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End of the Empire is a once-monthly feature on all news relating to the transition from the unipolar world of the US Empire to a multipolar world.
Noting that Washington DC’s existing nuclear arsenal could destroy the world ‘100 times over,’ Donald Trump recently spoke about his desire to end the Ukraine War and follow up with a trilateral arms reduction treaty including Russia and China.
This column typically deals with other countries seeking to use multilateralism to reduce DC’s power and influence, and almost never covers reductions in power coming from within. This is because the Biden Administration and the previous Trump Administration had no interest in reducing American power, even if it cost American influence.
In an even more poignant reversal, Trump, whose first administration oversaw the ending of two nuclear arms limitation agreements with Russia, is now proposing a comprehensive reduction in addition to a halving of the military budgets.
Speaking on February 13th to reporters ahead of a summit with Indian President Narendra Modi, Trump hoped to meet Xi and Putin “when things calm down”.
“When we straighten it all out, then I want one of the first meetings I have [to be] with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, let’s cut our military budget in half,” Trump said. “We’re going to have them spend a lot less money. We’re going to spend a lot less money. And I know they’re going to do it”.
Trump said that he had discussed arms control with Putin during a call he recently had with the Kremlin about negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine. He added that there was “no reason” to build more nuclear weapons (the US is currently modernizing its arsenal at the cost of over $1 trillion) and that the money could be spent on “other things that are actually hopefully much more productive”.
“And here we are, building new nuclear weapons and [Russia] is building nuclear weapons and China is building nuclear weapons and China is trying to catch up because you know, they’re very substantially behind, but within five or six years, they’ll be even,” Trump said.
The executive branch does not control the power to fund the federal government, and though there are already challenges in the courts as to Trump’s current activities of freezing funds going to federal agencies like USAID, CFPB, and others, one would presume interfering with the war budget would trigger a much stronger response from lawmakers.
The invisible side of empire
Even bigger news than the rhetoric of cutting military budgets has been the actual attempts by Trump and Elon Musk to murder the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal agency nominally coordinated with the State Department. If reported on by left-wing corporate media, USAID is made out to be what government bureaucrats are always made out to be in the best of times: good-meaning people trying to change the world in a difficult industry full of challenges and red tape.
However, their own reporting undoes them—look no further than the New York Times‘s recent description of media groups in Russia funded by the US government as “independent”.
The Times claims USAID provides vital humanitarian assistance of food and medicine, but lists such outflows as less than what they spend on “democracy promotion” inside the territories of many of America’s biggest adversaries, or, more sinisterly, in nations with existing domestic upheaval such as Georgia.
The paper of record will try and disprove USAID’s association with “woke” projects like an LGBTQ opera in Colombia, a transgender comic book in Peru, and transgender surgeries in Guatemala, while also glossing over Ukraine being the agency’s largest recipient of aid, a country currently embattled with America’s most formidable nuclear-armed peer.
Undoubtedly though, the largest blow to the empire from the fall of USAID comes with the end of a convenient method of funding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and related groups, such as the Open Society Institute and International Republican Institute. These “CIA sidekicks” are, as one former NED official named Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post doing “a lot of what… was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.
The NED funds media, civil society, and political groups in over 100 countries, and funded groups are often at the scene of various political crimes including the toppling of governments, most recently in Ukraine in 2014. Former Soviet Georgia has been wracked by protests over the last few years, with the protestors organized by NED-funded groups, in opposition to the current ruling party’s attempts to make funding to such groups transparent by law.
Georgia as it happens, experienced a collapse in its government in 2003, when the chairman of NED admitted to paying the salaries of the Georgian parliament. In Nicaragua against Daniel Ortega, in Haiti against Jean-Bernard Aristide, and in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez, groups that have received funding from the NED and others have attempted violent overthrows of government—in all cases against leaders the US foreign policy establishment considered undesirable. WaL refers to ‘The 307’ substack for details.
In 2015, Foreign Policy revealed that USAID paid for the launch of a social media platform in Cuba in 2010, hoping to create a Twitter-like service that would spark a “Cuban Spring” and potentially help bring about the collapse of the island’s Communist government, in yet another example of this force of empire at work beyond the news headlines.
“While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements,” wrote the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bekule, on X on the occasion of the announcement of USAID’s dismantling.
He claimed the Biden administration used the agency to prop up a communist protest movement in San Salvador to oppose his government. He released WhatsApp messages from administration officials as evidence of the meddling in his country’s democratic process.
The New York Post, whilst combing through the USAID books, found funding directed from the agency to EcoHealth Alliance, the group that sponsored the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan, China, lab which many believe caused the COVID-19 outbreak.
Reeling in the years
USAID seems to have been a tool for regime change and bribery long before wokeness or partisan politics became the norm in America. Former State Department official Peter Van Buren recently eulogized the fall of the $42 billion agency with an account from his days working on the reconstruction of post-Hussein Iraq.
“When a local Iraqi town council complained about a corrupt building contractor siphoning off funds designated for rebuilding homes, the USAID guy swore no knowledge of the project,” Van Buren writes at American Conservative.
The project was, as it turns out, from USAID, but the agency representative wasn’t allowed to share details of it and many other projects for fear that State or Army Civil Affairs would investigate.
Van Buren found out, and writes that he “was invited to a nice sit-down lunch at the sprawling USAID compound in Baghdad with a senior staffer and told to mind my own business, that no one would be looking into the project, things needed to move ahead”.
“My view of USAID in Iraq was not comprehensive, but confirming. I saw nothing that wasn’t a gross caricature of our foreign policy,” Van Buren writes. “The absurdities of 2015 and the goofy woke programs of 2025 are cousins”. WaL
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PICTURED: Elon Musk, who said he would feed USAID through a woodchipper, attends a press conference with Trump at the Oval Office. PC: The White House via X.
