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Feb. 7, 2025 18:35-19:38 - CSPAN
01:02:51
Discussion on Global Aid & COVID-19
Participants
Appearances
r
reginald dwayne betts
00:43
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
This Saturday, we'll look at the first 100 days of Andrew Jackson's presidency.
Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828 in a rematch with John Quincy Adams from the 1824 election.
Mr. Jackson came to office with a vision for the country, but his agenda was stalled by controversy.
Early issues during his term included states' rights, payment of national debt, tariffs, and treatment of Native Americans.
Watch American History TV's new series, First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2.
Maria Omiliicheva is a strategy professor from the National Defense University.
She discusses the geopolitics of global humanitarian aid, focusing on aid from the U.S., China, and Russia.
The U.S. decision to withdraw from the international aid organizations such as the World Health Organization was also addressed.
This one-hour discussion was hosted by the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.
Okay, let's go then.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good afternoon.
Welcome to this event organized at IRIS, the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University.
My name is Marlene Lowell.
I'm the former director of the Institute and currently the director of the illiberalism studies program.
In this event today, we will be discussing the geopolitics of EID and how Chinese, Russian, and American COVID-19 assistance developed.
And as you can guess, it's a very timely topic given the current reorganization and transformation of U.S. foreign assistance and strategies under the new administration.
Our speaker, Maria Omiliceva, is professor of strategy at National Defense University here in Washington, D.C. She's the author of multiple books on the former Soviet Union and articles she has been engaging with broader audience and the policy world for several years.
And her latest book is called entitled COVID-19 Humanitarianism, Geopolitical Logics of Chinese, Russian, and American Assistance.
It's really a great book.
You can see it here that she wrote with the colleagues that is looking at how assistance should be interpreted as part of a geopolitical discourse and as a space for constructing political action by great power.
And that's what we will be discussing today.
So Maria, welcome.
I will give you the floor for about 30 minutes.
Then we will open for Q ⁇ A discussion and I welcome our C-SPAN audience also.
Thank you, Maria.
The floor is yours.
Thank you so much.
And I do want to express my sincere appreciation to all of you for taking the time to join us this afternoon.
So those of you who spend your winter holidays here in the GMB area should remember the early January snow that blanketed the GMV, right?
So as the East Coast experienced some record inches of snow this year, fires erupted on the West Coast and scorched 60 square kilometers of territory in the subsequent three weeks.
This kind of natural disasters have become quite common and they are among many consequences of the warming climate and changing weather patterns.
In fact, by some estimates, today 20% more people are displaced due to environmental disasters than just a decade ago.
And some estimates suggest that by 2050, more than a billion people will be at risk of displacement due to the compounded effects of environmental crisis, wars, and civil unrest.
So the states have traditionally been very, very important contributors to the overall pool of resources to assist those in need.
But as I alluded to in my opening example, just the demand, the sheer demand for the life-saving assistance has grown considerably in the past few years.
We've also witnessed that the supply of those resources has shrunk.
So I think this gap between the resources that are needed to help people in need and the resources that are available, this gap will continue to grow in the years to come.
Again, on this graph, I just show in terms of, you know, the orange part shows what are the estimated resources that are necessary to help people worldwide experiencing disasters and what the states as the international donors provided.
So humanitarian assistance is a distinct form of assistance.
It's different from both developmental aid and security aid in that developmental aid and security aid are the tools of states' foreign policy.
They are used to pursue various policy agendas by the governments.
Humanitarian assistance has kind of unique ethical and normative foundation with roots that go back to the beliefs that emerged in the Enlightenment era of the 18th century.
In that those Enlightenment ideas, they bestow the same level of dignity, the same level of humanness to all individuals.
And as a consequence, humanitarian assistance is supposed to be administered without considerations of ethnicity, nationality, no politics would be involved.
It should be administered on the sheer, just based on the level of suffering, whether it's the casualties, the destruction of the property, and so on and so forth.
But I am not going to break or reveal any secrets.
We know that in practical terms, the levels of humanitarian assistance have departed from this kind of universal humanitarian principles.
And again, I'm just putting it up there for illustrative purposes only that, again, humanitarian aid must be guided by the principles of humanity, neutrality, and impartiality.
But there have been significant differences in the volume and type of aid and in the volume of type of COVID-19 aid that I wrote my book about.
So, you know, those departures from the about principles of neutrality, impartiality, and universality, and the practice of aid administration was one of the sort of motivating questions for this research and for this book.
So we wanted to understand what motivates countries to give.
And particularly when the demand for these scarce resources is so high and the resources are so limited, how do the governments make decisions about which lives are worth saving?
So these are kind of the motivating questions for the book.
And of course, you know, as a researcher, I, you know, looked at, you know, what was the state of knowledge?
And I felt that the state of knowledge was not quite adequate.
The existing explanations tend to place answers to this question about what motivates states to give to those in need into one of the three buckets, interest-based, need-based, or merit-based.
Moreover, the political discourse surrounding aid-given tends to sort of distinguish traditional donors such as the United States, Germany, Japan, UK, from the so-called emerging donors.
Some call them rogue donors, like China, but also Brazil, India, South Africa, they fall into that category.
So, one of the arguments goes that the traditional donors, like the United States, they are the ones who are more like altruistic and driven by the ethical considerations of the need, impartiality, whereas China are driven by political expediency.
They use it as a part of their political agenda.
So, spoiler, spoiler, neither the traditional donors nor the emergent ones consistently follow any of these logics.
Again, that was another more theoretical kind of reason for why we wanted to pursue this book.
And last but not least, I felt that the discourse about aid is typically disconnected from the broader context of ideas, norms, and power relations.
You see, aid-given does not take place in vacuum.
Aid-given, decisions about aid, they are part of a broader humanitarian regime.
Humanitarian regime has some written, some unwritten rules, regulations, agencies, international institutions, as well as ethics.
And humanitarian regime itself, with its premise of recognizing common shared humanity, bestowing equal dignity in all individuals, it's part of a broader global order that used to be known as neoliberal international order, or under it came across other names.
And until recently, the United States was an architect, a benefactor, and a contributor, a backer of this global order.
So, the spread and tenacity of those neoliberal norms that also buttress the current humanitarian regime.
So, they've survived because of the material power of the United States as well as other traditional donors, particularly U.S. allies and partners in Europe.
And the argument that we make in the book is that if we want to understand how and why states decide where to send their scarce resources, we cannot overlook that broader context of what people in Washington call the geopolitical or geostrategic competition, that aid cannot be understood outside of the relations of the United States and China and to a lesser extent Russia.
So, bottom line up front.
So, the argument on the surface is very simple.
So, what we say is that states' motives for humanitarian aid are informed by their geopolitical logic.
The geopolitical logic is simply a sexy word.
It's a construct, it's a shortcut to explain something that is very, very complex, namely that every state has this set of foundational beliefs about themselves, about their place in the world, about the world writ large, about the relations with others.
And these foundational beliefs emerge in a particular historical context, but they evolve under the influence of that same state's relations with other countries and their experiences with humanitarian disasters and so on and so forth.
But once those beliefs are integrated into the institutional makeup of the countries, into their laws, they start setting the parameters for those countries' policies in the field of humanitarian action.
And so in the remainder of my talk, I'm going to present geopolitical logics of China, Russia, and the United States, but in a very, very simplified ways, just kind of to give you the feel for how this argument looks in practice.
So let me begin with China.
Okay, though, I'm going to the wrong direction now.
China.
So China is known as an emergent donor.
Why?
Because it was only in 2005 that China transformed itself from being a recipient of aid to being an international donor.
But of course, China's geopolitical rise, rise in terms of kind of shifting the distribution of power at the global level, emboldened Beijing to sort of offer a new set of ideas about different things, including international humanitarian assistance.
In fact, China does not use the language of aid.
It uses its own terminology to refer to those win-win collaborations.
It doesn't refer to the recipients of aid as recipients and itself as a donor.
So you cannot find donor and recipient terms in Chinese vocabulary because for China, it harkens back to the colonial era.
And so it really wants to portray itself as someone who is on even terms, equal terms with the recipients of assistance.
So this is all to say that China clearly came up with kind of its own vocabulary, its own way of registering.
It's not part of any of the global mechanisms to track where the aid is being sent.
Okay, so what are those key principles of China's assistance?
On the left-hand side, you see a picture that illustrates one of the foundational myths portraying a great flood that took place in third millennium.
And that great flood was so great that no ruler was able to manage it successfully until a key persona, a key actor of this myth by name Yu, emerged and succeeded in managing the consequences of the flood.
That in turn passed the way for establishing the emperorship in China and that was the opening of the Qi dynasty in China as well.
So I wanted to begin with this myth because the legacy of Yu and the legacy of state in disaster management has endured for centuries to this day.
To this day, state is the key actor in humanitarian assistance at home and abroad.
And because state is considered to be as a main actor in humanitarian assistance, and state is a political actor, right?
So politics is integral to humanitarian projects.
So humanitarian assistance being political is not an aberration in China's cosmology.
And I don't want to go into a lot of detail, but state is not just a material entity in China's thinking.
It has virtue.
It has kind of ethical connotations.
So there is nothing wrong with politics informing some of those humanitarian decisions.
So again, state has is and will probably continue to play a key role in making decision and administering humanitarian assistance, which is quite different from how aid is administered in, you know, for example, United States humanitarian assistance frameworks.
I want to tell a couple of other foundational beliefs that inform geopolitical logic of China.
One is the unity of thinking, which is in simple terms, what is good domestically, what works domestically.
We can extrapolate it.
We can use it as a role model for our foreign policy action.
So if domestically we use humanitarian assistance to help local communities to develop.
So humanitarian assistance is a tool to facilitate local development and we need local communities to develop because development is the key to internal harmony and peace.
We can use the same logic internally.
So internationally, I'm sorry.
So internationally then humanitarian aid becomes part of the developmental projects.
So all of the aid packages, they come aid trade investment packages.
So aid is indistinguishable from all other.
It's very hard to separate what is aid, what is trade, what is investment, what is not.
But it is consistent with China's logic because just like domestically, internationally, we're going to send aid, this health route that is part of the Belt and Road Initiative network of projects, because this is consistent with how we do that domestically.
Not only that, whatever is good domestically is going to be good internationally, but international development and peace is also beneficial to China because it's going to facilitate, in turn, development and peace at home.
So in China's development and foreign aid thinking, there is this belief that China can create a win-win situation of co-prosperity and peace that is beneficial to China.
So humanitarian aid is inextricably linked to Beijing's development aid.
When it comes to how it played out during the COVID era, right, so A, we did see that Beijing, the government, and the government agencies were the main actors overseeing both decisions and implementation of COVID-19 assistance and later the distributions of vaccine.
Again, very, very different from how aid was distributed in the context of United States humanitarian infrastructure.
So a lot of those aid packages were state-to-state in bilateral fashion.
As a side note, so we did a lot of novel data gathering.
We systematically collected information on humanitarian aid transfers from China, from the United States, from Russia.
We did both qualitative and quantitative analysis.
And one of the strongest findings that emerged out of all of this analysis is that COVID-19 aid went to the countries that had BRI projects with China.
So again, it's consistent that in China's thinking, humanitarian assistance is an important piece and parcel of its thinking about development, development is linked to peace and security and how it's beneficial back to China.
The relationship was even stronger than when it comes to those countries who recognize or does not recognize Taiwan versus China.
It was kind of overriding some of what we expected to find with regard to China's humanitarian assistance.
And remember, I began by saying that we cannot think about aid outside of the context of broader U.S.-China relations.
So China's approach to aid is in contrast to and even contrary to the kind of that neoliberal logic of the traditional humanitarian assistance that places high premium on individual and in the individual.
And so the United States obviously perceived China's action as kind of rogue state action that is undermining the traditional humanitarian regime.
China perceived U.S. resistance to its assistance as a deliberate effort to hamper or impede China's rise.
So we also find that some of the COVID-19 aid distributed by China and vaccine distributions as well was to counter assistance sent by the United States.
So there was this element of geopolitics in the aid distribution as well.
Let me say a few words about Russia, because Russia's logic is also very much state-centric.
And you probably heard the famous saying from Vladimir Putin, who was quoted, so the state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and its people.
So for Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against quite the country.
It is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator, and the main driving force of any change.
End of quote.
But if China's aid policies has been linked to the goal of global leadership, Russia hasn't really proposed anything that can be emulated on the global scale.
Instead, Russia's humanitarian action have been driven by concern with projecting and defending its great power identity, great power status.
But for Russia, great power identity comes with both rights and responsibilities.
And among those responsibilities are to play a bigger constructive role in global and inter-regional affairs, but also help to alleviate poverty, also help to alleviate consequences of natural disasters.
So in Russia's context, there have been this curious mix of aspirations, claims, and entitlements.
And there has always been this tension between like sort of trying to do good and being recognized as a member of this exceptional or exclusive club of Western donors and also this pension for acting in self-interest.
Interestingly, so until 2014, where Russia illegally annexed Crimea, there was, I would say, even a genuine effort to sort of integrate into the Western humanitarian regime.
Russia ran a number of workshops funded by the Department of State.
It really tried to share data on the levels and where it sent its humanitarian assistance with international agencies.
It did work through international agencies much more than it does today, in large part because it didn't have its own infrastructure to channel aid.
Things changed, obviously, in 2014.
And right now, Russia's official documents and doctrine explicitly name assistance as a tool of foreign policy that Russia can use for a range of objectives, including for projecting and defending its great power status.
And what we did find that when it came to COVID-19 assistance, some assistance was sent to sort of consistent with the principle of the need to the countries, especially on the African continent, who needed that assistance the most.
But of course, we also find a very, very strong relationship between aid for votes in the United Nations.
So Russia sort of rewarded countries that either abstained or voted against United Nations General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia's aggressive foreign policy.
So there was that kind of relationship.
Of course, it supported The like-minded neighboring countries, members of the Collective Future Treaty Organization or the Eurasian Economic Union.
So, yeah, so we do find that when it comes to COVID-19 assistance, many of the elements of that geopolitical logic played out as well.
And a few words about the United States.
So, the United States, I will use that in past term, had been the top humanitarian dollar in terms of just the dollar value of assistance.
And it had also been the major contributor to COVID-19 assistance and vaccines assistance, again, in terms of just dollar amount.
This is not to say that the United States have traditionally been driven by humanitarian concerns alone, not necessarily during the Cold War era, for example, both the Soviet Union and the United States used humanitarian and development assistance as a way of countering either communist ideology or capitalist ideology.
If we talk about the Soviet Union, in the post-Cold War era, when various administrations would find a connection between, for example, development or underdevelopment and authoritarianism as sources of terrorism, much more aid would be channeled towards goals that were unrelated to solving humanitarian disasters,
but rather standing up democratic regimes, helping development.
So, all I'm trying to say is that United States aid distribution has always been colored by modern humanitarian motivations, geopolitics, geoeconomics intervene.
But I do want to acknowledge that the institutional infrastructure that was established in the 1960s, 1970s, either by a fluke or by design,
this Office for Humanitarian Assistance that was functioning within the United States aid was able to maintain considerable level of independence from partisan politics, from all of those geopolitical, geoeconomic concerns.
It had significant financial independence.
It had the authority to quickly administer funds to countries and territories in need of those in the aftermath of various disasters.
And it could do so independently of the bureaucracies of the State Department, or you know how long it takes to approve any kind of allocations by the Congress.
And it had a small but very, very dedicated personnel.
So again, the history has shown that that office in particular did stay committed to those humanitarian principles of impartiality, of neutrality, and universality of humanitarian assistance.
But as the United States became more and more involved militarily in various parts of the world, there was kind of a tactical necessity, so to say, to have staff of USAID and staff of the Office for Humanitarian Assistance to work in close proximity to the geographic combatant commands.
It made a lot of a lot of sense because some of those situations where humanitarian disasters unfolded were complex emergencies, kind of a confluence of conflict, disasters, environmental disasters.
So it made tactical sense to have that interagency staff working together, but it did not stay at the tactical level.
Kind of got elevated, and over time, many of this kind of decision-making autonomy and autonomy in making financial decisions were taken away from the Office of the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance.
So, that authority got dispersed to either USAID, State Department.
President Bush created the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
President Trump during the first term created another financial corporation.
So, other agencies acquired authorities for making decisions about the aid administration.
So, with the loss of this independence and the emergence of close linkages between humanitarian aid and development assistance, even humanitarian aid became much more aid-like.
So, let me give you a specific example of how it played out during the COVID era.
So, the United States COVID-19 assistance was also transmitted through the established development assistance channels, and it relied on the metrics for determining recipients of development aid, not humanitarian aid.
Remember, the development aid is always somewhat political.
You know, development aid in the context of the United States was distributed on the basis of placing faith in democracy, placing faith in the market economy.
So, it was linked to those kinds of metrics.
And because humanitarian assistance architecture began resembling or was folded under the development assistance architecture, humanitarian aid during the COVID era was also administered through those development channels.
So, we find a very, very strong relationship between where development assistance went, COVID-19 assistance followed.
And I think the United States freezing its membership in the World Health Administration also had a lot to do with that.
And again, unfortunately, as a result, you know, some of the aid did not reach the areas that World Health Organization offices could reach.
Again, so it followed the development channel.
Okay.
So, U.S. humanitarian aid has become tethered to those same considerations that developmental aid was connected to.
So, the U.S. government ended up providing a higher level of assistance and vaccine assistance to democratic allies, as well as those countries that supported U.S. foreign policy in the United Nations.
Again, so there was kind of with all credit to, again, just the sheer magnitude of resources that the United States shared with the rest of the world, but nevertheless, there was this departure from kind of original humanitarian principles and much more consistency with kind of the geoeconomic developmental logic.
All right.
So, let me just kind of tie it all together, and then we can also discuss some of the other bigger themes in the QA.
So, on the surface, the humanitarian assistance, particularly COVID-19 assistance by China, Russia, and the United States, followed both humanitarian principles, but also kind of the logic of their national interest.
But the reasoning that went into the definition of national interest, that reason, the underlying logic that the book is about, differed.
And this is what we try to sort of Unearthed with our exploration that the United States, as I said, always placed much more faith in democratic governance and market economy, and it has traditionally channeled more humanitarian aid to states with pardon that typo there, with good economic policies, potential for growth, and promise of political reform.
China always packaged its aid in the aid trade investment packages.
It always emphasized political neutrality and it emphasized win-win cooperation with recipient countries.
We've seen that much more humanitarian aid goes towards countries where China has various economic development projects and investments.
And Russia, of course, used aid to both project, defend, and sort of kind of shape its image as a responsible great power.
And because Russia's in China's approach to aid depart from kind of those traditional humanitarian regime principles and the principles of broader global liberal or neoliberal international order, there have been this competition and anxiety by all of these countries.
For the United States, China's desire to promote an alternative model of development, an alternative model of humanitarian assistance, is threatening because again, the United States has benefited strongly from a set of institutions that were established in the aftermath of the Second World War and all of those normative frameworks.
So anything new, it's not just a material challenge in terms of greater military or whatnot, but it is an ideational challenge.
So the United States tried to counter China.
China and Russia would perceive the United States as sort of impeding their desire to also play an equal great power role in regional and global affairs.
And so that thinking also influenced all of the three governments' decisions about humanitarian aid.
And so they tried to use humanitarian aid to compete with each other.
And so this contest over ideas and approaches to humanitarian aid has also diluted humanitarian imperatives.
And so when geopolitics are infused into decisions about humanitarian aid, the outcome is that the time-honored norm of alleviating human suffering loses its legitimacy and original purpose.
So we kind of found that, again, that contest became counterproductive, you know, to the kind of original intent of helping people in need.
So I'll stop here.
I think I have 30 minutes.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Maria.
I think it was really super highlighting, especially the way you were showing this kind of broader ideological thinking context in a way of kind of beyond the COVID case to understand this interconnectedness between perception of foreign policy and global order and the concrete example of assistance.
And I think it's really highlighting a lot what is happening now, right?
That when you have a new administration that arrives with another way of understanding foreign policy and another vision of what should be both the domestic and the global order, you almost automatically have a rethinking of what should be the assistance, right?
And then I think you're showing very well the three cases.
So you mentioned at the end the kind of competition aspect that the three great power may have in the way they are displaying their assistance.
And I think we saw that in the COVID case very much with all this vaccine diplomacy kind of competition.
But I was wondering, and I will open the floor for QA, but I wanted to take the advantage of the first question.
Have we also seen cases of cooperation on concrete case?
And I'm thinking maybe COVID, but maybe also in Afghanistan, where there was a time where the three great powers were in a much more kind of closer interaction, for example, on some specific cases.
So I wanted to launch that as a kind of wake.
If we move beyond the kind of competition narrative, are there cases of possible cooperation or are they functioning at best in parallel, if not in competition?
Yeah, absolutely.
Great question.
Yes.
So as an international relations scholar, I don't see competition and cooperation as the opposite ends.
In fact, cooperation sometimes happens through competition.
So cooperation is simply coordinating policies in an effort to achieve kind of a remote shared goal.
And so in the book, we do talk about how cooperation is possible even at the height of the competition.
So just to remind you, during the Cold War era, the United States and Soviet scientists ended up cooperating over the polio vaccine.
And to this day, the polio vaccination campaign around the world in Africa, in Asia, and in many, many other countries that were the places where the proxy wars were fought.
So that example of cooperation between the two rivals is still listed as kind of that, you know, something to look forward to, that it's possible to cooperate even between the rivals.
And to that, the United States and China have had their moments of cooperation even in the field of developing vaccine or studying those possible zoonic diseases or whatnot.
And many scholars of health diplomacy, they point out to various areas where China and the United States can continue cooperating.
And if it's a vaccine production, China has a lot of productive capacity with sharing some of the information on vaccine production.
China can scale up the production of vaccines for distribution through COVID or other international forms, as one example.
So yes, there are opportunities, and those are pointed out.
China has, one thing that I didn't point out is that China has had tremendous experience of dealing with environmental disasters because due to its geographical location, it has been plugged with droughts, floods, etc., etc., etc.
It has a top-notch search and rescue, urban search and rescue team that has been assisting in various international settings.
Something that can be brought to bear in terms of experience sharing or informing international regional response.
So there are areas where the United States and China can cooperate.
I think in the end it's just the political will.
And again, not being boxed into seeing geopolitics or geostrategic competition kind of in a very, very narrow sense that excludes any opportunities for cooperation, which is more and more difficult to do because I think both administrations now see the bilateral relations in terms of the zero sum.
So one country's win is another country's loss.
And I think again, it is all in the minds, and it's very important to change, to shift that discourse.
And I think with the shift in discourse about what competition and cooperation is all about, then there will be these windows of opportunity for actually engaging in practical forms of cooperation.
And again, this kind of goes back to the importance of understanding that lots of things that we take for granted are not natural.
They are in our minds.
These are the ideas.
And kind of shifting that discourse then will open the space for even limited cooperation that may be very beneficial to humanity writ large.
Thank you.
Let's open the floor for questions.
We have a mic here in the room.
I will come here.
Henry Hale.
Yeah, thank you.
Henry Hale George, Washington University.
Thank you.
Really interesting talk and congratulations on the book and the research.
I guess my question is just looking at what we're experiencing today in the United States, right?
There's something of a backlash against aid.
And I thought it was very interesting to think about that in the context of the Chinese approach that you said, right?
So like kind of in our language is a language of aid, it's a language of U.S. leadership.
Whereas for China, you're describing it, they're describing it as all integrated, right?
That aid, you can't, they don't even use the word aid, and it's kind of all bundled up very tightly with the idea of like development, trade, so things that benefit Chinese people and China directly.
So I guess I'm wondering, you know, based on your research, do you find evidence, have they managed to, has that helped them to avoid kind of a backlash in their own country?
I mean, do you see critics there that are saying in the same way that critics have long talked about here about how, well, you know, money spent abroad is money not spent at home where it's vitally needed.
So I just wonder how much this language and approach to characterizing and conceptualizing these aid policies might also affect kind of their domestic levels of support for them.
Sure.
Great question.
If I were to offer like a mild critique of U.S. aid administration, that will concern kind of the paucity or deficiencies of strategic communications.
The United States, State Department, USAID, and the Office for Humanitarian Assistance, they've been able to achieve a lot.
I mean, we can criticize them for some things, but they've really achieved lots of accomplishments.
But American people don't know what those accomplishments are and how those accomplishments are beneficial to them.
So there's always been this disconnect between what we do in terms of investments, development assistance, and humanitarian aid overseas and how it benefits Americans at home.
There have always been this disconnect.
And it's not just about aid, I mean, it's also about security assistance.
Like I travel overseas or I travel domestically.
It's like, you know, what does it do to us that we spend X billion of dollars, you know, in Georgia, Ukraine?
You name the country, right?
So I think what China has done better is A, really putting on display all this effort, even though in terms of monetary value, China administered considerably less aid than the United States.
It's like China's aid is a small percentage of what the United States contributed.
But it has always been like with this huge pump.
Like, you know, everything is like, oh, it's China-made, you know, all those photo ops, you know, handshaking, thank you, thank you so much, and it all gets reflected.
So I think it gives the Chinese citizens so much more pride, appreciation, and sort of it's much more tangible for them, and it's more tangible in terms of how they talk about what the benefits are.
Because again, it goes back to that unity of thinking.
The unity of thinking means that what we do internationally has direct benefit to our development at home.
So this narrative, like all of their doctrines, all of their documents, they kind of, they repeat this narrative.
So I think their strategic communications campaign has done it much better that the Chinese people take pride in China's leadership role and they also believe that it's beneficial to them domestically.
I don't think that the United States aid administrator has done the same kind of explanatory, has played the same kind of explanatory role, or even overseas, there have been a lot of limitations on where the United States can place the stamp, like, oh, this is USA.
Sometimes where the aid comes from is concealed for the reasons of safety, security, and there are some other limitations on where aid can go.
Like China can sponsor stadiums and hospitals and this and that and that's something that is very visible and it can be advertised and publicized.
In the United States, you know, there are limitations.
And so A, aid, even though it is in large numbers, then it can have very, very important and positive effects internationally, it may not be as visible as Chinese and it is not well understood.
I mean, the public opinion research in the United States has consistently shown that Americans exaggerate what they think the United States, you know, how much aid it sends, like 2% of the GDP, like these crazy, crazy assessments.
No, it's a teeny tiny, I mean, the United States, in terms of the percentage of GDP, is at the bottom of the list of the Organization of Advanced Developed Economies.
So it doesn't really meet that unofficial standard of aid given in dollars, yes.
But I think domestically we also don't understand how that aid benefits American citizens either in terms of preventing the outbreak of another zoonic or another infectious disease or whatnot.
So I do think it's a lot about strategic communications.
And I spoke to quite a few State Department folks and they kind of acknowledge that the strategic communications campaign has not been their strength.
Thank you.
Do we have other questions?
Yes, one here.
Thank you so much for...
Yeah, sorry.
Thank you so much for your presentation.
This was very interesting and very timely.
I was wondering to what ex I have two questions a bit separate from each other but connected to what extent like the research accounts for all the aid that stays in the United States.
I constantly see these numbers online that for example for the development assistance 77 cents to a dollar stays actually in the United States and doesn't leave the country and it benefits the American industry, American vaccine production or American military production.
To what extent the numbers and the US position in terms of dollar amount accounts for the money that stays in the United States.
And the second part of my question would be do you think with the United States pulling away from aid and possibly shutting down USAID, can China and Russia do they have the capacity to fill in the gap that the United States might leave behind in the developing world?
Yeah, great question.
I think the second one is a little bit easier to address.
So not so much you know aid domestically but um, when it comes to World Health Organization, for example um, among many approaches to helping it be perceived as a global leader uh, China used kind of making institutional inroads, meaning that China has tried to place its officials in the key leadership positions in various international agencies.
Neither China nor Russia will be able to fill in the gap of funding.
It will be a significant gap, but I think, when it comes to playing a role in decision-making fashion, in leadership fashion, I think China in particular will benefit tremendously from the United States departure from those agencies.
One thing that I do want to say here regarding the volume of assistance.
So yes, China and Russia cannot fill in that gap, but what I find in my research is that sometimes the volume is less significant in terms of getting at the desired outcomes than just being there.
I will use an example of Russia that I looked very, very closely.
Um, Russia's aid is like a drop in the ocean of assistance, but Russia has done it so strategically, placing it in the areas where either the United States will be like scaling back its assistance or like really strategically to counter something that the United States has done.
And again, it's just a perception of Russia and China being somewhere back in the countries in need.
At the time of the United States departure has a very, very significant impact in terms of, a these countries supporting Chinese and Russia's foreign policy.
B these countries allowing China to have access or place investments into the strategic areas that they wouldn't have otherwise allowed them to place their investments into.
So again, it is the timing, it's the situation when the countries find themselves in a dire situation and when this vacuum is filled, even if the resources that are incoming considerably less than what they would have got from the United States.
Again, it is how it is perceived and how it's framed, you know, by China, by Russia is what it's gonna have, an impact on the recipient countries foreign policies.
So that that's first um and again, I do think that China will benefit from the United States leaving some of these international agencies, because then it will be able to shape their agendas in ways that are consistent with its approach to development.
And with regard to your first question, you're right, you are correct, like that.
You know, even the the amount of money that the United States puts into humanitarian and development assistance, and especially security assistance, oftentimes benefits the United States when it came to covet 19 assistance.
Some of that aid that was sent through Usaid offices of State Department offices.
It was used to ensure the safety of the United States diplomatic personnel, even though it is reflected in the total dollar amount as aid sent to those countries.
So there's definitely some benefit.
Um, that goes back to the United States with all that aid that it sends overseas.
When it comes to, like the specific dollar amounts, I I don't have it at the, at the, at the, at the tips of my, you know fingers, but definitely the United States, and it's a great example of how the?
U.s can benefit domestically from the aid it sends internationally.
Yes, a question there in the Back.
Yes, hello, I'm Pavel Smetsniuke, one of the Patrick Fellows at George Washington University.
And so my question is about the competition between the countries and aid.
You mentioned this as a sort of international fact, and my question would be: how does it work domestically, like within countries that benefit from international aid?
So you would have probably countries where NGOs receive aid from different sources.
So how do they compete?
Do they compete?
Do they then reflect different values?
I don't know.
Russia defends traditional values.
US has some other kinds of agendas.
Does it lead to sort of ferment culture wars within those countries?
How does it play out?
That's great.
Thank you so much for your question.
Because one of the main differences between China-Russia aid administration and that of the United States is that the United States has traditionally administered aid through non-governmental organizations and other non-state agencies that partner up with the field offices of the USAID, State Department, whatnot.
Which again, by extension, if the United States freezes, pulls out, reduces that level of assistance, if those organizations used some of the resources at operational costs for them to administer those aid packages on the ground, I don't know where they will come up with alternative resources because neither China nor Russia work through NGOs on the ground.
Both Russia and China work through state-to-state channels.
If NGOs are involved, they are NGOs in the name only.
They are the Gongos, they are the government-organized non-governmental organizations.
There are a few of those that Russia works with, mostly in Serbia and a handful of other locations.
But still, all of that funding is strictly controlled by the state.
China also works through the government channels.
Yes, so it is going to affect, now that you brought it up, I think it's going to have a trickle-down effect on civil societies in those countries.
So there will not be really competition, but definitely an effect will be felt on the operation of the civil society, non-governmental organizations that traditionally received funding from US embassies or field offices.
Sort of shifting and balance.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, I didn't even think about it, but I think that is one of the trickle-down effects that may potentially potentially observe.
And if I can follow up on that question and, in a sense, ask a question which is the other side of the coin of Henry's question about local public opinions in countries which have been receiving COVID-19 assistance.
So what do we know about how local public opinion have been perceiving the kind of vaccine diplomacy competition arriving?
My impression from what I saw is that the US and Europe have been very alone in their bubble to be very critical of Russian and Chinese vaccine diplomacy, but local perception has been much more positive, whatever the limitation of this Chinese and Russian assistance.
Is that something that you are looking at in the book?
And do we have any way of kind of looking at in terms of data at how public opinion interprets this kind of great power competition around assistance?
Sure, great question.
So, not necessarily in this book, but in a different project of mine where I look at like smaller and middle powers, how do they deal with the great power competition?
But I think this conclusion will probably apply to your question as well, namely that The small other countries of the world have agency and their governments are savvy enough to understand what is going on.
There is a reluctance to side with the United States or China or Russia.
But there is also in the savviness, the savvyness also plays out in a way where these countries can actually leverage and manipulate that competition.
So, one of the other negative byproducts of geopolitical competition is that the United States, China, and Russia, they themselves can be played by the actors on the ground.
And we don't want to recognize that, but I think this is what's happening.
Again, the governments are savvy, they have their own political agendas, they have own domestic agendas, and they do what's in the interest of the government in power.
And they can leverage this competition in the interest of those in power.
And you're right that when it comes to Russia's Sputnik or some of the China's funded vaccines, they were received much better in many local contexts than how it's been presented in the West.
A.
But it was actually Russia who promised more than it was able to deliver.
A lot of the contracts that were signed on significant volumes of Sputnik vaccine were not fulfilled or fulfilled only partly.
And so that kind of undermined Russia's credibility because of Russia's own inability to fulfill the commitments.
But overall, from the standpoint of those countries, I mean, I looked at Central Asia, for example, you know, they were just willing to accept whatever vaccines, either at discounted price or if it's through COVID, it's free of charge that became available at the time.
Do we have time for one more question?
If not, then I would be happy to ask one more that follow what you were just saying in mentioning Central Asia.
So you presented the way each of the three great powers was, of course, organizing assistance toward countries with whom they have some links, either Belt and Road or kind of political connection.
I was wondering how much we see a kind of regional identity in the three cases, like Russia giving mostly to Post-Soviet space, China giving mostly in Southeast Asia and maybe Pakistan, US giving mostly, I don't know, in Central America.
So do we see this kind of sphere of influence in a very kind of old-fashioned way being visible in the distribution of aid or was that much more largely kind of dispatched around who are the partners of the moment?
Definitely in the case of Russia, for sure.
And I think again, Russia of the three actors is probably the most limited.
There are lots of limitations.
A, humanitarianism is by far less developed as an idea in Russia's context than in the context of the United States and China.
There are lots of limitations in terms of how those development and humanitarian assistance doctrines are written.
There were some debates about how to structure institutions inside Russia to administer aid.
Again, there are lots of deficiencies and limitations on how, what.
And I think this has something to do with the fact that it was much easier for Putin to pick up a phone call, a phone and a phone, the counterpart in Kyrgyzstan, in Kyrgyzstan, or in another former post-Soviet republic.
So a lot of those things were done at the level of the leader, whoever he was connected to through the mechanisms of CSTO or Eurasian Economic Union.
So oftentimes, the phone call will take place.
Do we need aid?
Yes, okay.
And then they will sort of take advantage of the planes available to the military or the Ministry of the Emergency Situations.
And then from there on, the aid would be delivered there.
But definitely those kind of political ties, the proximity and the limitations of the infrastructure did play a role.
And let me give you one more example, particularly since you brought Central Asia.
I think in Central Asia, interestingly, the older generation, the generation that grew up and maybe had formative years in the Soviet Union, there was also much more receptiveness to Sputnik vaccines and overall vaccination campaign.
I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the bilateral aid relations, but yes, so there was much more receptiveness.
And I think due to that historical legacy of the Soviet vaccination campaign, and so there was more of a support for Sputnik or more trust in Sputnik as a more traditional type of vaccine among that older generation that could have affected the element decision making if those individuals were part of their health agencies.
Wonderful.
Well, with that, it's time for us to conclude.
So Maria, I wanted to thank you for coming here today and presenting the book.
Thank you for everybody for joining us.
I really invite you to look at that book.
It's giving you a great kind of background on the current transformation of our foreign assistance ideology and strategy that we are following here in the U.S.
And we hope to see you soon for another event at the George Washington University.
Thank you so much.
And Maria, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Did you all let them know?
Congratulations, Kitty.
Good kids, how are you?
Yeah.
Oh, wonderful.
Oh, nice to meet you.
Yeah.
Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A.
Ex-convict, award-winning poet, and Yale Law School graduate, Reginald Duane Betts, is our guest.
He wrote the afterword for a new commemorative edition of Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail and talks about the book and the work done by Freedom Reads, an organization he founded that builds libraries in prisons.
reginald dwayne betts ▲ ● ▼
You know, the judge might have been under no illusion that sending me to prison will help, but he did say I could get something out of it if I tried.
And I think that this is a testament, not just that I got something out of it, but that I came home to a world where it might feel overwhelming.
It might feel like it is absolutely hard to make a way when you have hurt somebody in the past.
But I also came to a world that has radically changed and shifted and created more and more opportunities for people to reflect on the ways in which they've changed and to be welcomed back into what I like to think of as King Stay, the beloved community.
unidentified
Reginald Duane Betts, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app.
Well, up next, Vice President JD Vance speaks at the 2025 International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C. His speech came after Trump administration officials had paused most of the U.S. Agency for International Development's work as part of the Department of Government Efficiency's review of federal government work.
The Vice President told those gathered that protecting religious freedom was a priority for the Trump administration and pledged continued support for religious communities.
It is our distinct honor to welcome to the stage the Vice President of the United States of America, J.
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