AN AUTOPSY OF AMERICAN ALTRUISM: The Rise and Fall of USAID - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

For more than sixty years, USAID was one of America's most visible instruments of influence abroad. Then it unraveled. Why?

In An Autopsy of American Altruism: The Rise and Fall of USAID, Bosco Mutarambirwa traces the extraordinary rise, transformation, and fall of the United States Agency for International Development, from John F. Kennedy's Cold War vision to an era in which the very purpose of American foreign aid came under attack.

USAID was created to promote development, strengthen fragile nations, and project an image of American generosity. But from Vietnam to Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and beyond, the agency carried a contradiction at its core: it preached self-reliance while imposing outside priorities, promoted partnership while serving U.S. strategic interests, and pursued humanitarian goals while operating increasingly alongside the machinery of American power.

Over time, those contradictions became institutional.

Development merged with counterinsurgency. Bureaucracy multiplied. Contractors proliferated. Washington demanded measurable results from problems that could not be solved on a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, China built infrastructure, new powers entered the development arena, and countries across the Global South gained alternatives to the Western aid model.

Then the crisis came home.

As American voters and political leaders increasingly questioned foreign assistance itself, USAID faced a threat no overseas mission could solve: the collapse of the domestic consensus that had sustained it.

This book examines:

• How USAID became a global development powerhouse
• Why foreign aid and U.S. geopolitical strategy became inseparable
• How bureaucracy and contracting transformed the agency
• Why China and other emerging powers changed the development landscape
• How the Global South became less dependent on Western models
• Why USAID ultimately became vulnerable in Washington itself

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