This title comes straight from Plague Inc.

Let me play Orange Baby’s advocate for a moment:

It is understandable that a country wants to cut money spent elsewhere for no immediate* gain.

The cynicism is in the orders of magnitude: this is about USD millions, not billions. Less than what was spent on GOP campaigning last election. Even if you take all USAID cuts, it’s very little compared to all the lobbying and saving OpenAI and defense and whatnot.

In other words, it would have cost the USA next to nothing to preserve Botswana’s public health.

There’s an additional aspect of what kind of aid you give to poorer countries: the type that helps them sustain themselves or the type that makes them dependent. But I don’t know enough about Botswana or USAID to argue that point, just something to keep in mind whenever we talk about aiding poor countries.

Botswana relies on diamond sales for around 80% of foreign exchange earnings…

… Botswana has hired French investment bank Lazard and Swiss lender CBH Bank to be co-advisers on plans to acquire De Beers.

Is this wise? Noone want’s diamonds. So lets get more reliant on diamonds.

“because of a shortage of essential medicines and medical equipment”