US Aid at the End of the “American Century?”

In 2025, we witness the United States' uncompromising and deadly retreat from its global commitments to relief and aid, a commitment rooted in World War I. US engagement in the world in the post-World War I period (reaffirmed after World War II) emerged as a muscular morality that, since January 2025, has crumbled under the weight of the Trump administration’s trade wars and racist isolationism. Tammy Proctor’s Saving Europe: First World War Relief and American Identity could not have come at a more critical and timely moment, reminding readers why the United States has been involved globally in the first place. Focusing on the formative decade (1914–1924), Proctor traces how the United States projected its moral and political authority through humanitarian aid even as wartime nativism and xenophobia hardened its borders. Saving Europe illuminates this founding paradox: a nation that exercised new global powers through benevolence abroad while repressing and excluding at home. A century later, as the doors of USAID are closed, its staff gone, the United States having withdrawn from the World Health Organization and global climate agreements, free speech is under attack, and violent crackdowns on immigrants dominate the news cycle, Proctor provocatively asked in a post-publication blog: Is the “American Century” at an end?1 She wonders if it is not passe to speak of US humanitarian ambitions abroad. Only the opposite can be true.