While USAID being dissolved would undoubtedly be a positive development, the current push is to merge it into the State Department, not to dissolve it entirely. Additionally, new instruments of international soft power have been in the works for a while now.
Elon Musk's X "The Everything App," Peter Thiel's Palantir, including the Palantir Foundation for Defense Policy and International Affairs, and Joe Lonsdale's OpenGov are gearing up to be the next generation of statecraft. Data-driven intelligence and digital statecraft will become more prominent than the on-the-ground NGOs that USAID was notorious for.
X is succeeding in its goal of replacing news media with its "citizen journalist" approach. Of course, those who fall in line with the techno-libertarian agenda are boosted on the platform and those who dissent to this agenda have their accounts suppressed, all while providing the illusion of "free speech." USAID always has been a major propaganda arm of the CIA, and X is well-equipped to fill their media role.
Additionally, X Payments, which has yet to launch but is set to soon, has the potential to fulfill the financial role that USAID had as well.
In coordination with X, which will collect unprecedented amounts of data, Palantir and OpenGov will run the data analytics and use it to come up with methods of statecraft and foreign policy previously unthinkable by intelligence organizations. Palantir has been making partnerships with foreign governments for years in preparation for this.
For example, Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda welcomed a strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies’ in 2023. “Developing new high technology oriented foreign investment opportunities as well as creating partnerships to co-create new technological products important for regional security is a win-win policy. Lithuania’s talented labor force and attractive business environment is our treasure we must further nurture," said the Lithuanian President.
People have been catching onto the fact that USAID is a CIA front for a while now, and there's a standard playbook for dealing with this whereby the intelligence orgs will either build the same thing through the private sector or claim that it's being cut when they really are just merging it with a different part of the government like the State Department.
What we are seeing take place now is a mix of both.
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