[openasocket]

> I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective

By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?

> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID

That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.

[heisgone]

It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.

The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.

[openasocket]

> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.

So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?

What do you think is the moral thing to do here?