Austin Tice’s mother, in Damascus, hopes to find son missing since 2012

LONDON: Among the recent victims of the slashing of US foreign spending was an education project in Iraq developed by the people behind the famed American children’s TV show, “Sesame Street.”

The Trump administration used the $20 million grant awarded for the scheme as a prime example of what it claimed was the wastefulness and liberal agenda at the US Agency for International Development.

Yet the demise of the project poignantly illustrates the widespread damage being done to America’s formidable soft power machine, both in the Middle East and around the world.

It also raises questions over whether China will move to fill the soft-power vacuum left behind and increase spending in the region.

Soon after his inauguration, President Donald Trump made it clear he was going to upend one of the core pillars of US foreign policy by dramatically shrinking foreign aid spending.

The full extent was revealed late last month when the administration announced aid funding cuts of $60 billion, including the cancellation of 90 percent of contracts by USAID.

The agency, which was the world’s largest provider of foreign assistance, including lifesaving humanitarian relief for millions, was also considered America’s most important soft-power weapon.

Speaking about the cuts on Feb. 5, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the grant for a “new ‘Sesame Street’ show in Iraq” was part of a “long list of crap” in wasteful federal spending.

What she was referring to was not a new TV show but a USAID-funded education project known as Ahlan Simsim Iraq, which was run by Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind “Sesame Street.”

The project used the characters and stories from the existing “Ahlan Simsim” show, an Arabic version of “Sesame Street” watched by millions of children across the Middle East and North Africa.

“Ahlan Simsim,” meaning “welcome sesame,” premiered in 2020 funded by a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Ahlan Simsim Iraq was a spin-off project in 2021 in partnership with Save the Children and Mercy Corps “to support communities in Iraq impacted by conflict and violence,” a Sesame Workshop spokesperson told Arab News.

The project created content and materials “to reach children at scale,” the spokesperson said. It also provided learning materials such as storybooks, activity books, training and guides for teachers for early childhood development and training to teachers.

USAID documents show that the grant of $20 million was to be awarded over seven years. Almost $11 million had been paid out to Ahlan Simsim Iraq before the project was terminated last month, according to US government data.

The project is one of thousands funded by USAID that helped the US maintain its position as the world’s leader in soft power but have been stopped in recent weeks.

“Supporting Sesame Street projects is a good investment in soft power, the ability to attract,” Joseph Nye, professor emeritus at Harvard University, who coined the term “soft power,” told Arab News.

“The change in government policy damages US soft power,” he added.

Nye describes soft power as the ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion or payment.

USAID was set up at the height of the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy to make the US more attractive than the Soviet Union by helping poorer countries with development.

The agency evolved through the decades into a vast provider of foreign assistance to more than 100 countries, bolstering the image of the US around the world.

While it may be difficult to quantify the damage done to US soft power by the recent foreign assistance cuts, recent interviews with humanitarians and grant recipients in the Middle East suggest there could be a significant dent.

One USAID worker focused on Iraq described the retreat from providing aid to large numbers of displaced people as “unconscionable,” particularly given the 2003 US-led invasion of the country and its aftermath.

An NGO coordinator for Syria said the dropping of aid programs, just after the fall of Bashar Al Assad, was a “betrayal of Syrian people.”

Rana Sweis, owner of a media company in Jordan, which had a USAID grant terminated, said a debate was now taking place about why her country, one of America’s main allies in the region, had relied so heavily on the agency and what values does the US now stand for.

“USAID was supporting the values they (the US) talk about like women’s rights and human rights and freedom of speech,” Sweis said. “I don't want to say it was a lie, but how can you suddenly stop this and say ‘we no longer believe in this, it's no longer part of our values.’”

A big question now is whether China will step in to the soft-power vacuum in the Middle East and elsewhere.

For more than a decade China has tried to boost its soft-power influence, particularly in the Global South with projects under the Belt and Road Initiative.

But its foreign aid was a fraction of what the US was spending between 2013 and 2018 at just $7 billion a year compared with Washington’s $48 billion, according to commentary published this week by the Brookings Institution.

The article’s author, Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, told Arab News that Chinese aid is unable to compare with US aid in terms of size and purpose, “but soft power is a different issue.”

“US withdrawals leave space that China’s soft-power influence will naturally extend and expand into,” she said.

Nye said there is a further reason why China may not replace the US as the main soft-power influence in the region.

“Soft power emanates from a country’s civil society as well as government policy, and China is less well placed because if its tight Communist Party control over its civil society,” he said.

For now, NGOs, governments and businesses throughout the region are recalibrating to account for the loss of a major source of external funding. Time will tell how much the US will miss the soft-power returns on its investments.