The Global Realities We Ignore: Bridging Boomers, Gen Z & Foreign Policy

I'm 74 years old, a “Boomer”, and the father of two teenagers. One just started college, and one is still finishing high school. I'm also someone who has spent 50 years both working and travelling in more than 50 countries across the Global South, mostly on the ground. I did many things during my work overseas; organizing range and livestock associations with Somali pastoralists in the 1980s based on data about how they grazed and claimed rights to communal lands at particular times of the year, to determine what improvements to indigenous rangeland management systems were worth making; building anti-corruption coalitions with citizens and even the government across five provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 2000s at a time when conflict and corruption were prolific; and competing (unsuccessfully) against the big international conservation NGOs (BINGOs) for USAID contracts awarded in Central Africa with the goal of perpetuating top-down planning in contrast to the local capacity-building agenda our small NGO was proposing. I've written two books on why development and conservation programs succeed or fail; one called “Redeeming REDD” (2013), the other “Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South” (2026). This Substack “newsletter” is an extension of that work — not a place for polarization, but a place for examining and rationally debating the issues from multiple angles. My preference is to avoid polemic and simplistic explanations of what often prove to be highly gray issues and problems. To do this, I combine various sources and my own field experience to support my arguments. One issue of interest to me throughout the podcasts I deliver: what is America's place in the world today, and how does that decision actually reach the kitchen tables of the people who will inherit it? The behavior. Over the past year, the US has visibly pivoted away from “soft power” — diplomacy, overseas development aid, long-term development partnerships. In its stead, America has adopted an old-fashioned hard-power approach: military operations (Venezuela, Iran) with a vast decrease in willingness to engage in foreign assistance and engagement practices. For example, the Trump administration’s elimination of USAID represents a controversial shift towards hard power — some decry the decision, while others argue it could offer opportunities for a major rethink in what aid is and how it is to be delivered in the future. While DOGE was brutal, my opinion is that many aspects of procurement, along with the assumptions of what the U.S. could and should do, and why, offers opportunities for getting out of “business as usual” approaches that failed to get at how foreign aid could have the greatest impact in developing countries of the Global South. Here, I distinguish this from humanitarian and disaster assistance.

2 The trend. The retreat of international assistance doesn't just create a vacuum, it also creates an opportunity for rethinking the logic and methods of international assistance. China's Belt and Road financing, and to a lesser extent European development banks, have moved into precisely the spaces the US has vacated: infrastructure, energy, digital systems, and agricultural commodities. One can debate whether this retreat is inherently good or bad, and it clearly has become a polemic for those denouncing the principle of overseas aid and assistance to developing countries at a time when the U.S. national debt is exceeding $40 trillion. I have seen versions of how development assistance has been used for geopolitical reasons over my decades of work. Often, the outcome does not necessarily work towards the best interests of countries and peoples in the Global South — who in the case of World Bank loan programs, have taken on huge debts of their own — and is a core function of China’s strategy for mineral extraction in exchange for roads, ports, hospitals etc. The impact. For all its moral qualms, the argument that hard-power repositioning would lower costs at home has not thus far borne out. If anything, ceding long-term economic relationships in places like the agricultural and mining belts of the Global South — which contain soybeans, rare earths, cobalt, copper, lithium, etc. abound — seems shortsighted. Compounded by immense spending on shorter-term military commitments such as the Iran War, which now seems like a long-term affair we have no way of getting out of, looks like a very bad trade for the average American household. I’m not saying that soft power would have mitigated Iran from going nuclear or destabilizing the Middle East for decades; what I am saying is that a mix of soft power and hard power is likely the most logical pathway moving forward, with the specifics of both buckets of aid being worked out both big picture and in detail. The attribution. Here's where my own record actually matters, not as color but as evidence that I perhaps have a basis for speaking on the subject matter. In the 1980s, as noted, I led the component working with AK-47-toting Somali pastoralists across the entire mid third of the country and ran the largest rangeland project ever funded ($ 80+ million after ~10 years) by USAID/World Bank/GTZ in Africa. The project was (incorrectly) premised on the assumption that customary pastoralist land use was degrading the rangeland; the data said otherwise: the traditional system was more sustainable than the policy replacing it. That's the pattern I've seen for 50 years: policy built without genuine, on-the-ground engagement — and preferably, negotiation and reliance on evidence — gets it backwards. This remains true whether the subject is grazing rights in the Horn of Africa or foreign assistance strategy overall at a country level. The current problem isn't that America is engaged or disengaged internationally; it's that the shift has happened without the kind of scrutiny that would have caught the same mistakes I and many others have seen play out in the field.

3 The policy response. I'd call my own position rational self-interest, not isolationism or internationalism for its own sake. The state of governance in, say, the DRC doesn't matter to a Wisconsin mother who can't afford groceries, but a Chinese near-monopoly on a commodity that sets her food prices absolutely does. The question isn't whether America should be involved abroad. It's whether we're making that call with actual evidence, or whether we're repeating the same unexamined assumptions and so-called solutions (i.e., mistakes) I and several others have spent a career documenting. As today’s kids are inheriting a mumbo jumbo of polarized beliefs and largely semi-coherent positions at best (or fully incoherent ones at worst) a Substack and podcast like I’m trying to do are meant to help bring some light and debate into an otherwise polemicized set of topics.