Dead on Arrival: Mourning the Humanitarian Fantasy

A hand-painted cardboard sign leans against the nondescript, featureless facade of a government building. Two half-priced, thin bouquets lie at the foot of the makeshift gravestone. Its inscription, “RIP USAID: 1961–2025,” marks what some describe as the end of an era, the death of humanitarianism.1

On July 1, 2025, the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, was officially shuttered and its remaining operations merged with the State Department. These developments sent paroxysms of anger and fear across the liberal media and institutions, long-term bastions and supporters of the US’s “soft power” agenda abroad.2 Joseph Nye’s famous concept has long been used by supporters of US bilateral aid and humanitarian assistance who have argued that these institutions, while imperfect, are nonetheless essential to building “a healthier, more equitable world today, just like it was in 1961,” when USAID was formed.3 Even if aid is imperfect, isn’t some better than none at all?

A year after the official demise of the agency—or what some prefer to call the “USAID complex”—dire predictions that its closure would lead to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths were largely proven correct.4 Rovina’s Choice (2025), a documentary by The New Yorker gives a human face to the story by following a former beneficiary of USAID-funded initiatives, Rovina, as she navigates Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp where food aid has become increasingly scarce and she is forced to make “a decision that no mother should ever have to make.”5 Aid is defined through viewers’ encounter with its absence; for a mother who fled a country where “war was ongoing,” USAID had once offered a solution to the effects of war.

The comments section underneath the video voice the expected sentiments: viewers express their empathy for Rovina and the nameless others she represents. Several describe feeling ashamed, no longer “proud to be an American.” Someone points out that USAID cost the average taxpayer a mere twenty dollars per year; commenters blame its demise on the soulless and greedy nature of the Trump administration. The figure of the liberal nationalist subject emerges here in stark contrast to the jingoistic “America First”–style patriot who lobbies for cuts to international aid programs.6 The liberal nationalist is defined by her generosity, which is, in turn, framed as central to the American identity. Conversations lamenting the material impacts of USAID’s demise can slip into an almost nostalgic, collective mourning for the generous subject of liberal nationalist fantasy: “This isn’t who we are or what we stand for.” 

If the trillion-dollar humanitarian aid industry is defined by its promise to make something better, the liberal subject identifies with the moral urgency of that promise. Such a subject experiences the death of humanitarianism as a denial of a fantasy of helping to fulfill the promises of humanitarianism for less than twenty dollars per year. For this subject, the death of humanitarianism—as symbolized by USAID’s closure—is a loss for the nation, for a country and a people who are generous to the core. The liberal fantasy of the generous American nation depends upon the decontextualization of aid as a gift offered to the distant other in a sociopolitical vacuum. The circumstances in which that gift was created and packaged remain outside the conscious awareness of the liberal nationalist subject.

What Are We Grieving?

The “Golden Age” of American humanitarian generosity is usually understood as the period immediately following World War II. As one former USAID employee told one of us in conversation, “The thing I’m proudest of as an American is the Marshall Plan.”7 As Nikhil Pal Singh argues in Race and America’s Long War (2017), this supposed “Golden Age” was the same epoch in which the “United States engaged in continuous and accretive wars all over the world—some named, almost all formally undeclared—whose toll of violence has been excluded from the balance sheet of moral, political, and material costs and benefits.”8 This enmeshment of violence and development led to a particularly American form of humanitarian theory and practice that Wesley Attewell calls an “infrastructural technology of racial liberalism.”9 

On Labor Day in 1961, the dream of a defining institution for US bilateral humanitarianism—USAID—came to fruition. From his family’s beach compound in Cape Cod, President John F. Kennedy mandated the creation of a single agency to coordinate the US’s international development efforts abroad and close the “aid gap” with the Soviet Union. Two months later, USAID was born. From the beginning, its goals were interwoven with national defense, national security, and intelligence objectives: development was the “cornerstone of hopes for victory over communism.”10 As David Bell, the agency’s administrator from 1962 to 1966, put it, “fundamentally, AID’s purpose is national security.” Within decolonizing nations, Bell argued, “we’re not aiming for standards of living,” but rather, for “internal dynamics of self-sustaining growth.” USAID would help decolonizing nations achieve independence, but only “so that they may be ‘interconnected’ in terms that feed capital.”11 Attewell argues that USAID and its predecessor institutions have been carrying out the will of the US empire-state ever since. 

Providing the infrastructural conditions for free-flowing capital was not the only entanglement that shaped international humanitarian aid in the Cold War and after. Counterinsurgency was another. The US and USAID are by no means singular in this, but given the contingencies of the Cold War, they have influenced how other countries “do” aid and what has become considered acceptable. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, for instance, the entanglements between humanitarianism and militarism go far beyond rhetoric to institutional linkages, project pressures, leading to the erosion of care itself.12 Similarly, development assistance, art and cultural programming, and research in the social and behavioral sciences were marshaled by the United States as tools of psychological and cultural warfare. In the language of the Cold War, the most effective kind of propaganda is the kind where “the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.”13 Humanitarianism, too, was appropriated for counterinsurgency purposes.

Declassified CIA documents reveal how, within a year of USAID’s existence, it was responding and coordinating with the CIA’s covert-action oversight body (the Special Group, Counter-Insurgency). By 1962, more than 279 USAID personnel had received a six-week orientation program that included classes in Communist Theory, Communist Global Propaganda, and Unconventional Warfare. In a memo between USAID and the CIA’s Special Group (CI) from 1962, Donald Brennan, founder of the Hudson Institute, a Washington, DC–based thinktank, elaborated that “[USAID] intends to coordinate with FSI [Foreign Service Institute] to determine where the program can be drawn in more counter-insurgency terms.” USAID was also participating in “the development of the national modernization and counter-insurgency school.”14  

That same year, the Office of Public Safety (OPS) was born within USAID as a program supported and shaped by the CIA. Its goal was to send US police across international borders for counterinsurgency, including to maintain order and stability for the operation of capital, gather better intelligence, and distract from military interventions. The Office was also a response to the unrest that erupted across more than 300 American cities between 1964–67, many of which were the results of police brutality waged on Black Americans. With the USAID’s OPS, police brutality crossed borders and globalized. As Micol Seigel shows, development and police work were yoked together in the 1970s. This included bringing back to US inner cities theories of development that had until then been applied only to the “Third World,” as well as greatly expanding the OPS’s operations abroad. Over the dozen years of its life, OPS distributed $200 million in arms and equipment to police in forty-seven countries and trained over 7,500 senior officers and nearly 1,000,000 rank-and-file policemen. Seigel notes that “while USAID records today strain to conceal this information, police departments at the time did not.”15  

In the early 1970s, OPS would be dogged by accusations that it was promoting or teaching torture techniques and political policing, and was eventually dismantled.  The most explosive of these revelations were of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which reportedly involved the torture and murder of over 20,000 Vietcong forces and was overseen by CIA Director William Colby. OPS’s presence inside USAID reminds us that development and counterinsurgency were structurally coincident from day one. USAID, or at least one of its key constituent parts, was not merely “captured” or “weaponized” by security logics; its foundational structure always contained the security function. Under its ambit, biopolitical improvement and necropolitical policing are both operationally entangled and institutionally linked at their origins.  

Dead on Arrival

Rovina’s story begins with a series of long shots across vast desert plains as she narrates her escape to the refugee camp from South Sudan where war was ongoing. When the film briefly alludes to the critical importance of aid for securitizing and stabilizing a region described as a “powder keg,” viewers are left wondering: As humanitarianism’s remains grow cold in their grave, how long until that region ignites? Even as the expert narrator hints at the central role of humanitarian aid within US military strategy, the film sustains the illusion of the two as discrete, diametrically opposed processes: militarism wages war while humanitarianism protects life. 

The humanitarian promise to protect life is made within the larger discourses of universal human rights and international law that have defined global relations for much of the last century, as well as the demands of Cold War counterinsurgency and global capitalism.16 But for subjects across the Global South, the slippery and contingent nature of these promises has always been apparent. In other words, for many, the fantasy of humanitarianism already died long ago, amidst the horror of a violence “so earth-shattering [that] it immediately hacked the world in two: into those who knew what was happening and those who denied it.”17 If we understand the death of humanitarianism as a moment in which its illusions collapsed on a larger scale, we might conclude that, at least in the spaces where humanitarian promises never appeared as anything but illusions, humanitarianism was never fully alive. Rather, it was dead on arrival, rotting from the inside out like the emergency rations that waited weeks inside trucks lined up in the blistering sun before finally crossing the border into Gaza to sicken its inhabitants.18  

The genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza thrust the contradictions and hypocrisies of the humanitarian project into the global spotlight. At the Rafah crossing, the staples of humanitarian aid—sleeping bags, tarps, portable ultrasounds, and ventilators—were defined as “dual use” and blocked from entering on the pretense that these life-sustaining supplies could be deployed for military gain. Further up the coast, thousands of tons of rubble—the remains of Gaza City as well as its inhabitants—were hauled to the beach to serve as the foundation for a humanitarian pier. The pier was built by the nascent for-profit contractor Fogbow, which was, in turn, owned and operated almost entirely by former US military and intelligence personnel. The charade would face international scrutiny when Israeli soldiers disguised as humanitarian workers drove an aid truck from the pier into Al Nuseirat refugee camp to launch the infamous massacre that killed 274 Palestinians.19 Meanwhile, efforts to get aid into Gaza continued by plane with humanitarian airdrops that, on occasion, left casualties, when parachutes failed to deploy or the desperately needed supplies were dropped into rough seas. 

We are told that militarism wages war while humanitarianism protects life. The myth of this separation collapsed on a grand scale in Gaza, not because it represents an exception but because the violence of a genocide pulls both projects to their extremes. It is not surprising that Washington held onto this myth for dear life, laying flowers at its grave. The Washington DC metropolitan region has for decades benefited from the humanitarian-industrial complex being located at its doorstep, as the lion’s share of development capital has not found its way to beneficiaries abroad but has lined “the pockets of American contractors.”20 Development, as Attewell puts it, “is first and foremost a metropolitan project of racial capitalist accumulation.”21 

Writing from the home port of Naval Beach Group 1, the San Diego–based unit that deployed to build the deadly humanitarian pier, the illusion of humanitarianism has always been fragile. Since the end of the Vietnam War and the subsequent efforts to transform the nation’s image from defeated military power and orchestrator of violence to humanitarian savior, San Diego has served as a major conduit for refugee resettlement. Given that those who arrive in the US for “resettlement” frequently began their journey as refugees in the wake of US military intervention, we might think of the infrastructures that facilitate refugee processing and resettlement as “dual use,” nodes where the illusion of humanitarian and military intervention as distinct projects collapses. 

Just a few years after San Diego’s Camp Pendleton served as a launch point for US military aggression in Vietnam, for instance, the same facilities served as the initial shelter for the 50,000 refugees who had been displaced as a direct consequence.22 And overseas, the technologies that facilitate access to humanitarian resources and map populations in need simultaneously function as tools of surveillance. Amidst the ongoing “War on Terror,” aid is deployed in the fight against “radicalization”; sacks of groceries are offered as an incentive for refugee men to attend workshops that teach anger management and other coping skills. Women’s rights are promoted aggressively in the name of the larger, multi-million-dollar UN Women, Peace, and Security initiative that provides aid in the form of interventions designed to reshape gender norms to combat extremism. All in the name of the generosity of the American people.

Hafez Omar, US "AID", 2012. Source: The Palestine Poster Project Archives.

In Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” the melancholic subject knows “whom he has lost but not what he has lost in them.”23 The liberal subject knows the USAID complex is gone, and with it, the illusion of the US as a generous, benevolent nation. For Freud, melancholic attachments are narcissistic to begin with: the object was only loved as a version of the self.24 The liberal relation to humanitarianism can only be melancholic, interminable, and self-reproaching. Mourning, on the other hand, does its work and then it ends.25  

If humanitarian givers are trapped in the melancholia of the dead-on-arrival gift, humanitarian recipients have real people and real losses to mourn. In a widely circulated video recorded during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, a man explains to the camera, “We thank the Americans because the Americans are good and they treat us in a way that is good and respectful. They give us a loaf of bread and they give us a sandwich. And they give the Israelis missiles, tanks, and warplanes.”26 He gestures towards one of the boys seated nearby and continues, “this kid here … he saw his father dying in front of him. He saw his uncle die in front of him.… Can we make a kid like this smile? If you bring a missile to kill him and a loaf of bread to fool him, you can’t fool him.” He turns towards the group, “Kids, who here wants American bread? Obama sent you all some balloons; do you want them?” The boys shake their heads with a vehement no as he concludes, “This is my message to the American people.”

Ali Ahmed Quideh, the man in the video, now lives in a tent amid the rubble, having lost most of his family members in “post-ceasefire” aerial bombardments in 2026. Refusing the gift of bread and balloons is, in the words of Freud, “a refusal to be incorporated into someone else’s grief”—a refusal to serve as the lost object that sustains the fantasy.27 Ali’s gesture asks, instead, if we, the givers of the gift, will ever be capable of mourning.