In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s recent decision to dismantle USAID, liberal internationalists have rallied, galvanized by the attack to defend the value of their institutions. Established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, USAID formalized US humanitarian relief efforts and diplomatic interventions in the Global South, especially—as I have written elsewhere—during the Congo Crisis, at a height in the transformative era of decolonization and the Cold War.

Trump’s plan has frozen more than 90 percent of USAID’s global operations as one of many perceived sites of state overspending and threatens unemployment for around 10,000 people. On February 21, 2,000 federal employees were put on immediate leave and given 15 minutes to pack their desk. Footage of these employees leaving the headquarters building has gone viral. Similarly, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced plans to cut the UK international aid budget from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent in order to sustain an increase to defense spending over the next two years. Beyond compassion for individual ex-employees, this wave of cuts has provoked a defensive reaction from those in the international humanitarian sector: If one of us is under attack, we all are.

Since then, many organizations and their supporters have eulogized the cuts in USAID and its UK equivalent (recently absorbed into the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office). Social media is awash with statements in support of USAID’s annual $4 billion activities. “The Trump administration’s abrupt elimination of so many vital human rights and humanitarian programs is reckless, cruel, and will wreak havoc on efforts to promote democracy and rule of law around the world,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at global NGO Human Rights Watch. As a result of the cuts in the UK, Anneliese Dodds announced her resignation as the British Minister for International Development, asserting that the decision would “remove food and healthcare from desperate people – deeply harming the UK’s reputation.”

Yager’s choice of defense—to assert USAID as a global policeman for democracy and rule of law—rings alarm bells for anyone who has read about US interference under the justification of “protecting democracy” during the Cold War and the War on Terror. Similarly, Dodds’s connection between the UK’s status as a global power and its humanitarian activities in service of “desperate people” feels outdated.

Justifications of the moral function, technocratic efficiency, and international security of the US and UK aid agencies are rooted in long-held beliefs about the West’s paternalistic responsibility for the Global South. This has its origins in colonial relationships and the legacies of the civilizing mission. Dodds’s statement helps to reveal how integral the West’s supposed benevolence and superiority has been in shaping the history of humanitarianism and for guiding the lines of who was perceived as deserving of aid or not. To create the archetype of the savior, one must continually construct the archetype of the “saved” as passive, needy, infantilized, and “desperate” to justify continued operations and growth in a sector that should ultimately be aiming for its own redundancy.

However, from many humanitarians’ perspective, Yager and Dodds are broadly correct. For them, the cuts are a lose-lose, materially for the recipient nations and reputationally for the donor states. Suggestions have been made that those facing cuts should look to the history of humanitarianism for morale as well as inspiration to reform the sector and prove the illiberals wrong. One senior humanitarian specialist encouraged British humanitarians to “remember the great history you share and start imagining a new shape for British humanitarian aid as soon as you can” on his LinkedIn page. Keep calm and carry on.

But a return to the cycle of liberal reformism—or “carrying on”—in humanitarianism shuts off the possibility of learning from the debates and critiques that the sector has faced since its origin, which have only grown more pertinent in the past decade. The coloniality of liberal internationalist logic and aid delivery has been well documented, most often by those described as “recipients” in the Global South as well as critical activists and scholars. The liberal internationalist order was designed to police and protect member states unequally; to be strong enough to intervene in Global South nations but too weak to hold powerful states, such as the UN permanent members, to account. Western and strong postcolonial nations alike, such as Indonesia and India, have long violated foundational principles whilst using “protecting democracy” or national security as justifications. The liberal order has relied on humanitarian organizations to defuse the consequences of these interventions and to continue to preach the gospel in support of retaining the same liberal structures and logics that failed to prevent the violence in the first place. In the aftermath of recent cuts, reactionary calls to support liberal internationalism in its time of need feel extraordinarily disconnected from a world where we are acutely aware of these state violations and the inadequacies of the humanitarian “smoothing over” process.

Trump’s cuts to USAID will not resolve these systemic problems, nor were they designed to. Indeed, he accepts the promise made by liberal internationalism and humanitarian operations to alleviate suffering around the world, but he rejects that this aim is politically or morally necessary—even at the cost to the US’s reputation. Ultimately, defending the sector and promoting reform will do little to reverse the mindset of someone who disagrees with the humanitarian intention to save lives beyond one’s own borders. Instead, we must acknowledge that liberal internationalists and Trump share a common history of white supremacy and coloniality, and that strengthening the humanitarian sector will only reinforce racist conceptions of recipients as dependent or undeveloped.

Why is it so hard to let go of a broken system? As Eleanor Davey, Fernando Espada, and Kim Scriven identified in their piece on the humanitarian reform and the mega-crisis, “after decades of reform initiatives, a paradox has emerged, in which humanitarian actors and commentators repeatedly evoke that the system is not ‘fit for purpose’ while the system itself is constantly reinforced even in times of increasingly budgetary constraints.” The liberal internationalist order thrives on the cycle for reform, welcoming the pretense of critical debate and organizational scrutiny whilst focusing resources on technical issues of operational efficiency and the excising of “bad apples.” But this performance of scrutiny only strengthens the argument that it is a democratically rigorous ideology, sincerely invested in improvement and the alleviation of suffering, rather than opening a discussion of the structural inequalities baked into its foundational logics.

This new attack from Trump, and Starmer to a lesser degree, has only galvanized liberal internationalists and humanitarians back into reformism. Under threat and poorly valued, the sector’s defenders have amplified their moral supremacy and purity. The sector is alive with the possibility of reasserting the promises that they seem to have forgotten they have already broken. Already reluctant to reckon with its own structural harm, power, and politics, reformists have reacted to Trump’s decision by positioning themselves and their organizations as underdogs to a giant foe, willing to “sacrifice” themselves in service of the liberal internationalist system. But this positioning ignores the capital accrued within the Western officers of the international humanitarian sector as well as undermining the work of Global South activists and critical practitioners who have long spoken out against the paternalistic, racists, and harmful systems of aid.

For a sector that sustains wealth for an elite class of cosmopolitans, there seems to be a refusal to reckon with basic ethical questions: If the foundational logics of Western models of humanitarian operations and international aid are harmful, what better alternatives exist? What if, instead of pretending humanitarianism is not inherently political, we make considered, political choices about the redistribution of capital across our communities rather than securitized “hot spots” in the Global South? Can internationalism be a means to solidarity and mutual exchange between groups rather than top-down delivery of “palliative” aid to “desperate people”?

The solution is not state austerity, but we also know it is not the revitalization of liberal humanitarian institutions in the West. Alternative forms of relief, community building, and methods of redistribution have been forged in the past and often ignored for their lack of scalability, political malleability, or potential for capitalist growth. But by decolonizing our relationship with other states and instead thinking of what we owe one another as citizens of a global society—and thus what kinds of methods we need to solve our own problems—there exist many generative sources of inspiration: mutual aid projects, South-South liberation movements, tenants and labour unions, and indigenous models of development, among countless others.

Even recent history can provide opportunities for inspiration. During the Black Lives Matter movement, some drew parallels between the US policing and carceral system and the international humanitarian sector; from one racist and patriarchal construct that justified its harms through a promise to “protect and serve” to another. Similarly, Olivia Rutazibwa has begun to consider what abolitionism could look like in the context of international aid and development, developing the concept of “ethical retreat” as an alternative to both liberal intervention and white-supremacist cuts.

Rather than reflexively rushing to defend USAID and the FCDO, reformers need to acknowledge the long history of harm caused by international aid and take the opportunity to empower alternatives to the global humanitarian and development systems.