Latest news with #BillGates
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Nvidia overtakes Microsoft to become world's biggest company as it shrugs off tariff woes
Chipmaker Nvidia yesterday elbowed aside Microsoft as the world's biggest company after it shrugged off tariff woes to post bumper results. Shares in the US tech giant surged 6.2 per cent when Wall Street opened after it reported quarterly sales rocketed nearly 70 per cent. Microsoft also rose – by 0.2 per cent – giving it a market capitalisation of £2.52 trillion. But that was not enough to hold on to top spot as Nvidia's valuation hit £2.57 trillion after it climbed £137billion following the publication of its results on Wednesday. Nvidia shares hit $143.49 – still below a high of £113.50 in January but enough to overtake Bill Gates' firm despite being caught in the fallout of Donald Trump's trade war with China. Microsoft later nudged ahead of Nvidia during choppy trading as Nvidia shares fell back to $139.18. Nvidia said revenue rose 69 per cent from £19.3billion to £32.7billion for the three months to April 27. Net income was £14.8billion – 33 per cent more than the £11.3billion a year ago. Chief executive Jensen Huang attacked Trump's ban on sales of Nvidia's most powerful chips to China, saying it would 'strengthen' Chinese competitors. 'The US has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips. That assumption was always questionable and now it's clearly wrong', he said. 'Export controls should strengthen US platforms, not drive half of the world's AI talent to rivals.' He added: 'The platform that wins the AI developers wins AI.' But he said the President had 'a bold vision to reshore advanced manufacturing, create jobs and strengthen national security'. 'He has a vision and I trust him,' Huang said. Nvidia replaced Apple as the world's largest company in January this year and in 2024. The iPhone maker is now third, behind Microsoft and Nvidia, with a market capitalisation of £2.2trillion. The US market was higher overall yesterday after a bombshell ruling that raised questions over Trump's tariff strategy. A judgment from the US Court of International Trade threw doubt on whether the 10 per cent universal tariff will stick and whether levies will be implemented in July. In a blow to the President, the court said he exceeded his authority in imposing sky-high tariffs on trading partners. The case could eventually end up in the US Supreme Court, causing further delays and uncertainty for global markets. 'Just when traders thought they'd seen every twist in the saga, the gavel dropped like a lightning bolt over the Pacific,' said trader Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management. The ruling was 'a brief respite before the next thunderclap,' he added.
Forbes
16 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
What Nonprofit Leaders Can Do In Light Of The Bill Gates Announcement
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 26: Bill Gates speaks onstage for a special conversation during ... More "What's Next? The Future With Bill Gates"at The Paris Theater on September 26, 2024 in New York City. (Photo byfor Netflix) Bill and Melinda Gates built a foundation that has given over $100 billion to nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations around the world for the past 25 years. It is one of the nation's largest and most successful foundations, and many nonprofit leaders have come to depend on it for vital resources and thought leadership. To the dismay of some, and the thrill of others, Bill Gates recently announced his decision to sunset the foundation in 20 years and distribute $200 billion of its assets – and his personal fortune – to achieve three goals: In order to accomplish the goal of distributing so much money in such a short period of time, the Gates Foundation will be forced to substantially increase its annual giving (about $9 billion a year), which is good news for those organizations who are toiling in these vineyards and desire faster change, but obviously concerning for those who see these global challenges as long-lasting and resistant to quick wins. What does this mean for nonprofit organizations and what should their leaders do now? MIT Solve is an initiative of MIT that supports innovators that use tech-based solutions to solve big problems. Its executive director, Hala Hanna, notes that the Gates Foundation has been an important partner for MIT Solve for many years, and 'we both share the belief that innovators are critical to solving global challenges and require targeted support to achieve scale.' Together the Gates Foundation and MIT Solve have collaborated on custom philanthropic programs such as the AI-Enabled Assessments Challenge and have secured additional funding for its innovators. 'While the Foundation's planned wind-down represents a significant shift in the philanthropic landscape, its impact on Solve will be more evolutionary than disruptive,' stated Hanna in an email message to this writer. 'Every year, we work with over 80 supporters and investors to help them achieve their social impact goals. The Foundation's partnership has certainly validated and strengthened how we design innovation challenges, select winners, and deliver entrepreneur support programs. The ultimate vision – which both our organizations share – is that in 20 years this type of risk capital becomes both more available as other funders follow suit and less necessary as capable governments, scaled innovations, and functional markets flourish.' Indeed, fundraising experts such as Ann Fellman, the chief marketing officer at Bloomerang, think that nonprofits need both short-term and long-term fundraising strategies and the flexibility to change those strategies over time. According to Fellman, the Gates Foundation announcement represents an opportunity for nonprofits. Because the Foundation will be more aggressively distributing its funds over the next 20 years, Fellman believes that nonprofit leaders need to ask themselves: do you have a mission and a vision and a connection – not just with the Gates Foundation but also other family foundations who might follow Gates's lead and wind down their operations? Fellman suggests leaning into family foundations to understand how they are governed, how they are distributing their funds and over what period of time. She sees the Gates announcement as signaling a change in how philanthropic institutions see themselves and she believes that this shift might be accelerating faster than what we've been used to in the past. 'There is going to be a $70 trillion transfer of wealth happening over the next two decades, and nonprofit organizations need a strategy to navigate that shift,' stated Fellman in an interview with this writer. 'Nonprofits shouldn't make the mistake of pulling back, deciding for the donor that the time isn't right – now is the time to make the ask. Now is the time to lean in.' Communication between the fundraiser and donor is key according to Fellman. Research that Bloomerang has conducted shows that 65 percent of donors value frequent impact updates on what is happening to their donations but only 36 percent of nonprofits are providing these kinds of regular reports. Fellman believes that as wealth is transferred to younger generations who are used to more real-time, shorter bursts of information, these kinds of updates will become more critical to the fundraising landscape. Transparency is also important. If nonprofits are experiencing a gap in revenues for whatever reason -- changes in government or institutional funding, increased expenses, a crisis of one kind or another – it's critical to identify the gap, make the ask, and communicate the results according to Fellman. Bill Gates has been a legendary corporate leader and philanthropist, and his thought leadership and resources have been an outsized part of the philanthropic landscape for the past 25 years. The next 20 years will see an enormous generational transfer of wealth in this country and nonprofit leaders need to be prepared and willing to shift as the fundraising environment changes with it.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Inside Bill Gates' annual employee meeting after his $200 billion bombshell: ‘How do we get people to care?'
Bill Gates had a question for the employees of his charitable foundation, which he recently announced will spend $200 billion to reduce disease and death among the world's poorest. 'How do you get people to care?' the Microsoft founder asked at the Gates Foundation's annual meeting this month. 'We're going to have to up our game quite a bit.' Hundreds of Gates Foundation employees—many flown in from the foundation's country offices in India, China, South Africa, and elsewhere—filled an amphitheater across the street from the world's largest private philanthropy's two-winged headquarters in Seattle. This year's event came at a remarkable moment: Employees had just learned that the operation they work for will no longer exist 20 years from now. On its 25th anniversary, the Gates Foundation announced that after doubling its spending in the next 20 years, it will shutter operations. The $200 billion it will spend is the largest philanthropic commitment in modern history. Walking into the dimly lit auditorium, Gates received a standing ovation from the mezzanine down to the front row. 'We are at an amazing milestone,' said the foundation's cofounder. Gates began by celebrating the progress made in the foundation's first quarter-century, including the reduction by half of childhood deaths, and successes fighting malaria, polio, and other infectious diseases. He teared up as he mentioned the people—his mother, father, fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett, and ex-wife and foundation cofounder Melinda French Gates—who have influenced him the most in his philanthropy. The tone was far from triumphal, however. Even as Gates laid out the foundation's big ambitions—including eradicating polio and malaria, and reducing deaths from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS by 90%—he warned of how far there is to go, bemoaned the sector's fragility, and said the recent drastic cuts to foreign aid from the United States and other top donor countries are already threatening the last two decades' progress. 'It's going to take our very best work to get this reversed, our advocacy to get the resources restored,' Gates told the foundation's staff. And he said, he's looking for 'amazing, low-cost innovation, so we can take what remains and actually get those figures going back in the right direction.' CEO Mark Suzman spoke for many when he expressed rage at the cuts in aid from wealthy countries. Gates and his foundation had made the decision to pursue these ambitious public health goals before the Trump administration's gutting of the United States' main international aid agency, USAID—and several other countries are also cutting their international aid budgets. 'Make no mistake, we are entering a new era, one in which, as you've heard, the world's poorest people can no longer rely on strong, steady support from the world's richest nations,' Suzman said. 'It is okay to be frustrated… We never thought we'd have to fight so hard to justify the importance of our work.' But, he continued: 'This is a fight we are ready for.' Reached after the gathering, one staff member at the foundation said that colleagues' mood has been 'pretty optimistic and enthusiastic' after the $200 billion announcement. 'We are super energized thinking about what legacy building looks like and how we can work ourselves out of a job by building local capacity and empowering our partners to continue the mission,' the staffer wrote to Fortune. Suzman said the foundation's goals have not changed. 'When critical coalitions seem to crumble before our eyes, we cannot just shrink our ambitions,' he said. 'When the very idea of hope for a better future starts to sound naïve or out of date, we must remind people that our optimism does not come easily. It has been hard-earned. It is not based on blind faith, but concrete, measurable results.' Gates asked his employees to reinvigorate their drive to achieve the foundation's core mission, bring new partners along, and invest in the potential of AI to help alleviate poverty and play a key role in drug discovery. 'I really believe, and I hope it's not a naive belief, that we can achieve—despite the headwinds—even more over the next 20 years than we did in the first 25,' he said. This story was originally featured on
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Could A Workcation Be The Most Productive Thing You Do This Year?
In the 1980s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates took 'think weeks' in a cedar forest in the Pacific ... More Northwest – today more commonly known as the 'workcation'. The 'workcation' has become increasingly popular among entrepreneurs and business owners who need to escape the daily grind and carve out the time to work on–rather than in–their organizations. Not to be confused with business travel, working abroad, or vacations into which work creeps, workcations are an opportunity to get stuck into one or two important tasks that never seem to take priority, and that require deep thought, problem solving or creativity. 'Insight doesn't arrive when we're rushing; it comes when we create the conditions for it,' says Arianna Cerrito, founder of StartUpandRise, who takes a solo workcation three times a year, for two to three days at a time. She designs hers around deep reflection and decision making and finds even a small shift in environment, pace, and energy can alter her perspective and help new ideas to surface. She adds: 'Narrowing my focus unlocks sharper insights and decisions that feel aligned, not rushed.' Those who seem to get the most out of these short, working trips are those who go with a very specific and clear goal in mind. Microsoft founder Bill Gates used his 'think weeks' in the 1980s to read through papers written by Microsoft employees pitching new innovations or potential investments and to give his feedback, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Sarah Abel, CEO of TNB Skills Training has used previous workcations to design a marketing funnel for a new project and an onboarding process for partners. 'It got done, because I wasn't bogged down in meetings or firefighting,' she says. Abel's golden rule is to go with a clear purpose and she credits these breaks, which have given her 'space to lead' for reaching seven-figures revenues. 'These intentional breaks are where I shift from doing to designing, and I've seen time and again how that changes the game,' she adds. But does where you go make a difference? Gates chose a secluded cabin in a cedar forest in the Pacific Northwest. Abel gives the location less thought, provided it's a departure from the every day. "I define a workcation as intentional time in a fresh environment where you blend structured business planning with true mental reset,' she says. And Jo Irving, an empowerment coach, thinks people should consider 'the energy of the space' over the location, with the type of work they're doing guiding their choice. She says: 'If you're writing a book, creating content, or mapping out a new offer, choose somewhere that feels beautiful and inspiring. If you're tackling admin or your tax return, you just need peace and zero distractions.' Irving says it's the distance that clears mental clutter. With no housework to complete or daily routines to run through it's just you, your thoughts, and the work that matters. She adds: 'This clarity lets you stop reacting and start creating. Most people live in constant response mode, but with distance comes perspective, and in that space, you remember what you're building and why it matters.' Business owners are generally poor at taking extended time off, until burnout forces them to rest. In a Time Etc survey of 251 US entrepreneurs, only 56% had managed to take a vacation where they'd been able to completely switch off from work in the previous 12 months. But mental health experts warn workcations should not be a substitute for actual time off work. As Sarah Daniels, a mental health coach at Headspace, puts it: 'It's not time off, it's just working somewhere different.' She concedes workcations can offer benefits: not just the boost in creativity from a change of scenery, but a sense of balance when your day ends with access to nature or new experiences. But for those feeling burned out, Daniels warns that these working trips won't provide the full recovery that the body and mind need. She explains: 'In these cases, what's called for isn't a reset, it's a full reboot. True time away, completely detached from work, is essential for long-term well-being and productivity.' She advises that, when deciding between a vacation and a workcation, consider your energy levels and your need for recovery. 'Productivity and rest both matter, but they require different kinds of space,' she adds.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
American soft power is evaporating in the Age of Trump
With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let's recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you're a this-or-that and you shout back: 'Takes one to know one!' Indeed, it does. This month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said of his fellow billionaire Elon Musk: 'The world's richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world's poorest children.' Elaborating, Gates explained that Musk, as head of his self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had decided to put 'U.S.A.I.D. in the wood chipper' by cutting 80% of its global humanitarian programs and that, he pointed out, will mean 'millions of additional deaths of kids.' To help undo the damage, Gates announced that he'll be spending down his own $200 billion fortune over the next 20 years to promote public health in Asia and Africa so that 'children [are] not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting H.I.V.' Amid the blizzard of executive orders and bizarre budgetary decisions pouring out of the Trump White House, Gates put his finger on the cuts that really matter, the ones that will do lasting damage — not just to their unfortunate victims but to America's sense of global leadership as well. In President Donald Trump's transactional diplomacy, only the hard power of mineral deals, gifted airplanes, or military might matters. And yet, as we learned in the Cold War years, it's much easier to exercise world leadership with willing followers won over by the form of diplomacy scholars have dubbed 'soft power.' As the progenitor of the concept, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, put it: 'Seduction is always more effective than coercion. And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.' He first coined the term in 1990, just as the Cold War was ending, writing that 'when one country gets other countries to want what it wants,' that 'might be called co-optive or soft power, in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.' In his influential 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Nye argued that, in our world, raw military power had been superseded by soft-power instruments like reliable information, skilled diplomacy, and economic aid. Actually, soft power is seldom soft. Indeed, Spanish steel might have conquered the New World in the sixteenth century, but its long rule over that vast region was facilitated by the appeal of a shared Christian religion. When Britain's global turn came in the nineteenth century, its naval dominion over the world's oceans was softened by an enticing cultural ethos of commerce, language, literature, and even sports. And as the American century dawned after World War II, its daunting troika of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines would be leavened by the soft-power appeal of its democratic values, its promise of scientific progress, and its humanitarian aid that started in Europe with the Marshall Plan in 1948. Even in these uncertain times, one thing seems clear enough: Donald Trump's sharp cuts to this country's humanitarian aid will ensure that its soft power crumbles, doing lasting damage to its international standing. The Logic of Foreign Aid Foreign aid — giving away money to help other nations develop their economies — remains one of America's greatest inventions. In the aftermath of World War II, Europe had been ravaged by six years of warfare, including the dropping of 2,453,000 tons of Allied bombs on its cities, after which the rubble was raked thanks to merciless ground combat that killed 40 million people and left millions more at the edge of starvation. Speaking before a crowd of 15,000 packed into Harvard Yard for commencement in June 1947, less than two years after that war ended, Secretary of State George Marshall made an historic proposal that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. 'It is logical,' he said, 'that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.' Instead of the usual victor's demand for reparations or revenge, the U.S. gave Europe, including its defeated Axis powers, $13 billion in foreign aid that would, within a decade, launch that ruined continent on a path toward unprecedented prosperity. Buy the Book What came to be known as the Marshall Plan was such a brilliant success that Washington decided to apply the idea on a global scale. Over the next quarter century, as a third of humanity emerged from the immiseration of colonial rule in Africa and Asia, the U.S. launched aid programs designed to develop the fundamentals of nationhood denied to those countries during the imperial age. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on a promise to aid Africa's recovery from colonial rule, disparate programs were consolidated into the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) in 1961. At the outset, U.S.A.I.D.'s work was complicated by Washington's Cold War mission. It would sometimes even serve as a cover for CIA operations. Just a few years after the Cold War ended in 1991, however, U.S.A.I.D. was separated from the State Department and its diplomatic aim of advancing U.S. interests. Then refocused on its prime mission of global economic development, U.S.A.I.D. would, in concert with the World Bank and other development agencies, become a pioneering partner in a multifaceted global effort to improve living conditions for the majority of humanity. Between 1950 and 2018, the portion of the world's population living in 'extreme poverty' (on $1.90 per day) dropped dramatically from 53% to just 9%. Simultaneously, U.S.A.I.D. and similar agencies collaborated with the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox and radically reduce polio, ending pandemics that had been the scourge of humanity for centuries. Launched in 1988, the anti-polio campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, spared 20 million children worldwide from serious paralysis. Behind such seemingly simple statistics, however, lay years of work by skilled U.S.A.I.D. specialists in agriculture, nutrition, public health, sanitation, and governance who delivered a multifaceted array of programs with exceptional efficiency. Not only would their work improve or save millions of lives, but they would also be winning loyal allies for America at a time of rising global competition. And Along Comes DOGE Enter Elon Musk, chainsaw in hand. Following President Trump's example of withdrawing from the World Health Organization on inauguration day, Musk started his demolition of the federal government by, as he put it, 'feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.' As his DOGE hirelings prowled the agency's headquarters in the weeks after inauguration, Musk denounced that largely humanitarian organization as 'evil' and a 'viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.' Without a scintilla of evidence, he added, 'USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.' With head-spinning speed, his minions then stripped the U.S.A.I.D. logo from its federal building, shut down its website, purged its 10,000 employees, and started slashing its $40 billion budget for delivering aid to more than 100 nations globally. The White House also quickly transferred what was left of that agency back to the State Department, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent six weeks slashing 83% of its global humanitarian programs, reducing 6,200 of them to about 1,000. As U.S.A.I.D.'s skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children. In Colombia, the agency had spent several billion dollars to settle a decades-long civil war that killed 450,000 people by mapping 3.2 million acres of uncharted lands so that the guerrillas could become farmers. That work, however, was suddenly halted dead in its tracks — project incomplete, money wasted, threat of civil conflict again rising. In Asia, the end of U.S.A.I.D. support forced the World Food Program to cut by half the already stringent food rations being provided to the million Rohingya refugees confined in miserable, muddy camps in Bangladesh — forcing them to survive on just $6.00 a month per person. In Africa, the aid cuts are likely to prove catastrophic. Departing U.S.A.I.D. officials calculated that they would be likely to produce a 30% spike in tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease that already kills 1.25 million people annually on this planet and that 200,000 more children would likely be paralyzed by polio within a decade. In the eastern Congo, where a civil war fueled by competition over that region's rare-earth minerals has raged for nearly 30 years, the U.S. was the 'ultra dominant' donor. With U.S.A.I.D. now shut down, 7.8 million Congolese war refugees are likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million children will suffer from malnutrition. In war-torn Sudan, U.S. aid sustained more than 1,000 communal kitchens to feed refugees, all of which have now closed without any replacements. With 25 million of the world's 40 million H.I.V. patients in Africa, cuts to U.S.A.I.D.'s health programs there, which had reduced new infections by half since 2010, now threaten that progress. In South Africa, a half-million AIDS patients are projected to die, and in Congo, an estimated 15,000 people could die within the next month alone. Moreover, ending U.S.A.I.D.'s Malaria Initiative, which has spent $9 billion since President George W. Bush launched it in 2005, essentially ensures that, within a year, there will be 18 million more malaria infections in West Africa and 166,000 more likely deaths. On March 3rd, with such dismal statistics piling up, Elon Musk insisted that 'no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.' Writing from Sudan just 12 days later, however, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Peter Donde, a 10-year-old child infected with AIDS at birth, had just died. A U.S.A.I.D. program launched by President Bush called PEPFAR had long provided drugs that were estimated to have saved 26 million lives from AIDS (Peter's among them) until Musk's cuts closed the humanitarian agency. Kristof reported that the end of U.S. funding for AIDS treatment in Africa means 'an estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid.' Why, he asked, should Americans spend even 0.24% of their Gross National Product on programs that keep poor children alive? Answering his own question, he wrote that the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. 'means that the United States loses soft power and China gains.' Indeed, Dr. Diana Putman, U.S.A.I.D.'s former assistant administrator for Africa, argues that the agency's programs have been the chief currency for U.S. ambassadors in negotiations with developing nations. 'Their leverage and ability to make a difference in terms of foreign policy,' she explained, 'is backed up by the money that they bring, and in the Global South that money is primarily the money that U.S.A.I.D. has.' The Loss of Soft Power In short, globally, the sharp cuts to U.S.A.I.D.'s humanitarian programs represent a crippling blow to America's soft power at a time when great-power competition with Beijing and Moscow has reemerged with stunning intensity. In back-handed testimonials to U.S.A.I.D.'s success, the world's autocrats celebrated the agency's demise, particularly the end of the $1.6 billion — about 4% of its annual budget — that it devoted to pro-democracy initiatives. 'Smart move,' said former Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. On X (formerly Twitter), Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán announced that he 'couldn't be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance, @elonmusk are finally taking down this foreign interference machine.' Expressing his joy, Orbán offered a 'Good riddance!' to U.S.A.I.D. programs that helped 'independent media thrive' and funneled funds to the 'opposition campaign' in Hungary's 2022 parliamentary elections. Similarly, El Salvador's de facto dictator, Nayib Bukele, complained that U.S.A.I.D.'s pro-democracy funds had been 'funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.' Offering even more eloquent testimony to U.S.A.I.D.'s past efficacy, China has moved quickly to take over a number of the abolished agency's humanitarian programs, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Beijing is locked in an intense strategic rivalry with Washington over the South China Sea. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, two public health specialists observed that 'a U.S. retreat on global health, if sustained, will indeed open the door for China to exploit the abrupt, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. programs in… Southeast Asia, and it may do the same in Latin America.' Last February, only a week after Washington cancelled $40 million that had funded U.S.A.I.D. initiatives for child literacy and nutrition in Cambodia, Beijing offered support for strikingly similar programs, and its ambassador to Phnom Penh said, 'Children are the future of the country and the nation.' Making China's diplomatic gains obvious, he added: 'We should care for the healthy growth of children together.' Asked about this apparent setback during congressional hearings, Trump's interim U.S.A.I.D. deputy administrator, Pete Marocco, evidently oblivious to the seriousness of U.S.-China competition in the South China Sea, simply dismissed its significance out of hand. Although the dollar amount was relatively small, the symbolism of such aid programs for children gave China a sudden edge in a serious geopolitical rivalry. Just two months later, Cambodia's prime minister opened new China-funded facilities at his country's Ream Naval Base, giving Beijing's warships preferential access to a strategic port adjacent to the South China Sea. Although the U.S. has spent a billion dollars courting Cambodia over the past quarter-century, China's soft-power gains are now clearly having very real hard-power consequences. In neighboring Vietnam, U.S.A.I.D. has worked for several decades trying to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War, while courting Hanoi as a strategic partner on the shores of the South China Sea. In building a 'comprehensive strategic partnership,' manifest in today's close trade relations, U.S.A.I.D. played a critical diplomatic role by investing in recovering unexploded American munitions left over from that war, cleaning up sites that had been polluted by the defoliant Agent Orange, and providing some aid to the thousands of Vietnamese who still suffer serious birth defects from such toxic chemicals. 'It is through these efforts that two former enemies are now partners,' said former Senator Patrick Leahy. 'People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world.' A Global Turn Toward Hard Power Although the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and sharp cuts to economic aid will have consequences for the world's poor that can only be called tragic, it's but one part of President Trump's attack on the key components of America's soft power — not only foreign aid, but also reliable information and skilled diplomacy. In March, the president signed an executive order shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including organizations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that had been broadcasting in 50 languages worldwide, reaching an estimated 360 million people in nations often without reliable news and information. A month later, the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a 50% cut to the State Department's budget, closing diplomatic missions and completely eliminating funds for international organizations like NATO and the U.N. While the actual implementation of those cuts remains uncertain, the State Department is already dismissing 20% of its domestic workforce, or about 3,400 employees, including a significant number of Foreign Service officers, special envoys, and cyber-security specialists. Add it all up and, after just 100 days in office, President Trump is well on his way to demolishing the three critical elements for America's pursuit of global soft power. Already, the erosion of U.S. influence is manifest in recent criticism of this country, unprecedented in its bitterly acrid tone, even among longstanding allies. 'Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping away,' warned veteran French legislator Claude Malhuret in a March 4th speech, from the floor of France's Senate that soon won a remarkable 40 million views worldwide. 'Washington has become Nero's court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a ketamine-fueled buffoon in charge of purging the civil service.' With such cutting critiques circulating in the corridors of power from Paris to Tokyo, Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership. And, as Professor Nye reminds us, leadership based solely on coercion is not really leadership at all. Welcome to Planet Trump in the year 2025.
