Event Highlights: “Upending Soft Power: The Human Cost of U.S. Funding Cuts in the MENA Region”

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Watch the full event on YouTube, Facebook, or X.

 

On March 13, 2025, MEDC and the Arab Center Washington DC co-hosted a virtual event to discuss the human impact of U.S. funding cuts across the Middle East and North Africa with a focus on health and humanitarian aid and development, human rights, and civil society support. The discussion featured the Arab Center Washington DC’s Deputy Executive Director Tamara Kharroub; Yara Asi, Assistant Professor at the School of Global Health Management and Informatics at University of Central Florida and a Non-resident Fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC; Nidal Betare, Co-founder and Managing Director of People Demand Change; Amy Hawthorne, a Middle East expert and Editor at the Arab Center Washington DC; and Alaa Sayeg, Democracy Matters Initiative Advisory Group Member at MEDC. The discussion was moderated by Arwa Shobaki, Managing Director of MEDC.

Below are highlights from each speaker’s remarks and the full transcript.

 

HIGHLIGHTS


Tamara Kharroub

  • While U.S. foreign assistance programs have had shortcomings, they have provided lifesaving aid, medical care, economic assistance, and support for democracy programs.
  • The Trump administration’s 90-day freeze and dismantling of foreign aid operations have caused confusion, chaos, and impacted lives across the region.


Arwa Shobaki

  • American soft power is being redefined and its global legitimacy further eroded after President Trump ordered a 90-day pause on U.S. foreign assistance on his first day in office.
  • USAID has been dismantled, the National Endowment for Democracy’s future remains uncertain, and the State Department is being reimagined. Humanitarian aid and development, and programming to support civil society, human rights, and pro-democracy advocates globally has been brought to a near standstill, impacting millions. 
  • While some programming may start up again or be saved by other donors and partners, U.S. soft power and influence that countless administrations have built up over the past decades cannot so easily be reclaimed.
  • The sudden upending of U.S. foreign assistance has further hurt the U.S. image across the region and dealt another blow to its so-called regional allies.


Amy Hawthorne

  • Since 1946, the MENA region has received more U.S. foreign assistance than any other region, though the distribution is lopsided, with the majority going to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, primarily for military aid.
  • From 2010 to 2023, the U.S. provided more than $28 billion for humanitarian emergency and relief funding to the region.
  • Foreign aid has been a critical instrument of U.S. soft power and influence in the region for decades.
  • The disinformation and falsehood campaign by Elon Musk and the Trump administration has demonized the whole concept of U.S. foreign aid among large parts of the American public, so that foreign aid has gone from having broad bipartisan support to being a focus of partisan politics.
  • In addition to its slash and burn approach, some in the Trump administration have talked about shifting the focus to development financing and away from foreign aid; others have proposed getting rid of foreign aid altogether. Be prepared for massive cuts.


Dr. Yara Asi

  • Many scholars and aid workers have long warned about the broken humanitarian aid system being overstretched and too politicized.
  • In Yemen, over 70% of the population depends on aid to survive, with the United States being the largest donor.
  • In Syria, 90% of humanitarian activities in camps are funded by the United States, including food vouchers, blankets, and hygiene supplies.
  • The United States is even cutting the aid that populations need to recover from conflicts that the United States was directly involved in, enabled, funded, or actively participated in.
  • Scholars in the region are now urging us to use the upending of U.S. foreign aid as an opportunity to reimagine how we can work in our own countries and not be dependent on aid. We now see that we can’t live our lives in the hands of people in the United States.


Nidal Betare

  • U.S. foreign aid in Syria covered four types of programs: humanitarian aid, governance, security, and civil society.
  • In Syria, the impact of the freeze was immediate, with workers receiving messages to not come to the office the next day.
  • The credibility of the U.S. government has been severely damaged, awakening trauma from Trump’s 2019 announcement about the withdrawal of troops from northeast Syria.
  • People really came to believe in the values of human rights and democracy that the United States promoted for the last 14 years in Syria, making the abandonment particularly devastating.
  • While no country can fill the gap, countries like China and Russia will seek to fill the void with different values.


Alaa Sayeg

  • Lebanon is facing multiple overlapping crises: financial collapse, the recent Israel-Hezbollah war, and a broken state.
  • Development aid was never just about generosity, it was a geopolitical tool. Now other superpowers are filling the gap.
  • As the United States steps out of this role, it will leave a vacuum for other powers who will not focus on development, humanitarian aid, human rights, and democracy to fill.
  • In the medium-term and long-term, this will cause significant damage and cause many countries to see the United States as a partner that they cannot rely on.
  • Once this damage is done, it will not be easily reversed when this administration’s term ends in four years. There will be consequences that will be very hard to reverse.

TRANSCRIPT

Below is an AI-generated full transcript of the virtual event. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tamara Kharroub [00:00]

Welcome and thank you all for joining us for this timely and important discussion about the impact of the Trump administration’s foreign assistance freeze and aid cuts on the Middle East and North Africa region. My name is Tamara Kharroub. I’m the Deputy Executive Director and senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and we are very happy to be organizing today’s event in partnership with the Middle East Democracy Center. Thanks to everyone involved in the planning of this webinar, Lana and Nabil at the Arab Center Washington DC and thanks to Arwa at the end, all the team at Middle East Democracy Center for the great work and efforts in putting this webinar together. Just briefly, and for those who don’t know, Arab Center Washington DC is an independent research organization based in Washington DC focusing on the study of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa with special attention to issues of human rights, democracy, international law, and just and peaceful resolution to conflict.

And this year, 2025 is our 10th anniversary, actually hard to believe. Our mission at Arab Center Washington DC is to provide Arab and indigenous perspectives to US policy conversations and to center human and rights-based approaches to policy making. And this is why today’s topic is critical and important for our work. While there were always issues and shortcomings with U.S. foreign assistance programs, they have certainly provided lifesaving aid and medical care, economic assistance and support for democracy and development programs. But the Trump administration’s 90 day freeze stop work orders and dismantling foreign aid operations have caused not only confusion and chaos, but also impacted people’s lives across the region and the world. And while it’s difficult to predict what the Trump administration’s next steps and policies are going to be in this regard, today, we have an excellent lineup of experts who will provide a much needed understanding of the current status of the foreign assistance programs and conditions and the pause and the review process that the Trump administration is instituting, as well as the impact on humanitarian aid and relief work, health and medical care, economic development and democracy and human rights programs across the region.

We also hope to hear about the implications for U.S. national security and long-term U.S. interests and soft power in the region and globally. Many thanks to the speakers for joining us today and for offering their time and insights. I very much look forward to their contributions and many thanks to the Middle East Democracy Center and specifically Arwa Shobaki. I’m pleased now to turn it over to Arwa, who is the managing director at the Middle East Democracy Center and she will be chairing the discussion for today. Arwa.

Arwa Shobaki [3:16]

Thank you Tamara and thank you Arab Center for co-hosting this event today with the Middle East Democracy Center. My name is Arwa Shobaki and I’ll be moderating today’s expert panel to discuss the human cost of U.S. funding in the MENA region and what the end of U.S. soft power as we know it means for the U.S.’s longstanding regional allies. As many of you know, on January 20th, President Trump issued a presidential action placing a 90 day pause on U.S. foreign assistance in a so-called effort to rule out funding and programming not aligned with American interests and antithetical to U.S. values. USAID has since been dismantled and the full review of thousands of contracts has led to an 83% cancellation with the remainder to be moved under the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy’s future remains uncertain and the State Department is being reimagined. While there have been a few legal wins for payouts and already-spent appropriated funds, humanitarian aid and development, and programming to support civil society, human rights, and pro-democracy advocates globally has been brought to a near standstill, impacting millions.

With these acts, American soft power is being redefined and its global legitimacy further eroded. At the same time, the Trump administration is pursuing a dramatic restructuring of U.S. agencies, has put tens of thousands of people out of work, entered into tariff wars with its neighbors, and sent alarming signals to its traditional allies across the globe that it is no longer doing business as usual. Tomorrow the U.S. government faces a potential shutdown if there isn’t agreement reached on a continuing resolution to fund the government. And amidst all of this, the near total end of U.S. foreign assistance feels like an almost foregone conclusion. At the same time, the MENA region cannot take more shock and disruption. The genocidal Israeli war on Gaza has destabilized the region and done tremendous damage to U.S. credibility. Regional peace is hanging in the balance with a weakened Iran and an emboldened Israel.

The sudden upending of U.S. aid and assistance has only further hurt the U.S. image across the region and dealt another blow to its so-called regional allies. While some programming might start up again or be saved by other donors and partners, U.S. soft power and influence that countless administrations have built up over the past decades cannot so easily be reclaimed. With all of this in mind, here today is an expert panel to help us try to understand what is at stake and why it matters. We’ll hear more on what foreign assistance is, what it looks like in the MENA, who the biggest recipients are, what types of programming have been impacted, and who are the most vulnerable. We’ll also hear from experts on the ground from Syria and Lebanon on what this dramatic policy shift means at this moment for these countries and its practical and political implications locally and regionally.

We’ll begin with 10 minutes of remarks from each of our panelists and then move into some questions. You can add your questions for those who are watching our event live into the chat Q&A feature on Zoom or email events@arabcenterdc.org. with your questions. Today, we’ll be hearing from Amy Hawthorne, a Middle East expert and editor at the Arab Center; Dr. Yara Assi, nonresident fellow with the Arab Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics at the University of Central Florida; Nidal Betare, co-founder and managing director of People Demand Change; and Alaa Sayeg, Democracy Matters Advisory Group at MEDC, a fellow with the Stanford Center for Democracy Development and the rule of law, and founder of Ryzomes Social Enterprise. Welcome to all. Amy’s going to kick off today’s discussion by explaining to us what exactly U.S. foreign assistance is, what it looks like in the MENA, and why it matters. Amy, please go ahead.

Amy Hawthorne [7:24]

Thank you so much. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks to MEDC and Arab Center Washington for convening this timely panel. As Arwa said, I’m going to give a brief overview just so we have some context and background for what we’re talking about with aid cuts to the Middle East and North Africa. Since 1946, the Middle East and North Africa region has received more U.S. foreign assistance than any other region in the world. So this is part of the world that for decades has been the focus of very large amounts of foreign assistance. And I’ll just add a caveat that in my remarks, I’m not going to be talking about Sudan, bureaucratically in the U.S. government, as many of you know, Sudan is grouped with Africa and the budget numbers and the foreign assistance programs are different. So I’m just going to be talking about the Middle East and North Africa, but not Sudan.

It’s hard to get an exact total for the annual amount that the U.S. provides in foreign aid to the Middle East and North Africa, but I think a good ballpark figure for recent years is somewhere between seven and nine billion dollars annually and notably in recent decades, all of this aid has been provided by the United States, by U.S. taxpayers, in the form of grants, not loans, and Russia and China and sometimes even the European Union provide aid through, partially through loans or entirely through loans. The U.S. grant-based aid is the most desirable form of foreign assistance for its recipients. Now, historically and today, USAID for MENA, despite being the largest recipient region in the world, is very lopsided and very unevenly distributed. So the majority of U.S. foreign assistance annually goes to three countries: Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. And the majority of that funding is primarily for military aid.

Just to give you an example, the Biden administration in its request to Congress for fiscal year 2024 funding made about 80% of its total requests for the Middle East and North Africa for those three countries, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, and primarily for military aid. So it’s a lot of money, but the bulk of that money goes just to those three countries. The remainder, which is smaller amounts of military and economic or civilian aid, a category that covers development, education, democracy and human rights, some health programs, environmental aid and the like goes to about 11 to 12 other MENA countries, but in much smaller amounts. And the Gulf cooperation GCC countries and Algeria receive for various different reasons, little to no U.S. foreign assistance. For the past 15 years or so, humanitarian aid has become a very significant part of U.S. assistance to the region. According to the Congressional Research Service from 2010 to 2023, the U.S. government provided more than 28 billion dollars for humanitarian emergency and relief funding and a couple billion more, we don’t have an exact total, but probably about 2 billion dollar or more has been provided in this type of aid following the current wars war in Gaza and the recent war in Lebanon.

And this aid goes to provide lifesaving assistance, food, shelter, medicine, livelihood, healthcare, and other emergency assistance for people, civilians who were affected by armed conflicts, natural disasters, and other emergencies. And this humanitarian aid has gone from, it has been provided to support civilians in Libya, Lebanon, Gaza, West Bank, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. Those are the main places where humanitarian aid has been targeted. And the U.S., up until now, has been the world’s largest single humanitarian donor for aid worldwide and the largest single donor in the Middle East and North Africa. So I know my colleagues are going to talk more about specific effects of these aid cuts, but it’s just important to keep in mind that because the U.S. has been such a significant donor, the cuts are felt even more acutely. There is also democracy and human rights funding for the Middle East and North Africa that comes from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a small quasi independent organization that is funded by the U.S. Congress and it provides support to activists and civil society organizations and dissidents and reformers across the Middle East and North Africa.

It operates separately from the State Department and USAID and NED colleagues were very surprised to find that their funding had been frozen a couple of weeks ago because NED was not part of the original foreign aid freeze. And that just sort of illustrates, I think, the chaotic and broad and sweeping nature of this Trump administration’s cuts and actions against all sorts of programs that the U.S. has done internationally. Recently, as the result of after filing a lawsuit, the National Endowment for Democracy did receive a portion of its back funding that was due, but hundreds of grantees in the Middle East and North Africa had seen their programs, their funding in some cases, their lives upended and disrupted by this aid cut. And just to give the audience a sense of maybe the scope of that amount of money, NED’s website says that in 2023, it made about 33 million dollars worth of grants for the Middle East and North Africa. So why don’t I stop there. I just wanted to give that overview as sort of a background context and then Arwa maybe later, if you have time to come back to me, I can sort of talk about what’s happened, but I can move now to my colleagues who are going to talk about very specific impacts in specific places.

Arwa Shobaki [14:40]

Thank you, Amy. Thank you so much for that really clear overview of what foreign assistance is and what it looks like in the region. We’re going to next be hearing from Dr. Asi, from Yara, who’s going to explain the impact of these funding cuts on the health and humanitarian sector, specifically focusing on countries and programs most impacted and discussing what the short and long-term implications of this change in policy will be to those most vulnerable on the ground. Thank you. Go ahead please, Yara.

Yara Asi [15:10] 

Thank you, Arwa. And thanks to the Arab Center and the hosts for having me and convening this conversation in what is an increasingly chaotic time, I think. So, yeah, I’m Yara Asi. I’m a non-resident fellow here at the Arab Center. Much of my work focuses on health and humanitarianism in the region, and that’s where I’ll be focusing my remarks today. First, I’m going to broadly address how much and what type of aid was specifically distributed to the region and what that aid was used for. There’s a lot of overlap in health and humanitarian aid around the world, and actually the MENA region in terms of humanitarian aid is not one of the primary regions that’s seeing significant cuts. We’re seeing a lot of that in Sub-Saharan Africa, but obviously, especially for the conflict affected countries in this region, humanitarian aid, many people were entirely dependent on it.

So I’ll focus after I talk a bit about the region more broadly on those specific countries, including Gaza, Syria, and Yemen. So as we begin this conversation, I think it’s important to me that we first address a few critiques of humanitarian aid that existed before this, and perhaps this illustrates why those critiques should have been reckoned with, and I think we should keep these in the back of our mind as we discuss the consequences of losing this aid. So scholars, analysts, aid workers, agency heads, aid recipients for decades have been warning about how broken the humanitarian aid system is for decades. It’s overstretched, and it’s both too political, in that, in terms of who gives what and to whom and when and how they give it. We’re seeing that right now with Ukraine. We’ve seen it with many other contexts, but it’s also depoliticized in other ways in that settings that are clearly affected by war discrimination, oppression, mass atrocities, are often treated as areas of humanitarian disaster completely disconnected from the social and political context that created the disaster.

In fact, as someone who’s worked closely with Palestinian aid organizations, local actors like them that do engage politically or that do address political realities are frequently not permitted to apply for aid by USAID and other such agencies. So there’s actually an incentive for aid organizations to be de-political in how they work with populations. And some would say it’s not the mandate of aid agencies to fix political and social dynamics, but certainly there’s plenty of evidence that they exacerbate and at the very least, delay real efforts to move past the root causes of why aid is needed. There’s also evidence that health aid is highly dependent on the whims of donors and not necessarily to be responsive or accountable to local populations. So what a donor might think a country needs may not be what the Ministry of Health or what local midwives or community health workers actually need, and there’s often a disconnect there.

Aid can also create systems that work parallel to state actors. So ideally you have a ministry of health or some sort of health department that’s accountable and responsive to the population. Often aid programming, especially in countries of prolonged protracted conflict or disaster, create parallel systems that reduces the capacity of local actors and does not work to develop sustainable and effective institutions. So when aid fluctuates, it’s significantly impactful on these sectors and many are saying, well, this dependence breeds these outcomes. There’s a lot written on these critiques that I don’t have time to get into today, but I do urge the audience to engage with them as we might have to start considering a new reality and in terms of what aid looks like and what countries that need humanitarian assistance can and should actually do. And so it gives us, I think, at least a bit of an opportunity to reimagine the global system of humanitarian aid as we’re seeing this kind of forced shift.

So I think I’d also like to introduce the idea of why health is such an important consideration as we think about aid. Of course, I think top of mind, most importantly, people having access to healthcare, to the social determinants of health like food and clean water, and the provisions that protect public health, like vaccination campaigns, infectious disease monitoring, keeps us healthy and alive for longer. So that’s benefit number one. This is good for multiple reasons, including, I mean, I guess number one there would be the sheer protection of human life, which is a value that I think hopefully we all hold, but also the ability for people to receive educations, attain decent employment, be productive, participating stable members of society, gives the ability for children to grow up with everything they need to thrive, the ability for the elderly to live healthily as long as possible with mental acuity, with mobility, and just the ability for people to feel as though they’re living in a society that is safe and stable enough where they can be creative and innovative as we, and I mean the global we here will need to be able to rise to many challenges that are facing all of us, like the implications of AI, aging societies and decreasing birth rates around the world.

And of course the big one: climate change. And we need healthy societies to do all of that. But also I think more in the short term disruptions in health access and health standards as we just saw with COVID, becomes a threat for all of us everywhere. So globally, these cuts are going to have a pronounced and immediate impact on global health especially, and I think probably most potently, our ability to combat infectious disease. So these cuts will terminate or have already terminated active programs in HIV treatment and prevention, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, Ebola, multiple other diseases and conditions including nutrition assistance programs for babies that are facing malnutrition. These programs are already cut as we speak in many countries. The Global Health Council, which is a collection of global NGOs that works on health, said, quote, about these cuts, “With the stroke of a pen, the U.S. government has gutted decades of progress in global health development and humanitarian aid without due process transparency or good faith consideration of the consequences. This reckless and unilateral move will cost millions of lives around the world.”

So we’re already being faced with the human impact of this. We saw with COVID-19 just how important it was to have disease surveillance, coordination between countries and their health agencies, populations that trust health institutions, adequate funding for aid responses. We know disease does not recognize borders. Several years ago in Syria, there were several polio outbreaks that were minimized in their impact with immediate vaccine efforts coordinated by aid agencies. We just of course saw cases of polio and Gaza just a few months ago. Disease does not recognize borders. So what happens with the next epidemic or pandemic when the U.S. has cut this lifeline?

That said, it’s not a ton of money. So even when we’re talking about the number of cuts, this is not going to make a significant dent on the U.S. budget. Of the 72 billion of US foreign aid money from 2023, only 21.7% was for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and 22% was for health. Of that 22% for health, almost 15% went directly to HIV v aids programming, primarily through PEPFAR. So every other health need just got about 7.7% of funding. So as an example, to combat the pandemic of influenza that we’re keeping an eye on around the world, this was a particularly bad flu season, just 2% of the full foreign aid budget was committed. This is just 1.5 billion to compare that. In the same year, we spent a full 817 billion for just the Department of Defense. And it’s not just the lack of cuts as Arwa and Amy said, but it’s also the disruption and the lack of understanding of local staff as to what they’re able to do and what they’re not.

So the Secretary of State announced a carve out for what they’re calling lifesaving care. Ostensibly, this should protect many of these programs, but staff on the ground are reporting that they’re not getting the payments, that they’re not even able to log into their email and check. So there’s obviously a lot of confusion. So in the MENA region, aside from Israel, which is of course the top recipient of USAID with more than 3 billion per year, we see Jordan and Egypt are the next highest, which are, with around 1.5 billion per year. Much of this is for security, military and economic assistance. And then we start seeing the countries that we’d expect. So Syria, about 762 million that year, Yemen 733 million, in the West Bank and Gaza, about 293 million. So all of these countries, specifically the ones I just mentioned, we’ll see reductions in basic health and humanitarian programming, nutrition assistance, disaster relief vaccine campaigns, looking at them specifically.

So since 2015, when the Saudi war on Yemen began, enabled by the U.S. (that’s a different issue), USAID has been the largest donor to Yemen, nearly 6 billion in AIDS since then. And in Yemen, more than 70% of the population is dependent on aid to survive. So for example, the World Food Program, trying to intervene in famine and hunger in Yemen, half of the world food program’s budget in Yemen was given by USAID. This was more than $300 million. So that seemingly has been cut. In Syria, the U.S. is the largest donor of coordinated aid, contributing 25% of funding in 2024. So a lot of the population of Syria is displaced, now living in camps. These camps are entirely, basically dependent on aid. So some local organizations that were distributing food and water to the camps are now pushing that to just one or two days per week and increasingly are saying we may not be able to deliver food or water at all in the near future. So for example, in the north, there were six NGOs working to provide water to more than 430,000 people, men, women, and children, that are warning that they won’t be able to provide any services very soon. The people living in camps in Syria, 90% of the humanitarian activities they receive are from U.S. funding. This is food vouchers, this is blankets, this is soap and other hygiene supplies. And these people, remember, many of them have no houses to go back to in Syria. So this camp right now is their life and they’re not able to afford even the basic necessities for living. So they really need this aid. And before I wrap, I of course want to talk about the Palestinian context. In Gaza, of course, we’ve seen among the worst humanitarian disasters of modern time: at least 48,000 killed, a hundred thousand injured, 2 million displaced.

So prior to the beginning of the Trump administration, USAID had about half a billion dollars to disperse to organizations in Gaza. And now in this period of ceasefire, USAID was supposed to fund much of the aid to progress the ceasefire. The Trump administration itself approved 380 million in aid on January 31st, just over a month ago, to help the ceasefire in Gaza. And there’s since then been no confirmed payments for these agencies. So many of these agencies working in Gaza because of the significant humanitarian need had already bought the supplies, the food, the medicines, et cetera. And now they’re receiving – expecting – reimbursements from USAID. Now they’re not getting those reimbursements, and for many of them, they’re either not able to order the goods or for others, they already ordered the goods and they’re either sitting at the border or sitting somewhere else in Gaza and the agency doesn’t have the money for the fuel or just to transport the goods.

So this is not only a significant humanitarian waste, but it’s just wasteful in terms of, when we talk about this entire effort being about weeding out government spending, here we have situations where the aid is there, the workers are there, and it would offer such a significant benefit to people’s lives, that would not be a very difficult lift, and we’re seeing inability to do even that. USAID specifically was supposed to buy 5,200 homes, temporary homes in Gaza as part of the next phase of the ceasefire. With the current cuts, this has been slashed to just about a thousand homes, and they’re assuming that there will be further cuts. So even with the ceasefire effort that the U.S. has pushed and to try to sustain, as we’ve seen in media reports, it needs, part of these agreements were that aid would get into Gaza – tents, houses, food, water, medicines, et cetera.

So if none of that is happening, then the ceasefire process itself has broken up. So a couple takeaways. The U.S. is the top donor in many of these countries, which is why we’re seeing such a disproportionate humanitarian impact when the U.S. pulls back. This is a time when we can point to too much dependence on the U.S., but how do we fix that in this moment? We know some other countries will pick up the slack as they did when the U.S. cut funding to UNRWA, but the level of funding cannot be made up by other donors. So what happens to these programs? What happens to these people? I also want to make a note of course, that many of the settings I just talked about, the U.S. was directly involved in, enabled, funded, or actively participated in (in the case of Iraq, for example), the need for this humanitarian assistance.

So the fact that the U.S. is now cutting even the aid that these populations need to try to recover is quite ironic. What we’re seeing is some scholars on the ground and analysts on the ground are saying, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to reimagine how we can work in our own countries and not be dependent on aid, because now we see we can’t leave our lives in the hands of people outside of in the U.S. in any other country because we cannot depend on them long-term. And so that’s also going to be a shift in the humanitarian system. So I look forward to talking more about these issues. Thank you.

Arwa Shobaki [30:51]

Thank you so much, Yara. Next we’re going to be hearing from Nadal who’s going to be discussing the situation on the ground in Syria. He’s just returned from a 20 day survey traveling across the country where people are still celebrating the downfall of the Assad regime, but also facing a very daunting task of reconciliation and reconstruction after what has been a totally devastating 14 year war. So please go ahead, Nadal.

Nidal Betare [31:20] 

Thank you, Arwa, and thank you Amy and Yara for this information. It’s really accurate. And let me start with where we stopped talking about the humanitarian aid in Syria, and especially in the IDP camps. So basically the U.S. government funded, for over the last 14 years, four types of programs in Syria. The humanitarian aid was on the top of them because it served beneficiaries in the entire country, like in Northeast Syria and Northwest Syria, and even in the regime controlled areas, formerly regime controlled areas, through UN agencies or other international NGOs. And I would say that in some programs, 100% of the beneficiaries depend on what on the U.S. funds. It depends on the program that was designated for the crisis. The rest of the programming was divided into three categories, and it was concentrated basically in northeast Syria as a result of the fight against ISIS.

And so these programs were divided into governance, security, and civil society. The U.S. policy there was based on the counterinsurgency policy, which means that we have to dismantle the government institutions that existed and we will have to rebuild the new institutions and gain the trust of the population. And this was the U.S. policy – not only the U.S. policy, it’s the U.S. led coalition to defeat ISIS – which basically included, in northeast Syria, the EU and the United States government. And these programs actually largely were on security and governance, and it’s a lot of money that has been paid since 2019.

And with this, I was still in Syria when the freeze happened or took place, and actually I was sitting in a seat for a focus group discussion in Deir Ezzor. And we’re talking about the programs that the U.S. is funding and how these programs will shift or be modified given the new developments in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. And believe it or not, the impact was immediate and you can see it. And I will divide it into two categories. The first one on people who are employed by these programs. While I was talking to them, two or three of them, they received messages that “our programs have stopped, and you don’t have to come to the office tomorrow until we tell you later what’s going to happen.”

And this also applied not only for these people inside Syria who are serving for these programs or working on these programs, also for the international NGOs, the American based organizations who are funded and they have been working on these programs for the last six or seven years basically in northeast Syria. And I started to receive messages from my colleagues here in DC telling me that their programs were put on hold. Well, later, until today, now, most of the programs in Syria were terminated for most of the programs. The only programs that survived are the programs that are guarding the ISIS prisons in northeast Syria. And as Yara mentioned, the humanitarian aid programs that were given waivers, until today, it’s not clear whether, how they would be continued, but people on the ground, people who I talk to and the IDP camps in northwest Syria, especially in the north, I mean until today they do not, they have not received any orders or permissions to continue work. And even the programs that were given waivers – because they are post ISIS stabilization programs – these programs, the organizations do not. The organizations who hold these contracts do not have the money to spend, and this money has not been funneled out to them yet, and they do not know how and when this money will be given to them.

The other impact that you could really see, I saw it when I was in Syria, that is really related to the credibility of the United States government. Let’s remember that in Syria, this awakened the trauma of this first term of President Trump when he announced in 2019 that he will withdraw from Syria, and that created a dilemma and chaos inside Syria and pushed some here in the United States to resign in protest to that decision. But he changed his mind and stayed in Syria. But now it’s very clear that his opinion about humanitarian aid and aid development in Syria will not change. And for Syrians especially, you see it, it’s very tangible on the ground when you are there, especially in northwest and northeast Syria, where most of the U.S. money was put in the civil society and the human rights and democracy promotion.

And people really came to believe in the values of human rights and democracy that the United States promoted for the last 14 years. And the cost of this promotion and these programs in Syria was not only in the cost of money, there were people who were imprisoned, like tortured to death. And I personally lost a lot of people who were part of promoting democracy and the human rights in Syria through the programs that the U.S. government funded and they were imprisoned and then later were tortured to death in Syria. So there is a lot of chaos now in Syria.

And back to most of the programs that the United States government, I’m just going to wrap up very quickly, in northeast Syria are coordinated with other countries, especially the EU countries. So for example, our organization implemented a peace building and conflict resolution program in northeast Syria between 2020 and 2024 funded by the Canadian government. But before the Canadian government gave us the approval and the funds to do this program, they had to coordinate and get to coordinate with the State Department here in Washington D.C. So there are so many programs that being implemented in Syria that are in coordination with EU countries like the U.K., Denmark, like so many other countries. So I’m sure that this decision left these countries in a dilemma to decide whether they will continue these programs or they will stop it, whether they can, if they want to continue, whether they can fully fund the whole programs or they will have to modify it and cut from it.

Finally, also, something that Yara mentioned about the dependence on the U.S. funding in humanitarian aid and international development in general. I am one of the people who used to say, if the United States stops funding programs in Syria, half of Syria will be unemployed or half of Syria will be dying, starving to death. Actually, in the recent two years, up until the fall of Bashar said, the situation in Syria became worse. The economic situation became even more severe for everyone. And you can see it on the ground, the level of unprecedented poverty in Syria that pushed maybe more than 90% of the population to depend on humanitarian aid. All these people are now, they have no idea what to do. As Yara said, there is no home for them to go back to because the level of destruction in Syria is beyond imagination.

All photos and videos that we have seen over the last 14 years really do not convey the actual destruction on the ground in Syria. And the last thing, well, this is literally the last thing, let’s remember that Syria is under sanctions and sanctions imposed by the United States and imposed by the EU. Even by easing some of these sanctions by the European Union, this does not translate on any actual or materializes on any actual benefit for people on the ground in Syria. So basically, with cutting off the aid and development programs in Syria, in this phase where Syria needed the most, it’s basically putting Syria under siege and no one really knows how they will get out of this problem. Thank you. And I’m ready for any questions.

Arwa Shobaki [43:14]

Thank you. Thank you, Nidal. And next and last, we’re going to be hearing from Alaa, who’s going to give us the view from Lebanon, a country for the first time in many years, not dominated by Hezbollah and the Iranian influence. And we will be hearing from him on what the end of U.S. soft power in Lebanon means at this critical time. Go ahead Alaa.

Alaa Sayeg [43:37]

Thank you, Arwa. Thank you everyone. It was like I came to this discussion with a deep concern about the impact of the USAID freeze, but after hearing from fellow panelists today about how these cuts will cost lives, I’m not just concerned, but more devastated. Let’s be clear: In Lebanon, it’s not just one crisis; the country is being crushed under multiple overlapping crises, each feeding into the other. So the country is at a breaking point, the financial collapse that wiped out savings and drove 80% of the population into poverty and the Lebanese currency into 90% less of its value. The latest Israeli war between Israel and Hezbollah and all the intervention of regional powers. You mentioned Iran and its soul and the Asad regime and its role in the country alone. The Israeli work costs Lebanon. Billions of dollars destroyed villages in the south and the southern suburbs of Beirut and Bakar. And it added more damage to the economy and to the already collapsing system.

We had a broken state for years, and now with the current state and current elected president, we are trying as a civil society to reshift the narrative, to regain what we’ve lost for the past years and three structure and rebuild the state and to make the influence and impact of warlords and the existing political elite less and less and the regional powers who are related to those warlords less and less. And through all of this, there has been one constant thing that held the Lebanese community together, which is the civil society with its organizations and with alternative groups that emerged, especially during and after the 2019 uprising. It has stepped in every aspect where the government has failed and it kept people with the basic needs and services. And this civil society in Lebanon had a great impact during many critical moments: the 4th of August explosion, during the latest war, during the ongoing financial and economic crisis, and different events, devastating events. But here’s the question we must ask today: What happens when the last safety net is pulled away? What happens when the US development aid, one of the few remaining lifelines, is suddenly frozen?

We are talking about around USD $3 million budget per year. The USAID has been instrumental in supporting various sectors in Lebanon from economic growth and microfinancing, water management and infrastructure and institutional support, civic engagement and youth empowerment, and definitely public health, and projects related to road safety. So with this cut that is more than just in aid, it’s been the America’s most powerful tool, most powerful soft power tool, if we can say, not just for humanitarian relief, but as a key instrument of soft power and diplomacy. Now, this partner that is not just a superpower is stepping out of this role and leaving a void and a vacuum for other powers. We need to be clear here, and numbers can give us some clarity, that the funding is reduced—it’s not only that the funding is reduced, the remaining funding is being shifted into other aspects.

So the agenda is shifting from development, the humanitarian aid supporting democracy and human rights, into military and security. And the new administration is promising peace and all its funding is going towards military and security in the region. In the MENA region, and especially in Lebanon, this shift might only cause conflict, more conflict, and not the promised peace because the very social fabric, the services that are being offered to the refugees’ community supporting the crisis that Lebanon is dealing with that, are not only the responsibility of Lebanon. And Lebanon cannot alone be responsible due to its economic and social constraints [to] deal with it’s being pushed into its limits. And this will not definitely lead into the promised peace. 

There is a trajectory, a positive trajectory of the civil society organizations that I talked about before that has been progressing and many progress has been done. Now it’s a very bad timing for this budget cut and all this is in danger. And the most dangerous thing is who fills this void and the geopolitical shift that this void will cause. So what happens when the U.S. pulls back? Other players will step in, and definitely other players will not focus on development, influence on humanitarian causes, on human rights and democracy. They’ll be focusing on infrastructure, on trade, on political leverage over our struggling economies in the region. And definitely this will cause many countries in the midterm and long term to see the US as a partner that they can’t rely on. And this will weaken the progress that has been made on governance reforms weaken democratic institutions and it will embolden authoritarianism in the region. And we have many authoritarian and extremist regimes in the region and the danger of prioritizing military development in Lebanon, for example, they unfreeze the $95 million for the Lebanese army. This is a good thing, but when you compare it with the freeze of the $300 million of the development [aid], and when you see the reforms are not being pushed very hard on the administrative level, on appointing the administration of the military and so on, you see that this will cause harm in the long run.

It’s stabilizing the country for the time being, but in the medium-term and long-term, this will have a really bad influence and impact. The focus is shifting towards security in the region. We are seeing this and in the budget shift, we’re seeing this at the expense of governance, economic stability, social stability, and reforms. This is a risky trade off. So this global strategy that the current administration is proposing that is looking and that is promising a win-win-win situation simply doesn’t work because, from the administration’s perspective, the shift appears to be a win-win-win strategy. Selling weapons boosts the U.S. economy. Tariffs replace foreign aid as a revenue source. Reduced spending on development aligns with the America first policies. But in reality this might be a losing strategy. Development aid was never just about generosity, it was a geopolitical tool. And now other superpowers are filling the gap, offering infrastructure projects without the reform conditions that U.S. foreign aid requires and many other regional powers will be leveraging our deals, energy deals to cement relations with governments that once depended on the U.S. Even U.S. allies in the region are recalibrating their strategies knowing that they can no longer rely on the U.S. as a predictable partner. So this shift weakens the Americans’ diplomatic hand and opens the door for new power dynamics that might not align with the values that the States wants preached and might lead into more conflict and bloody reality.

I wanted to conclude with: This whole change leads us to a new way of thinking. We need to push for a more balanced U.S. engagement strategy. Definitely we need to push the remaining funders and donors, especially the Europeans, to fill this gap. We need to have a local look on localizing funding and supporting local civil society groups in empowering local organizations rather than cutting them off and to create new paths for sustainability. One definitely can argue that foreign funding schemes, especially U.S. foreign funding schemes needed reform, needed innovation, needed diversification, but definitely this cut cold-Turkey strategy will not lead into any of that. It’s time for us to rethink the whole scheme. I agree with what Yara mentioned here and what other panelists mentioned on this point. And I believe there are opportunities to rethink funding, to rethink the sustainability of local organizations, and to localize agendas as well because it has been donor dependent and donor agenda first. This needs to be challenged and changed. Meanwhile, we need to find an emergency plan and an emergency advocacy and lobbying plan to make this phase pass with the least damage possible on the good organizations that have been doing great work and to keep the track of all the achievements that have been done in different civil societies and different countries, for example, in Lebanon.

Arwa Shobaki [58:04]

Thank you so much, Alaa. I think you’ve given us all a lot to think about and perhaps when we have a little bit of time after my first round of questions, we can flip some of what you’ve called for or questioned back to some of our panelists to talk about. I mean obviously the humanitarian aid and development funding that the U.S. has been providing is really marginal compared to the military and security assistance that it provides. Yet the impact of pulling this funding is sort of exponentially large and felt from the soft power as well as the actual daily livelihoods of many in the region. And we’re trying to just make sense of how this could strategically be a good move for the U.S. at this point in time. And I’d like to dig a bit more into that, but first can we maybe go back to Amy. And I’d like to ask you Amy, and I’ll ask a couple of questions and then address, I think we’ve received quite a few questions from the audience, but they’re all kind of linked to some of the things that we’ve all been discussing and plan to kind of address now. 

I think that Amy, you talked about the budget and what it is, and right now we’ve got this continuing resolution deadline tomorrow, but in the bigger picture, the Trump administration is going to be putting forward its Fiscal Year 2026 budget in the upcoming month or two. And I’m just wondering, what do you expect? I mean, do you think that this policy, this sort of slash and burn of foreign assistance is going to hold? Do you expect more of the same or do you think that there will be some pushback and perhaps some rethinking on this? I’d love to get your opinion on that.

Amy Hawthorne [59:59]

Thanks, Arwa. So as you mentioned, in the coming weeks the Trump administration is supposed to prepare its funding request to Congress for all federal funding including foreign assistance for Fiscal Year 2026. And it’s a bit confusing how the U.S. does it, but that is the fiscal year that begins on October 1st, 2025. So everything that the Trump administration has done so far in terms of freezing and cutting aid projects is all with money that has already been appropriated by Congress under the Biden administration. So with the Trump administration’s budget that it will deliver to Capitol Hill sometime this spring, we will get a much clearer picture of what their own vision is for foreign aid. And we have a few different clues just based on what’s been reported in the media. But overall, I would say that the picture looks pretty dire for any significant amount of foreign aid to continue being provided by the U.S. government.

One of the things that’s been really notable about the aid freeze and then the terminations of all these projects and the firing of so many federal aid workers, et cetera, has been the campaign of disinformation and sometimes sheer falsehoods that has been propagated by Elon Musk, by President Trump, by other members of the Trump administration, by some members of Congress, and by people on social media who are supporters of Trump and Musk. And this disinformation and falsehood campaign has basically demonized the whole concept of U.S. foreign aid with large parts of the American public. That has been the goal. We know that U.S. foreign aid has never been popular among the U.S. public. Americans generally think that we spend much, much more on foreign aid than we do or did. It’s actually quite a small portion of the federal budget, but generally over the past 20, 25 years, there has been a growing lack of support for foreign aid.

But what the Trump administration has added on top of this is this really shocking in my view disinformation campaign that has presented false information about where USAID, what it was being spent on. I’m sure our audience is familiar with the false information that was put out about $50 million for condoms and Gaza and that sort of went viral and that was not true. And there’s many other stories like that. And also the rhetoric that has been coming from Elon Musk and Trump and others have been repeating, describing USAID as a corrupt organization, a criminal organization, even describing the National Endowment for Democracy as evil. This is really, really shocking discourse. Even the members of Congress mostly on the right who have long been skeptics, not that supportive of foreign aid, have never described it in these terms. They’ve said it’s a waste of money, we need to focus here at home. But this is a very well organized and well concerted and far reaching campaign to really besmirch the reputation of aid workers of aid programs of foreign aid in general. And so that’s going to have an impact. 

And the reason I mentioned that is that’s created the political climate in which all this is happening. So foreign aid has gone from being something that had strong bipartisan support in Washington, didn’t necessarily have a huge amount of support from Americans out across the country, but wasn’t like an intense focus of partisan politics. And now the Trump administration has intentionally turned it into a partisan political target. And so I think they must believe they’re getting some political mileage out of this so they will continue. So when Trump presents his budget, his new federal request to Congress, I would anticipate that very few Republicans will stand up to reverse the cuts or restore some of the funding for foreign aid.

Trump actually tried to make very significant, not as significant as this recent round, but when he was in office the first time he tried or wanted to cut about 30% of the U.S. foreign aid budget and there was an immediate bipartisan pushback from Congress, which of course is supposed to control funding and does have the power of the purse to shut that down. This time, fast forward all these years later, with the new political environment in Washington, with the disinformation and falsehood campaign, with a lot of politicians being intimidated, frankly, there has been almost no pushback from Republicans, very, very limited. Some of it has been behind closed doors. These are from some very long time supporters of foreign aid on the Republican side. And what’s also been notable is that other members of Congress, the Republican-held Congress, have organized hearings in recent weeks that have just basically been about attacking and demonizing USAID, U.S. foreign assistance. So this has an impact. So now aid will be something that is very, very unpopular. 

So in addition to slash and burn and cutting the numbers hugely, what will the Trump administration propose? There’ve been a couple of ideas reported in the media. One is to really shift the focus to development financing and to move away from aid and more to make the Development Finance Corporation the lead agency. And that would mean working with some U.S. federal money, but also a lot of private sector money, and really the sort of investment model that you’re investing in aid projects that are going to, or development projects that are going to generate a profit. That’s very, very different than the model the U.S. has used mostly so far. 

Some officials in the Trump administration have talked about do we need any funding for foreign aid at all? Is it even constitutional? Is it against the U.S. constitution to provide foreign aid? This to me is a very radical idea, but it sort of shows you where we’re going. Some Trump officials have been quoted in the media or reported to have said, this is all the U.S. has to get out of the foreign aid business entirely, and this should just be the domain of private philanthropy and private citizens. It should all be funded through private donations. So I think in summary, we can look for massive cuts. So basically what Trump has done now de facto, he will want to enshrine —have Congress enshrine in appropriations law—much lower levels of funding, different kinds of funding, democracy aid over climate and environment aid over, anything to do with gender, done, possibly looking at converting some military aid grants into loans, which would be a hardship for some countries that like to receive this military aid just in a pure grant form. And I think a continuing rhetorical assault on the foreign aid sector. 

And I guess I’ll just complete this with sort of a final dire warning about the climate here in Washington. It’s even been reported, and this is not confirmed, this is just what’s been in the media that one very important Trump official who’s kind of at the center of this whole aid cut, has raised the idea to members of Congress behind closed doors of referring USAID staff and aid contractors for criminal prosecution for alleged—again, there’s been no evidence publicly offered—but alleged corruption, waste, fraud. So this is the climate that we’re now in. So to go back and echo what all of my fellow panelists have said, this is the new reality, at least for the foreseeable future. And Middle Eastern countries that have depended on this kind of aid, this is the moment to find Plan B, because you are pretty much on your own when it comes to support from the United States for the next several years.

Arwa Shobaki [1:09:08]

Thank you. Thank you, Amy. You took the words out of my mouth. I mean, I think that we’re receiving questions along these lines as well. What is the Plan B since the future of U.S. foreign assistance is looking very bleak? I mean, under the Trump administration, and as I said, these things can be reversed under future administrations, but the impact and the credibility of the United States will not be so easily reversed. And I think that’s important for us all to keep in mind. 

Yara, I was wondering if you might want to take a stab at addressing this, what’s the plan B? I mean, you’ve given us a very thorough discussion of the health and humanitarian sector, which countries are most dependent on this type of assistance? And I’d love to hear from you, how can countries pivot given what’s going on? What does that look like? I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on that.

Yara Asi [1:10:13]

Absolutely. I think we have to first recognize that we’re having this conversation in a moment with so many unknowns, not just for us talking about it, but the people receiving aid, the people on the ground giving aid, the people in HQ, wherever HQ is, that are procuring resources and whatnot. Everyone is kind of in a strange limbo right now of: will the worst case scenarios as Amy just laid out, come to pass? Or is this, as we’ve seen with so many other aspects since the Trump administration, this kind of shock-and-awe initial approach that will eventually be scaled back, but can then be used as a talking point of like, well, we got rid of the bad stuff, so now we’re bringing in whatever they define “the good stuff” as. 

So we don’t know, right? We don’t know how large Plan B will have to be. We don’t know. And the thing with a Plan B is that it’s going to be incredibly fragmented because one of the things the U.S. did, aside from giving a lot of money, was for better or for worse, it was in charge of a lot of the coordination efforts or heavily collaborated with UN agencies or agencies like MSF, the International Medical Corps, et cetera. It also served that function. So if the U.S. is stepping back from both of those, both providing the funding and coordinating efforts, it’s unclear what will be the country that steps up. I mean, we’ve seen the EU step up in terms of restoring funding for UNRWA. We saw some powers in Asia, like China and Japan, have stepped in. The Arab League also, it tends to promise a lot more funding and then actually distributes, but it has stepped in numerous times to fill in aid shortfalls even prior to this.

There’s always been aid shortfalls. There’s always been a need for Plans B, C, D, and E because aid provided was never matched the need. So we’re going to have to dig deeper into those efforts. We’re going to have to see what other countries decide to prioritize, who they decide to prioritize. And I mean hopefully this will shift to a greater understanding that countries need autonomy when it comes to managing the humanitarian needs of their citizens. This is the only disruption-proof way of ensuring that at least most services are continued. When we think about it, large widespread vaccination campaigns should be led by government officials. Public health, food provision, protecting people from shocks and food markets and whatnot. These are the jobs of governments. Is this an opportunity, despite what will be immediate loss of life, harms caused to people, to children, in that, knowing that that is the backdrop of this, is there an opportunity where we say we need to rethink how we view aid altogether?

We cannot remain dependent on aid because when it is snatched away, as we now know, can happen so quickly and so immediately, we cannot be left in the lurch. The problem is these secondary and tertiary systems, that could be the Plan B, they can’t spring up overnight. They need funding, they need infrastructure, they need capacity, they need workers. And unfortunately, and obviously a lot of the countries that most need aid are least positioned to be able to manage their population needs. When you look at someplace like Syria, the state actor who should be providing services is in fact the antagonist that is causing the need for so much aid. When you look at the Gaza Strip, it’s not like the Palestinian authority has the legitimacy, credibility or ability with all the movement restrictions to suddenly have a sovereign ministry of health, for example. So I think this goes back to if we really want to be serious about rethinking aid and ensuring that countries don’t need to be so dependent on aid, we need to seriously engage with root causes of what is causing such high needs for aid.

Palestinians will always need aid as long as Israel occupies Palestinian land. Conflict-affected countries will always need aid as long as we continue to fund weapons sales to these countries, prioritize weapons manufacturers, totally ignore international humanitarian law, human rights law. If we don’t protect people from needing aid, then we can’t suddenly call them freeloaders or grifters for needing aid. These are people in circumstances that are desperate beyond our comprehension. So I think it’s going to, in an ideal world, require these kinds of hard challenging conversations a lot of time and a lot of investment. Do we live in a world where it will get all of those things? It’s unclear. So what we have seen is that as long as it’s the most marginalized people with the least voice in the conversation, we may see significant increases in mortality and harms to these people because in many ways they’re already forgotten by the rest of the world. It’s really sad to think about what might be coming very soon.

Arwa Shobaki [1:15:38]

Thank you, Yara. I think you make a really, really good point. I mean, the need for this type of assistance does not just spring up out of nowhere. This is part of a much larger dynamic that we do need to have conversations about. That is for the large part, manmade and driven by lots of other interests that do not reflect on civilian needs or interests themselves. We’ve just got seven minutes and I want to try and squeeze in as many questions as possible. So if our panelists could just try and be concise, that’d be great. Maybe we can squeeze in two or three more. 

Nidal, I wanted to ask you, what do you think the biggest—I mean, Syria is in a really unique position right now, given what we’ve seen in the region over the past decade, there is opportunity. This is a transitional moment, a post-conflict transitional moment. What do you think the biggest missed opportunity will be for Syria and for the United States by choosing to disrupt its assistance, whether it be development or humanitarian aid? What do you see as the biggest missed opportunity and the most damaging to Syrians at this very crucial time?

Nidal Betare [1:17:00]

Thank you. Arwa, I’m going to focus my answering this question on the role that USAID played in Syria and globally, actually, because USAID was a unique agency and entity like in messaging and promoting the values of democracy and human rights. I know that it is politicized, but it is the least politicized actually, especially when they implement on the ground. And the loss of USAID as an entity has an impact globally because the methods of implementation, the methods of programming, the methods of development, it’s all created and developed inside this agency USAID. So it is unique in this sense and this uniqueness made USAID in Syria start building success stories inside Syria starting from shifting communities into thinking and democratization. They had played a really good and strong role on the ground in Syria, in the northeast and in the northwest, and localization this democratization. In this context, it is like other than the urgent and emergency humanitarian aid that’s needed and healthcare, et cetera, it is very obvious that the transitional justice part and or aspect in Syria is going to be impacted the most because of the loss of USAID programs, but also because of the loss of the NED. National Endowment for Democracy was the leading force of promoting and working on transitional justice in Syria and this program is gone now. All organizations, all documentation, all cases that NED and USAID and other agencies helped Syrians to build and take to ICC and other global cores are gone. So this is really, really severe. 

I just want to mention something very quickly and conclude with that. I don’t think that there is any country that can fill the gap, the vacuum that the United States left behind. This is like I can confidently say that. What we are seeing now is just shifting the international system from human rights-based values into other values that other actors will come in and fill, like the Belt and Road initiative that China is leading, like other actors like Russia through Wagner that are leading in Africa. So my worry is on the global level that these actors will be filling the vacuum. I hope that I send a message.

Arwa Shobaki [1:20:27]

Thank you. And Alaa, we’ve got a couple of minutes. I would love for you to respond to that question. A few of our audience members have also been asking who’s going to fill this void? Are there Arab countries, regional actors that are going to step in and what are the implications of that? 

Alaa Sayegh [1:20:48]

Two interesting questions, Arwa. Thank you. Actually, lots of this void will be filled with chaos, so it will not be filled with a specific power. It’s not how I see it. And I see part of this void will be filled with other regional powers like Turkey. This is happening in Syria now like some Gulf countries and definitely China will fill , this void is being filled after the crisis in the past years with chaos and with military groups and with Russian-related groups and unofficial institutions. So sadly, this void will be filled mainly with chaos. The main thing that I want to stress on is that this void and this damage after being created will not be reversed after the term of this administration ends in four years, because things do not happen this way. In a very specific way: an administration comes, signs administrative orders, and the world responds to this. No, there will be strategic changes and there will be consequences that will be very hard to reverse. And this will bring us to think of how we can advocate for a more balanced U.S. engagement strategy and how we can recalibrate this development aid by maybe advocating with lawmakers and policymakers in the U.S. specifically to try to redefine all those changes that are happening on the foreign funding level. Because if it’s an aim, if the aim is efficiency and reform, this is everything but not efficiency and reforms. And if the impact that they need is peace, this will lead to everything but not peace, to more conflict and to destabilize countries and to strengthen authoritarian regimes. And guess what, in four years, this administration will most probably not be there in the United States, but authoritarian leaders that are gaining power in those regions will stay sadly in their positions. So a big effort should be made on this level. And I second my panelists, colleagues who mentioned we need to focus on localization and supporting local civil society groups to survive and to innovate for funding options and to use this crisis as an opportunity and to change it, to be an opportunity for more collaboration between civil society groups to keep all the achievements that has been done in the past and to save what can be saved.

Arwa Shobaki [1:24:58]

Thank you. Thank you so much. I think that’s a perfect way to end our really important conversation today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Arab Center. Thank you, all of our panelists. Please, everyone who’s watching us, check out the Middle East Democracy Center and the Arab Center online. See all the work that we’re doing and we’ll definitely keep this conversation going. I greatly appreciate your attendance and everyone’s participation. Thank you so much.