Trump's pick for UN ambassador says he'll use aid as 'leverage' for African votes
US President Donald Trump's former national security advisor, Mike Waltz, a hardline neoconservative, told lawmakers on Tuesday that African countries in particular will have to fall in line with Washington at the United Nations if they want to continue receiving US aid.
He made the statement at his confirmation hearing for his expected new role as US ambassador to the United Nations, which has not had a confirmed diplomat since Trump took office in January.
The US president nominated Waltz in May, when he became the first senior White House figure to leave his role in the administration after the Signal group chat fiasco.
His statement on broadly conditioning US foreign aid on voting loyalty at the UN was first reported by the news outlet, PassBlue.
"So as to recalibrate our aid to our interests, should voting patterns at the UN be used as something of a metric to take into account and to determine and qualify US foreign aid recipients?" Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah asked Waltz.
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"Senator, I think it's a fantastic point. It absolutely should be," Waltz said.
"I'll commit to work with this [Senate Foreign Relations] Committee, with the Secretary [of State Marco Rubio] to put mechanisms in place that it is. But to your point, if you look at the aid by the figures, I've seen over $100bn have gone through UN entities into Africa, and we're looking at between a 29 and 32 percent voting coincidence rate," he explained.
"So we actually have the highest continent with the highest recipient of American workers' money siding with us by far the least. It is completely inverted," Waltz said.
"I commit to you to work very hard to use the leverage that only this president could use to reverse that trend."
The US voting record on the five-member UN Security Council has largely served to protect Israel, and that vote has become increasingly isolated as Israel's war on Gaza approaches the two-year mark.
More than 58,000 Palestinians have been killed, half of them women and children, since the war broke out in October 2023.
Such a move, as Waltz suggested, would also fly in the face of a century-long tradition of US soft power, where the mere optics of things like food assistance with a label that says "From the American people" were enough to maintain a charitable image of the world's foremost superpower.
It did, of course, come with an overall political agenda of currying favour with the local populace.
But with Trump and former US government special employee Elon Musk's dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Waltz's statement seemed the inevitable next step in an aggressive America First approach that is blunt about preferring economically beneficial trade partnerships over aid agreements.
Since the administration announced an immediate suspension of all foreign assistance, blocking ongoing aid programmes and freezing new funding, humanitarian workers around the world have been trying to work out exactly what this means for the millions of vulnerable people they are trying to keep alive.
Middle East Eye reported on the impact of the initial USAID cuts on 1.8 million Sudanese experiencing famine. Food boxes sent by the US were rotting in warehouses because the agency no longer provided the necessary funds for actual distribution.
Since 1946, the Middle East and North Africa have been the biggest recipients of US financial assistance. Between April 2023 and April 2024, Congress appropriated around $9bn for the region.
While most of the aid went towards military assistance, a fraction was funnelled into democracy programmes via USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-autonomous agency funded largely by the US Congress.
MEE reported in May that the Trump cuts to USAID have already impacted human rights defenders in the region who were reliant on the small grants to relocate and resettle abroad.
Although modest in scope, the money provided a lifeline for exiled human rights activists.
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