askchapo

The way soft power is used is by doing good things, while simultaneously sowing discontent among the populace that these things aren't being done by the local government, who is likely either being cut off at the hamstrings by U.S. and multinational lending policy. It also serves a domestic purpose of convincing activist liberals that the system is salvageable, after all, we spend all this money doing good things, clearly all we need to do is vote the bad people out and reform or get rid of the bad elements. They don't really understand that the reason we spend so much money is that the person that we help today is tomorrow's informant or even just saying "They're not that bad, they helped get running water to 'such and such village'. Mind you, depending on geography a project like that would really cost only 6-10 thousand dollars, pennies in terms of what we spend controlling the elite levels of power and the value of the labor and resources we extract.

Often it is less subtle than that, like just slipping a shipment of weapons through with a shipment of food. Why do you think Israel accused Hamas of wanting aid trucks to come in simply to secure weapons? Well, they do it all the time, so why wouldn't their enemy?

So yeah, it is totally possible that removing USAID money will lead to the deaths of that many people. But at the same time, it was just the open hand with the fist in the other.