The End of USAID! The Beginning of MESA?

Will the dismantling of the USAID usher in an era of European sovereignty ?

Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave recently tweeted that Europe needs its own Declaration of Independence if it is to succeed in the 21st century. In a tweet he called for MESA or Make Europe Sovereign Again as a counterweight to MAGA - Make America Great Again.

But how do we make the continent sovereign again?

Cosgrave, whose successful international technology summit is currently undergoing a shift towards the Global South, outlined it in four steps:

- Remove US Deep State across Europe

- Stop flow of US “dark” aid money (USAID, NED) used to manipulate European elections & media

- Shut network of US military bases across Europe

- Stop being a vassal

- Educate yank-brained vassal MEGA supporters

It’s easy to see why a European tech bro is keen on ensuring some level of autonomy from Uncle Sam. Technology is now at the forefront of geopolitics. China and America are currently enmeshed in an internecine technology race in which the former is eating the latter’s lunch as proven by the reveal of the new AI model titled DeepSeek or R1.

Framed as the West’s Sputnik moment, in which the Soviets upended America’s underestimation of their technological capabilities by sending a satellite into space, Beijing has managed to produce a large language model (LLM) at a cost of only $6 million compared to OpenAI’s $600 million while requiring less than 10pc of its rivals’, namely Nvidia, Graphic Processing Units or GPU capabilities. It is also open source meaning anyone can use it. DeepSeek has the potential to completely upend the US Stock Market’s buoyancy which has largely depended on the enlarged bubble of AI. Nvidia, whose GPUs are currently under export controls to avoid technology sharing, previously made up 14pc of the index. Big Tech has already invested $1 trillion into AI technology with last year seeing Silicon Valley invest close to $200 billion into the futuristic technology. Shortly after R1’s launch $600 billion was wiped off Nvidia’s market value causing the Nasdaq to drop by 3pc. The waning crumbling edifice that is the US tech economy is hanging by a thread it seems.

The spectre of China excelling in this geopolitically sensitive technology has been a wake-up call to the tech bros at the helm of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE whose remit is to cut costs and streamline efficiency.

Recently, the tech bro extraordinaire offered Europe a path towards more sovereignty.

Elon Musk announced in a space on X - for boomers that’s a live chat on Twitter - that the US would dismantle the USAID or the United States Agency for International Development program effective immediately.

Describing the program as “beyond repair” both Musk and Trump agreed to end the decades-long strong arm of American foreign interference under the guise of humanitarian assistance.

The remaining staffers of USAID were informed not to report to the agency's headquarters in Washington and to work remotely. The website is currently down.

With a budget of over $ 50 billion and a staff of over 10,000 such a programme was inevitability heading for the chopping block with Musk’s henchmen successfully obtaining classified material linked to USAID which could eventually reveal a treasure trove of sensitive information about the operation revealing the agencies inner workings through the years.

Established in the early 1960s by President John F. Kennedy, USAID's purported purpose was to promote ‘global development, humanitarian relief, and democratic governance.’ Having branched out to more than 100 countries, under the auspices of tackling challenges to global health and economic growth, its critics argue that the organisation has a more ulterior motive.

Ever unabashed in his denunciations and edicts, Trump stated that USAID was “run by a bunch of lunatics” and that he was “getting them out.”

While many may be deceived by the latter three letters in the acronym to believe it is simply an aid program for impoverished children in Africa or some other region, USAID is about as involved in AID as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is involved in enforcing an expanded franchise for its citizens.

According to former State Department official Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online, USAID was conceived to centralise the differing roles of various government departments and also to outsource the dirty work of the American security state: “When they are capacity-building activist groups in a foreign country, it is because the State Department wants those activists there.

“USAID for the first time in its history… was created because all the intelligence, statecraft, support, and logistical aid was tripping over itself. The military would run aid to certain groups, the State Department would run aid to groups in the region, and the intelligence community would too. There was no central coordinator of those operations.”

Far from simply an aid group the organisation was instrumental in covert coup d'états spanning from Havana to Kiev.

In Bolivia, USAID was expelled from the country for funding “democracy-building” in the lowland opposition stronghold to the ruling Socialist leader Evo Morales's regime in Santa Cruz.

In Haiti, following a devastating earthquake which rendered 1 million homeless with over 20,000 deaths, USAID filled the void by offering assistance. However, the group massively underperformed providing millions of dollars to build less than 3,000 of the 15,000 homes it promised. Many of the houses were also found to be faulty. Previously, in 1980, USAID exterminated several Creole Pigs to prevent Haitian farmers from competing with American pig farmers putting thousands out of business with no compensation. In 2004, following the coup of previous US ally and Libertarian Catholic Priest Jean Bertrand Aristide, the US installed a puppet regime led by US exile Gerard Latortue. USAID and other strategically aligned groups like the Haiti Democracy Project established NGOs to provide "primary care" and "child survival services” having established the first prison for children to create an open-air prison colony to make the country more amenable for business interests. USAID also set up a Western propaganda outlet called Radio Vision 2000, based on Radio Free Europe a radio station set up by the CIA to broadcast anti-Soviet messaging to Soviet Satellite States.

In Cuba, USAID built an alternative social media application called ZunZuneo - Cuban hummingbird - that emulated Twitter to circumvent the lack of access to social media platforms to convince the Cuban public to rebel against the ruling regime of Raul Castro. The app attracted tens of thousands of users but failed to initiate a Cuban iteration of the Arab Spring.

ZunZuneo was a highly sophisticated network that sought to elicit key information from its demographics including their gender, age, and political leanings.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Suzanne Hall, then a State Department official working with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s social media efforts, helped spearhead an attempt to get Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to take over the ZunZuneo project.

But why would the US want Jack Dorsey of Twitter to own their social media puppet in Cuba? Well, the US has always viewed the internet generally and social media in particular as an arm of their soft power which they can utilise to achieve their aims.

The internet itself is the product of a DARPA grant which is the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, responsible for developing emerging technologies for national security and military capability purposes. In the 1970s, the agency linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers and later transferred the technology to the National Science Foundation (NSF) which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the nascent World Wide Web. Indeed, the progenitors of the algorithm that created Google Larry Page and Sergei Brin received funding from DARPA as well as NASA and the NSF when they were pursuing their PhD at Yale Law School.

This gave the US security state unfettered access to the data of these technological behemoths which is why they were so keen to expand their reach to the rest of the world. Rogue states that did not embrace the free internet were cast as closed societies with censorship rife.

It may be hard to believe given the recent shift, but the US government was the biggest proponent of a free internet for political reasons. They encouraged social media usage without any interest whatsoever in regulation.

During the Arab Spring, several hostile regimes to the West including in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen among other places were toppled with access to the internet and Facebook in particular playing an instrumental role. The number of Arab internet users hit well over 20 million people in 2011.

However, the internet soon became the US’s Frankenstein monster having enabled the public vast access to different ideas and narratives not suited to US interests.

In 2014, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland was instrumental in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych under the so-called Gerasimov Doctrine named after Gen. Valery Gerasimov who in 2013 referred to an “expanded form of warfare” to include the transmission of narratives via the internet. Thus, groups such as the government-funded NGO the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is linked with USAID, set up in the 1980s to use NGOs to remove the stigma associated with overt CIA clandestine operations, spent over $ 30 million backing Ukrainian NGOs to promote “civic participation” culminating in the Euromaidan in 2014 that toppled the ruling government leading to conflict that persists to this day. NED also invested tens of millions into social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Nuland for her part handed out cookies to demonstrators and was caught on hot mic the saying “fuck the EU” for not doing enough to back US interests in the region.

Thus, the narrative of Russian hybrid warfare on the internet grew endemic in Western media.

However, a more recent outgrowth of USAID that has had major implications for free expression occurred in 2016 with the creation of entities such as the Global Engagement Centre. Founded by former journalist turned securocrat Richard Stengel who served as President Barack Obama’s Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs initially as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication to fend off threats against ISIS and other extremist groups, during the 2016 Presidential election it changed its name to the GEC while maintaining its counterterrorism remit.

The National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) for the year 2017 expanded GEC's operations to include addressing foreign propaganda such as misinformation and disinformation.

During that election, particularly in the aftermath, those terms became weaponised to silence any dissent against all sorts of orthodoxies or taboos. Indeed, not only were some of the ideas that led to the democratic upheaval both in Britain - Brexit - and America - Trump - wrong but were part of a sinister fifth-column foreign political threat emanating from the Kremlin.

The recently watered-down Irish Hate Speech Bill was the perfect example of an attempt to silence not highly opinionated journalists, commentators or academics but ordinary people under the veneer of fighting misinformation or ‘hate’.

Aspects of that bill would have seen individuals targeted for expressing views considered ‘hateful’ even when hate was not defined. Even more egregiously the bill would have seen individuals sent to prison for up to 5 years for possession of subjective and ill-defined ‘hateful’ material.

This piece of domestic legislation was an outgrowth of attempts by the European Union (EU) under the Digital Services Act (DSA) to not only regulate and rein in big tech but to regulate people’s thoughts as expressed online or other alternative channels of communication.

However, the DSA is the brainchild not of European lawmakers but of NewsGuard the web extension rating system for news and information with its advisors a who’s who of the American Intel deep state including Stengel and former CIA director general Michael Hayden.

Before the DSA was announced members of NewsGuard convened with European Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton in a closed-door meeting on 15 November 2021.

Part of NewsGuard’s remit is to provide a list of approved sites for news consumption and to warn users before they click on disapproved sites of its alleged misinformation abuses. Approved sites include The New York Times and Buzzfeed while disapproved sites comprise the likes of Russia Today and Fox News among others.

The UK-based State Department-backed entity the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) also created a so-called ‘exclusion list’ of problematic media organs that supposedly spread misinformation.

Among the publications deemed problematic by this modern-day ministry for truth were publications including Unherd and the New York Post.

And on what basis were they listed?

For saying aliens landed on Earth?

For suggesting the earth is flat?

No, but for spreading information that turned out to be true.

Even reports that indicated that COVID-19 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China were deemed misinformation when we now know, based on testimony from the FBI and the CIA that there is some validity to this theory.

When Joe Biden’s son's laptop was found in a café in Delaware and the New York Post reported on the contents within the laptop, which is totally ethical and allowed, social media companies blocked access to the link after pressure from US govt agencies that the story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Not only did USAID adjacent bodies promote and enable egregious censorship legislation but USAID directly funded a musical in Ireland that promoted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

While defending the decision to end the USAID program the White House Press Secretary mentioned some of the wasteful spending associated with the program including: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces, $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru."

But what musical is she referring to?

According to accounts online the musical, done in partnership with the US Embassy in Dublin and the Biden White House, Other Voices, sought to highlight ‘Voices Towards a More Equitable Future’ at the Ambassador’s Residence as part of ‘the Biden Administration’s commitment to the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA)’, according to US Ambassador Claire Cronin.

Another performance to mark the centenary of Irish independence Styled ‘Ireland 100’ presented by the group South Wind Blows, its executive producer Nuala O’Connor explained to the Irish Examiner: ‘The idea behind the event was to show, through performance, songs, words, and music, “an appreciation of where we have come from, of what we have come through as a people and a State, and of our experiences living through the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st century’.

Many of the performances included critiques of the narrowness of Irish identity and revisiting Ireland’s shibboleths including Catholic-run Mother and Baby Homes.

USAID also collaborated with Dublin’s Department of Foreign Affairs to improve food security in Zambia. Led by then administrator for the agency and Irish-American Samantha Power and then Irish Tánaiste Micheál Martin the initiative sought 'to ‘focus on building sustainable food systems, improved nutrition, climate action and gender quality’.

In announcing his takeover of USAID US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “There are things that we do through USAID, that we should continue to do, and we will continue to do”, but that, “foreign aid is not charity… we must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security”.

For years, USAID acted as a middleman to provide safe cover for American soft power through the carefully cultivated veneer of the promotion of democracy, human rights and freedom via NGOs. Far from isolating from the world, America is now quickly but incrementally respecting the sovereignty of different countries without importing foreign ideas and concepts.