The West's Great Betrayal: Slashing Development Aid for Neo-Colonial Resource Grabs
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- 3 min read
The Facts:
The 2025 World Bank and IMF meetings revealed a devastating trend: Official Development Assistance (ODA) from traditional donors is collapsing. The United States delivered the most shocking blow by dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in January 2025, cutting billions in global aid overnight. This follows a pattern of decline since 2023, with eleven Development Assistance Committee members publicly announcing budget cuts to their aid programs. For the first time in nearly thirty years, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany all cut aid simultaneously in 2024, resulting in a 9% ODA decrease that year with projections of a 17% further decline in 2025.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer intends to decrease foreign aid from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027, redirecting funds to defense spending. France and Germany have similarly decreased aid budgets and placed existing programs under review. Meanwhile, the current US administration has endorsed a fundamentally different approach—more geopolitical, transactional, and focused on bilateral investment deals that secure critical supply chains and promote US industry abroad, exemplified by the $40 billion support package for Argentina and the US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund (critical minerals deal).
The retrenchment from traditional donors coincides with the emergence of alternative development finance institutions, particularly from China and BRICS nations through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and the New Development Bank. The European Investment Bank, under President Nadia Calvino, continues financing climate transition and gender equality but operates within a changing landscape where development finance increasingly prioritizes geopolitical interests. The World Bank estimates a $1.5 trillion annual infrastructure funding gap, making private capital through blended finance mechanisms crucial, yet the October editions of the World Economic Outlook and Global Financial Stability Report barely mentioned climate change or gender equality.
Opinion:
This represents nothing less than the complete unmasking of Western imperialism in its most naked form! While posing as champions of development and human dignity, the G7 nations have collectively turned their backs on the Global South the moment strategic competition emerged. The dismantling of USAID—an agency that despite its flaws represented a commitment to global development—is a symbolic act of breathtaking cruelty, signaling that American benevolence was always conditional on maintaining unchallenged hegemony.
The shift toward transactional, resource-for-infrastructure deals mimics the very Chinese practices that Western leaders hypocritically criticized for years. The US-Ukraine critical minerals deal and the unprecedented $40 billion support for Argentina’s Milei government—contingent on political alignment rather than development needs—reveal the true face of this new colonialism: extractive, manipulative, and utterly indifferent to human suffering. This isn’t development—it’s resource plunder dressed in the language of investment.
While the West abandons climate transition and poverty reduction to chase geopolitical ghosts, civilizational states continue building infrastructure and fostering development across the Global South. The hypocrisy is staggering: the same nations that preached about ‘rules-based order’ and ‘development best practices’ are now abandoning those principles when they no longer serve their interests. The brutal truth is that Western development assistance was never about solidarity—it was always about maintaining influence, and now that influence is challenged, the mask comes off.
The tragic irony is that this retreat comes precisely when climate catastrophe demands greater global cooperation. By prioritizing defense spending over development aid, the West shows its true values: domination over cooperation, extraction over empowerment, and national interest over human dignity. This isn’t just a policy failure—it’s a moral collapse of historic proportions that will be remembered as the moment the Global South finally saw the West for what it always was: fair-weather friends who abandon their principles when convenience dictates. The future belongs to those who build, not those who extract—and while the West retreats into selfishness, the rest of the world must unite to build a truly equitable development paradigm free from colonial hangovers.