, told Axios: “There’s really no better gift to Putin and Xi than for the world to see that the United States is a completely unreliable friend and partner. People will obviously treat us as just one more transactional great power.”

Foreign aid is inefficient: there’s rarely a straight line between any specific investment in foreign aid or a goodwill initiative and a policy change.

Here’s an example, tracing some of the path the US has followed with Jordan. Yes, USAID sent a music group there in 1979. But then there were a series of other actions: we dropped trade barriers, making it easy for Jordan to buy US cars and oil and electronics and for the US to buy pearls and fertilizer. We welcomed Jordanian students to our universities. And we started sending money through USAID to a struggling, resource-poor, strategically-located country-- an average of $1.5B a year. Along the way, Jordan got comfortable permitting a strategically-valuable US military presence in the country, signed a fragile peace treaty with Israel, and, when Iran tried to bomb Israel in late 2024, Jordan played a key role in stopping the attack by shooting down some of the drones.

*About 3000 US troops are stationed across Jordan, including 350 at this strategically-located base on the Jordan-Syria border.*

That variety of diplomatic approaches is just one example of our strategies in countries across the world. Foreign aid in some places means we subsidize low-cost drug treatments; in others technical assistance on agriculture. Some places get aid building infrastructure; in others we launch trade initiatives; and occasionally we even subsidize goodwill tours. That sort of stuff is on many levels, to quote Musk, “political,” but it has not been historically seen as “partisan.”

*Dale Carnegie’s classic 1936 book on “how to win friends and influence people” came down to one recommendation: respect them. It’s still a good idea.*

I don’t have any illusion that my singing group’s tour of hostile countries in 1979 made any particular governmental official change any particular policy. But I do know that across our 35 concerts, I never saw anyone sit down when we started performing the US national anthem: maybe we won a few hearts and minds. In diplomacy, sometimes victory is not getting someone to love you more, but to hate you less. Defeat is what you call it when you make them hate you more.

Notes:

USAID overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development

Musk and USAID: https://apnews.com/article/usaid-foreign-aid-freeze-trump-peter-marocco-8253d7dda766df89e10390c1645e78aa

Camp David Accords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_David_Accords

US bases in the Middle East: https://www.cfr.org/article/us-troops-middle-east-mapping-military-presence

US foreign aid as a percentage of GDP (UN suggested benchmark is 0.7%): https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-does-us-spend-its-foreign-aid

Impact of President George W. Bush’s AIDS initiative in Africa: https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/03/pepfars-profound-legacy-20-years

Diplomats on impact of shuttering of USAID: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/07/trump-soft-power-diplomacy-tariffs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Layoffs and cancelled contracts at USAID:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/usaid-job-cuts.html

Reaction of autocrats to dismantling of USAID: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/world/europe/usaid-russia-putin.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

China’s “Belt and Road” initiative: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative