The New Trump’s USAID: From Nation-Building to Nation-Breaking

Trump’s America is not sentimental. It does not care about narratives. It cares about: stability, security, borders, leverage. Ambazonia must now present itself not as a humanitarian cause, but as a solution to a regional instability problem created by Cameroon’s failure.

By Dr. Martin Mungwa The Independentistnews contributor

For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was sold to the Global South as a humanitarian instrument. In reality, it often functioned as a soft-power extension of Western control — funding NGOs, shaping civil society, influencing elections, and embedding foreign priorities inside sovereign states. In Africa especially, USAID became part of a neo-colonial ecosystem that replaced direct rule with managerial oversight. That era is now ending.

Under President Donald Trump’s return to power, USAID is being restructured — not to do more development, but to do less political engineering and more transactional statecraft. The new doctrine is simple: America will no longer subsidize foreign governance models it does not control. It will not build states for others. It will reward stability, security, and strategic alignment — or withdraw.

This same doctrine has already pushed Washington to withdraw from dozens of UN and non-UN international organizations — more than 60 by current counts — because the administration no longer believes in paying into systems that do not advance American leverage or security. The old multilateralism of managed global governance is being replaced by a harder, more transactional model of power. This shift has profound consequences for Cameroon, for Africa, and especially for Ambazonia.

The old USAID: development as supervision

The traditional USAID model rested on a paternalistic premise: that fragile states could be improved by injecting money into civil society, technical ministries, NGOs, and election systems. In practice, this created parallel governments — donor-funded institutions that answered more to Washington, Paris, or London than to their own people.

In Cameroon, this model helped stabilize a corrupt regime by outsourcing social services to NGOs while allowing Yaoundé to keep control of the security state. Aid softened the impact of repression. It managed suffering rather than addressing its cause. For Ambazonia, that was disastrous. International aid kept the Cameroonian system alive while Ambazonian civilians were bombed, displaced, and silenced.

Ambazonia is NOT an “Anglophone problem”

One of the most damaging myths sustained by the old aid system was the lie that the Ambazonian war is an “Anglophone problem” — a cultural or linguistic misunderstanding inside Cameroon. It is not and will never be.

The Ambazonian conflict is a decolonization dispute, rooted in the illegal dissolution of the UN-supervised Southern Cameroons and its forced annexation by a foreign state. It is a conflict of sovereignty, not language. No amount of NGO dialogue workshops, bilingualism programs, or decentralization schemes can solve a question that is fundamentally about whether a people have the right to govern themselves.

By treating the war as a social grievance rather than a political rupture, the old USAID model helped Yaoundé avoid confronting the real issue: that Cameroon is occupying a territory that never consented to be part of it.

The new Trump doctrine: no more managed failure

Trump’s foreign policy rejects the idea that America should pay to stabilize other people’s messes. His view is not humanitarian — it is brutally strategic. Under the new USAID framework: Funding is reduced, not expanded, NGOs are deprioritized, Regime-support programs are cut, Aid is linked to security, migration, and compliance. The message is clear: states that produce chaos will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their own behavior.

For countries like Cameroon, this is lethal. No more donor-funded clinics to mask war. No more democracy workshops to disguise dictatorship. No more humanitarian theatre to cover political rot. When aid retreats, the true cost of repression is exposed.

What this means for Cameroon

Cameroon’s survival strategy has depended on three pillars: – French protection, – NGO-managed suffering, – International indifference. The Trump-era USAID dismantles pillar #2. Without the aid cushion, Yaoundé must now either: govern properly or face collapse. There is no third option.

What this means for Ambazonia

For Ambazonia, this shift is quietly revolutionary. Ambazonia does not need more NGOs. It needs recognition that Cameroon is structurally incapable of governing its territory without violence. The new U.S. approach does not pretend to fix failed states. It lets them break. And when states break, suppressed nations emerge. This is how South Sudan was born. This is how Eritrea was recognized. This is how colonial borders finally crack.

The strategic opening

Trump’s America is not sentimental. It does not care about narratives. It cares about: stability, security, borders, leverage. Ambazonia must now present itself not as a humanitarian cause, but as a solution to a regional instability problem created by Cameroon’s failure.

A functioning Ambazonia stabilizes: the Gulf of Guinea, migration flows, energy corridors, West African security. A collapsing Cameroon destabilizes all of it. That is the language Washington now understands.

The end of managed misery

The old USAID model kept Ambazonians alive while leaving them unfree. The new U.S. posture is harsher in the short term — but far more dangerous to colonial systems in the long term. When the aid stops, the truth begins. And the truth of Cameroon is that it cannot survive without the people it is trying to crush. That is why the new Trump-era USAID matters to Ambazonia.

Dr. Martin Mungwa