Secret Deals, Aggressive Demands Are New US Foreign Aid Tactics

On a Friday last November, government officials representing Lesotho, a mountainous enclave in eastern South Africa, sat down in the capital Maseru for three hours of negotiations with Trump administration counterparts.

Earlier that year, the US suddenly cancelled funding for healthcare programs in the country as part of billions of dollars in cuts to international aid. For Lesotho, a nation of 2.4 million people with the unhappy distinction of having the world’s second-highest HIV rate and the fourth-highest tuberculosis rate, the loss of support threatened thousands of lives.

To unlock future funding, the US wanted something back. While previous US ...