Humanitarian Aid for Minerals: Trump’s Transactional Statecraft and the Weaponization of Dependency

The second Trump administration’s decision to curtail USAID operations has had severe humanitarian consequences. Estimates vary, but a Boston University model suggests that nearly 800,000 people may have died within a year of the early 2025 USAID cuts, approximately two-thirds of them children.¹ These deaths are widely considered preventable by global health analysts, raising urgent ethical questions about the withdrawal of life-sustaining aid.

However, the ethical implications of dismantling USAID extend beyond immediate humanitarian harm. The Trump administration’s aid policies signal a broader transformation in the logic of aid itself, from ostensibly humanitarian assistance to explicitly transactional arrangements. Recent reporting indicates that renewed health aid is increasingly being tied to economic concessions, particularly for critical minerals.² This shift raises a critical question: what are the ethical and structural implications of conditioning life-saving assistance on resource access? Framed as a pragmatic “America First” foreign policy, conditioning aid in this way risks institutionalizing exploitative dynamics and contributing to human suffering under the guise of development cooperation.

Humanitarian Aid as Leverage: The Case of Zambia

Following significant reductions in USAID programming, at least twenty-four countries have reportedly entered conditional agreements to secure approximately $20 billion in aid funding over five years, often paired with commitments to increase domestic health spending and exclusive U.S. access to minerals.³ Zambia provides a particularly illustrative case. U.S. officials have proposed a $1 billion health funding package contingent upon expanded access for American firms to Zambian mineral deposits. A draft memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reported by The New York Times, indicates that the State Department is considering withholding HIV assistance as leverage to secure this mineral agreement.⁴ Approximately 1.3 million people in Zambia rely on daily HIV treatment through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).⁵ Rubio reportedly wrote that “we will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”

The memo further states that if Zambia refuses to sign, “sharp public cuts to American foreign assistance would significantly demonstrate to aid-receiving countries the seriousness of our interest in collaboration and our insistence on tangible benefits under our America First foreign policy.”⁶ The State Department frames African countries as partners “in collaboration” in critical mineral development. Yet, when paired with global tariff policies targeting the very countries positioned as “partners,” this approach resembles coercive extraction rather than reciprocal economic diplomacy.⁷ HIV advocacy organizations have accordingly described the memo as “shameless exploitation” with Zambian lives treated as a “bargaining chip by a rapacious administration.”⁸ In this formulation, the “art of the deal” extends to human survival itself.

Weaponizing Dependency

Dependency theory provides a useful lens for interpreting the Trump administration’s shift toward conditioning humanitarian aid on access to mineral resource governance in Zambia. It conceptualizes the global economy as structured to benefit a “core” of wealthy nations at the expense of a “periphery” of developing countries.⁹ Dependency theorists have long critiqued development aid, particularly with institutions such as USAID, as a structural instrument that sustains unequal global relations and creates forms of reliance that limit national development. Proposed responses within the dependency school vary. Reformist approaches, associated with figures such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Raúl Prebisch, advocate for more equitable integration into global markets through fairer trade terms.¹⁰ More radical perspectives, including those of Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, call for forms of “delinking” from the global capitalist system altogether.¹¹ Despite these differences, the literature shares a common normative concern: that the global economic system is not merely unequal, but systematically structured to sustain inequality between countries.

At first glance, the Trump administration’s approach to aid appears to align with the reformist dependency perspectives. For example, in addition to mineral concessions, Secretary Rubio’s proposed agreement with Zambia includes a requirement for $340 million in domestic health spending, reflecting calls for greater national responsibility and reduced aid dependence. In the “America First in Africa” planning, administration rhetoric reinforces this framing, with the goal of the Trump administration “resetting its relationship with Africa based on mutually beneficial partnerships rather than aid, dependency, and spreading divisive ideology.”¹² Within this logic, American private investment and technological capacity are presented as tools through which African states can “be more self-reliant” and unlock underdeveloped mineral resources, creating a purported “win-win” outcome.¹³

However, this framing collapses under closer scrutiny. The administration is not dismantling dependency. Rather, it is leveraging it. Aid is being weaponized as an economic cudgel, transformed from a mechanism of support into a tool of coercion. Existing reliance on life-saving programs such as PEPFAR in Zambia becomes the very leverage through which concessions are extracted. Rather than enabling national autonomy, this approach exploits vulnerability. The “America First in Africa” strategy does not represent a departure from the historic dynamics identified by dependency theorists, but an intensification of them. Dependency is no longer a byproduct of aid, but an explicit instrument of statecraft.

The dependency theory dynamic of “core” and “peripheral” interests is not merely theoretical; the vocabulary is directly in the Trump administration’s policy discourse. Nick Checker, head of the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, wrote to bureau staff in January to share “a few thoughts” on how best to implement President Trump’s strategy in Africa.¹⁴ As Checker wrote, “to put it bluntly, Africa is a peripheral—rather than a core—theater for US interests.”¹⁵ This characterization signals a shift away from long-term engagement and soft power toward a narrow model of cost-efficient, interest-driven deal-making. By explicitly framing the African continent as peripheral, the administration justifies a mode of engagement defined by short-term extraction rather than sustained partnership and global health development. Such an approach does not foster self-reliance; it constrains it. This policy prioritizes external access to mineral resources at the expense of sustained investment in domestic state capacity and infrastructure—thereby reinforcing the dependency dynamics it purports to transcend.

From Reform to Regression

The Trump administration is not wrong to question the effectiveness of past aid models. Critics have long argued that traditional development assistance can entrench dependency and fail to generate sustainable growth.¹⁶ However, the Trump administration’s proposed alternative is a perversion, rather than a corrective. As one internal State Department email concerning humanitarian aid in Africa reportedly claimed, “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests.”¹⁷ This assertion is fundamentally unsound. Public health systems, economic stability, and political legitimacy are deeply intertwined with American long-term strategic interests. Reducing humanitarian assistance to a narrow calculus of immediate material gain ignores its role in generating soft power, sustaining U.S. credibility, and projecting a commitment to global ethical norms. Programs such as PEPFAR demonstrate that humanitarian assistance has historically advanced both American influence and meaningful health outcomes, rather than existing outside national interest.¹⁸

The legacy of USAID is undoubtedly complex. Yet, over the past two decades, some estimates suggest it has saved over 92 million lives.¹⁹ The Trump administration’s emerging model of humanitarian policy, by contrast, risks redefining aid as a conditional instrument of economic leverage, raising fundamental ethical questions about the purpose of development assistance. While encouraging domestic investment in the Zambian public health system is defensible, its value is fundamentally undermined when paired with extractive concessions that erode long-term economic sovereignty. If the Trump administration is serious about building partnerships in Africa regarding critical minerals, a different balance is required. Such an approach should be grounded in ethical obligations that require humanitarian engagement to respect local sovereignty and strengthen domestic development capacity rather than enable asymmetrical resource exploitation. A true “America First in Africa” approach would recognize that long-term stability, health, and economic autonomy are not obstacles to U.S. interests, but foundational to them.

—Ben Hazelton

Ben Hazelton is an MPhil candidate in Development Studies at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. His dissertation research examines the expansion of critical mineral mining in former apartheid-era mining towns in Namibia, with a focus on environmental justice.

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