American Foreign Aid and its Consequences for Human Rights Protection in Southeast Asia

In 2019, the United States committed to at least US$47 billion in foreign aid obligations to more than 100 countries. The total value of US foreign aid in 2019 amounted to at least 23 percent of the absolute value of aid spending of all the 38 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is the intergovernmental club of the world’s richest constitutional democracies that uphold market economic principles. The US is the world’s largest state donor of foreign aid.

In recent decades, especially during the post-Cold War period (and with the exception of the presidency of Donald Trump from 2017-21), Washington has persistently legitimized its military and economic foreign aid by invoking its alleged interest in stimulating democratic governance, human rights and sustainable development in recipient countries.

That American legitimization narrative of human rights and democracy promotion vis-à-vis the actual record of aid outcomes in the Global South, however, suggests a different story. Most of the countries receiving US foreign aid have problematic human rights records, particularly in terms of physical integrity rights, defined as the right of each human being, children included, to autonomy and self-determination over their own body – a human person’s claim for dignity through the absence of state-inflicted violence such as extrajudicial killings, torture, enforced disappearances, and other forms of politically motivated physical and mental harassment.

According to US Agency for International Development (USAID) 2020 data, the top five recipients of American aid obligations for 2019 were Afghanistan (US$4.9 billion), Israel (US$3.3 billion), Jordan (US$1.7 billion), Egypt (US$1.5 billion) and Iraq (US$1 billion) – all countries in the Middle East. This list reflects an order in place for years.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that were substantially destroyed by the US war on terror, enormous amounts of American post-war reconstruction finance have yet to generate lasting peace and stability. US military forces are pulling out of the former by the end of August, raising questions about the effectiveness of the two-decade-long mission. In Egypt, state agents under the administration of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi have used the cover of counterterrorism as they implement widespread torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances of civilian political dissidents. Meanwhile, Israel, the top recipient of US foreign aid since World War II, has been widely accused of the brutal and persistent violation of the physical integrity rights claims of Palestinians.

The situations in those countries reflect a broader global phenomenon, in which high amounts of American foreign aid correlate with widespread, state-initiated abuse of physical integrity rights in recipient countries that are highly dependent upon Washington’s patronage. Given the rhetoric of good governance and human rights promotion in post-Cold War American aid strategies, these questions beg for answers: Why does an increase in US foreign aid tend to coincide with a rise in abuses in recipient countries? Does foreign aid promote human rights abuse? If so, how?

At that time, governments in Thailand and the Philippines, countries with longstanding strategic alliances with the US (the latter’s buttressed by a mutual defense treaty), faced enormous domestic pressure to bolster their constitutional democracies and put their Cold-War-era pasts well behind them. After the fall of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, the government of president Corazon Aquino was beset by several coup attempts, none of which succeeded. In February 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, a military putsch in Thailand toppled the elected government.

In the 1990s in Southeast Asia, the administration of US president Bill Clinton boosted American economic investment and poured in aid to promote democratic governance as the ideal political system, support the strengthening of human rights, and push for market-liberalizing structural reforms. In this, American interests converged with those of the policymakers, elites and the public in recipient countries. The aid and pressure played a significant role in bolstering democratization in the region, with dramatic improvements in governance and human rights compliance, particularly the protection of physical integrity rights. In Thailand and the Philippines, in particular, this fortified the legitimacy of governments in power, diminishing if not altogether eliminating the need to deploy force against political dissidents, which contributed further to improving the human rights situation.

By contrast, the US under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, reoriented its massive foreign-aid apparatus towards counterterrorism and intensifying military action in response to the 9/11 terror attacks and the perceived threat posed by armed Islamic extremism. While the Middle East was the frontline of the US-led global “war on terror”, the Bush administration considered Southeast Asia as a “second front”. The priority was to quell militant Islamic rebel groups that were cast as part of a global jihad against the US.

In the Philippines, the administration of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo also received large amounts of US foreign aid. The president introduced her “strong republic” political paradigm as justification for intensified state violence. The government systematically deployed foreign aid and domestic resources to expand the its coercive apparatus.

The evidence from post-Cold War US foreign policy in Southeast Asia offers an intriguing insight about the impact of foreign aid on human rights. Whereas mainstream analysis focuses only on the material dimension of the assistance, it is critical too to understand the role of geopolitical motives and strategic policy goals of foreign aid. Foreign aid per se is neither good nor bad for human rights. Rather, the shared ideas and converging interests of donor and recipient governments ultimately shape the broader frameworks that make foreign aid a potent tool for social transformation – either positive with the emergence of better governance and improved human rights protection, or negative with increased state violence and the suppression of political dissidence.