Entrenching Inequality or Opportunities to Forge New Pathways: Implications of U.S. Foreign Aid Cuts and Reciprocal Tariffs for African Countries

This essay focuses on the United States' practices that rise from two executive orders 1and their amendments-relating to foreign aid and reciprocal tariffs in the first six months of President Donald J. Trump's second administration.The two executive orders are examined together because of their mutually reinforcing nature and illustrations of the unequal underbelly of our international development and economic orders.These executive orders have critical distributive implications for the Third World. 2 President Trump's actions continue his unrepentant focus on altering the extant international legal and economic order especially as U.S. hegemony has come under significant threat from China. 3 Crucially, the first six months of President Trump's second administration has laid bare the disrupting impact of power politics over diplomacy, neglect of rules-based international order, and nonempirically backed unfair-trade relations.Tariffs are now selectively deployed as instruments of economic coercion 4 and political cudgel.By weaponizing and globalizing the experiences of the United States, the Trump administration retrenches the experiences of most of the world and relegates them to the background.Emerging from these executive orders then is an attempt by the United States to reconstruct the international economic order in favor of a specific national political project: America First.For African countries, the foreign aid cuts and reciprocal tariff executive orders accentuate the deeply unequal, unfair, and unjust character of an international legal regime that often subjects the Third World to domination, subordination, and acute disadvantage.5 By situating these executive orders in the false promises of even-handedness in the foreign aid regime and the international trading system, this essay analyzes the destabilizing impacts of these measures on U.S.-African foreign aid relations.With the full return of transaction, power, and conditionality-based U.S. international economic relations, 6 African countries confront a tricky dilemma: the difficulty 1 Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid, Exec.Order 14169, 90 Fed.Reg.8619 (Jan.20, 2025); see also Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices that Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits, Exec.Order 14257, 90 Fed.Reg.15041 (Apr.2, 2025). 2 The Third World is not a geographical location.As such, the consequences of the Trump executive orders are felt by vulnerable persons both in the Global South and the Global North.See generally Obiora C. Okafor, Newness, Imperialism, and International Legal Reform in Our Time: A TWAIL Perspective, 43 OSGOODE HALL L.J. 171 (2005).3 See Jacob Katz Cogan, Contemporary Practice of the United States, 119 AJIL 312, 313 (2025) (noting that "Cumulatively, they denote an 'America First' program that, more intensely than before, questions, ignores, weakens, and undercuts, without compunction or hesitation, existing international processes, understandings, rules, institutions, and multilateral frameworks, including security commitments and alliances, that have helped maintain the global order for decades.");see also Jamieson Greer, Trump's Trade Representative: Why We Remade the Global Order, N.Y.TIMES (Aug.

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