These institutions are how neoliberalism often arrives, not through coups or invasions, but through aid. Under the guise of market efficiency, these policies force nations to surrender control over their own economies and hollow out their ability to build independent futures. The result? Weaker states, stronger multinational corporations, and a world where economic sovereignty becomes increasingly impossible.
Despite what some argue, aid has never been a neutral tool sometimes misused by bad actors, but a kind of imperial infrastructure that has allowed the US to prop up allies, punish designated enemy states, and maintain a grip over the politics and economies of entire regions. Take for example Egypt, which receives over $1 billion annually in US military aid, a kind of pay-off for suppressing local dissent and normalizing ties with Israel. Jordan, Kuwait, Colombia, and Ukraine are also strategic clients, with each receiving a mixture of economic and military aid that ensures loyalty and access to American capital.
The use of US aid as a form of political manipulation and as a bargaining chip is likely no more evident than in Gaza, where US and Israeli officials are demanding that Palestinians “relocate” before receiving food. Meanwhile, the same US armaments that are flattening refugee camps are delivered with congressional approval, because when the United States says “aid” it usually means one thing: leverage. In Gaza, so-called “aid zones” and facilities funded or constructed through US assistance are instruments of violence. US contractors and allied forces have used coordinates of aid distribution sites as strategic targets or staging grounds during military operations. According to an investigative report from The Intercept, some of these areas, once promoted as lifelines for Palestinians, have been used to track movement, conduct surveillance, or facilitate strikes under the guise of humanitarian support, killing hundreds. In several well-documented cases, US-funded aid warehouses have been bombed, raising serious questions about whether these aid initiatives are being weaponized to entrap and kill Palestinians. These war crimes blur the lines between relief and warfare, and further underscores the violence inherent to US foreign policy.
Another feature of US aid is the rise of NGOs, mostly funded by USAID or linked to Beltway think-tanks which bypass governments and operate as their own shadowy foreign ministries. In many Global South nations, this has created a parallel civil society that is more accountable to donors in Washington than to their local communities. These organizations are not just ineffective, they often undercut organic movements by absorbing political energy and steering radical agendas into technocratic dead ends. As scholar Arundhati Roy has warned, NGOs often function as a buffer between the empire and its subjects, turning people “into dependent victims and blunt political resistance […] They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.”
After nearly two decades of besiegement, Israel—with full US support—has turned Gaza into a testing ground for collective punishment. Aid trucks are blocked, bombed, and even physically attacked by Israeli settlers intent on denying anything from entering the Strip. Gaza is what aid looks like when it is stripped of all its illusions: a policy designed to maintain US hegemony, discipline non-compliant nations, and enable some of the worst engineered atrocities of our time. Since October 2023, Israel’s US-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing has obliterated entire neighborhoods, killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and left a population of over 2 million people starving and internally displaced. Aid to Israel, the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since WWII, is codified under the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding during the Obama administration, and has helped subsidize Israel’s advanced military systems—including fighter jets, precision-guided bombs, and missile defense technology—all of which have been deployed against Palestinians.
US foreign aid, cloaked in the language of altruism, is all too often a tool of neoliberal governance, economic entrapment, and military domination. In Gaza, the machinery of US foreign aid and the sprawling network of affiliated NGOs have worked to create and then manage catastrophe. NGOs have acted not as agents of mercy and charity but subcontractors of imperial strategy, fragmenting daily life for Palestinians. This is not an accidental contradiction, but the very core of neoliberal humanitarianism. Gaza is the laboratory of a counterinsurgency apparatus in which aid operates as an insidious weapon, and true liberation will not come from further NGO-ization by the West, but from the resistance that survives them.
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