What Good Was Built, Was Just Dismantled.

KJS 5.26 DC

Between 2003 and 2018 I worked in global development and finance — specifically in sub-Saharan Africa. This meant negotiating on behalf of guarantors, banks and donors including the United States, while carrying a big line of credit backed by the U.S. Congress. I sat across tables from ministers of finance in countries most Americans cannot locate on a map and got unprecedented signatures on standby letters of credit – and other instruments — to allow emergency commodities (often pre-purchased by the U.S. government) to reach populations in health crisis much faster than the standard 12-to-18-month cycle allowed.

The architecture we helped build was premised on one foundational principle: American credibility as a partner is the asset. Not the commodity. Not the leverage. The credibility.

A leaked State Department memo reported by the New York Times this week has confirmed what many of us who built that architecture feared was coming.

The Trump administration has made a $2 billion health aid package to Zambia contingent on Zambia signing a Critical Minerals Memorandum of Understanding granting U.S. companies preferential access to its copper, cobalt, and lithium. There was an actual memo on this abominable policy, prepared for Secretary Rubio, stating explicitly that the U.S. will only secure its economic priorities — quoting directly — “by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”

Pause. Find words…

Approximately 1.3 million Zambians rely on daily HIV medication through PEPFAR. The administration has signaled those treatments may be cut as early as this month if the deal is not signed.

I have spent twenty-five years watching how extractive relationships between wealthy nations and African governments actually work in practice. I watched China come into Zambia, into the DRC, into Angola — build roads to mines, leave communities worse off, strip generational mineral wealth in exchange for infrastructure that served the extraction rather than the population. Back then, we called it the new colonialism. We wrote papers about it. We built lending architectures specifically designed to give African governments the fiscal sovereignty to say no to those terms.

What the Trump administration is now doing is not a version of that model. It is worse. Because China at least pretended the relationship was mutual. The State Department memo does not pretend. It instructs Rubio to threaten the lives of 1.3 million people as a negotiating tactic. Explicitly. In writing. With a justification memo attached.

This is not diplomacy. This is not development. This is not even a transaction in the legitimate sense of that word. This is a hostage arrangement.

The hostages are HIV patients. The ransom is lithium.

Zambia’s Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe called it “undiplomatic and regrettable.” That is the language of a diplomat trying to preserve a relationship that his counterpart has already chosen to destroy. What he means — what every African foreign minister who read that memo understands — is that the United States has just confirmed what the most cynical voices on the continent have argued for decades: that American aid was always conditional, that the conditionality was always ultimately about American interests, and that the humanitarian framing was a story we told ourselves more than a commitment we actually held.

This assessment has already been made. The Foreign Policy Research Institute — one of America’s most credible nonpartisan foreign policy institutions — published a formal analysis in March 2026 written by Ambassador Charles Ray, a former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe and Cambodia. His conclusion was surgical: the administration is not just being immoral, it is being strategically catastrophic. The medicine-for-minerals approach is actively sabotaging the Lobito Corridor — America’s own flagship Africa infrastructure project, the one asset designed to compete with Chinese investment across the continent. It is destroying the single advantage the U.S. held over China that Beijing could never manufacture: the credibility of humanitarian partnership that asks nothing extractive in return.

And it has already failed on its own terms. Zambia rejected the deal. Which means the United States lost its leverage and its credibility simultaneously — handing China the moral high ground it never deserved and could never have purchased on its own.

The cruelest part of this is the timing. The U.S. spent thirty years building PEPFAR into the most trusted bilateral health program in the world — genuinely trusted, not performatively trusted, by the communities it served. That trust was the strategic asset that differentiated American engagement from Chinese engagement across the entire continent. It was the thing China could not buy. It was the reason African governments chose American partnerships even when Chinese terms were financially superior.

The memo traded that asset for a minerals clause.

The architecture many helped build over decades, this administration is using as a weapon. The standby letters of credit, the commodity pre-purchase frameworks, the bilateral health financing facilities — these were designed as instruments of partnership. They were designed to demonstrate that lending, not granting, not extracting, was the model that respected African sovereignty while building American credibility.

What was designed as a hand extended in partnership has been redeployed as a fist.

I am not angry in the political sense this morning. I am angry in the professional and spiritual sense — also the way a doctor is angry when they watch someone use a surgical instrument to cause the harm it was designed to prevent.

This is not a policy disagreement. This is a desecration.

And Marco Rubio — who yesterday accepted an olive-wood pen from the Pope as a symbol of peace — signed the memo that authorized it.

* *

The rage, the empathy and the fear of feeling lost in my own country, is not how I wanted to end this essay. But it’s all I feel.

What an audacious hate signal sent out from the top of this country. My country. Hates.

Before Trump, we wouldn’t treat an enemy this hatefully – no less the most vulnerable populations on earth.

This act manifests one of my own worst fears: that the poorest people on this planet are left alone while we have so much. The stark reality I gave a career to changing.

Poof, we lose decades of trust, adding years to our arc toward social justice.