Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons expressed support Saturday for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) use of taxpayer dollars to fund programs such as the children’s puppetry show Sesame Street in Iraq.
Coons expressed his view while on air with CNN political commentator Michael Smerconish. “This isn’t just funding a kids’ show for children — millions of children — in countries like Iraq,” Coons said. “It’s a show that helps teach values, helps teach public health, helps prevent kids from dying from dysentery and disease and helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, and cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham], extremism, and terrorism.”
Coons also told Smerconish the funding for Sesame Street in Iraq was “pennies on the dollar” as its annual budget was $30 billion, relative to the $850 billion annual budget for the U.S. Department of Defense.
“As [former President Bill Clinton’s aide Joseph] Joe Nye [Jr.] would often say, ‘It’s not just soft power; it’s smart power,’” Coons said.
The USAID coproduced Ahlan Simsim — Arabic for “Welcome Sesame” — together with Sesame Workshop, for children in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries. Ahlan Simsim was “designed to promote inclusion, mutual respect, and understanding,” according to the now-unavailable USAID website.
12:54:35. (Wikimedia Commons/Public/By G. Edward Johnson – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=159365723)
Coons also paraphrased an argument for soft power through international aid once made by General James Mattis, President Donald Trump’s first-term Secretary of Defense.
“[I]f you don’t fund the State Department fully then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. So I think it’s a cost-benefit ratio. The more that we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget as we deal with the outcome of an apparent American withdrawal from the international scene,” Gen. Mattis argued at a March 2013 Senate military budget hearing.
Smerconish said that “in a soundbite-driven world, it’s so easy to deride how much we’re spending on an LBGTQ [sic] show in Bogota [Colombia].”
Smerconish was referencing a White House fact sheet that flayed USAID‘s funding of various programs abroad as wasteful. Some of the funding went to LGBTQ and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in countries as diverse as Guatemala and Ireland. (RELATED: ‘Incredible Delay And Arrogance’: USAID Whistleblower Believes ‘Tremendous Waste’ Runs Rampant Throughout Federal Govt)
Coons referred to the figures cited by the White House and alluded to by Smerconish as “Kryptonite examples” that cost far less than former President George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). A Washington Post analysis says the White House’s claims are “wildly inaccurate” and lacking context.
Coons said the derision directed at such spending was part of the challenges of governing in a “short attention span era where a brief tweet from Elon Musk or Donald Trump often trumps a two-minute or a three-minute explanation.”
China and Russia have begun wielding soft power across the world, “celebrating the death of USAID,” Coons added.