The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

[Read: Han Kang’s transgressive art]

Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”

American veterans help Vietnamese veterans locate mass burial sites 50 years after the war.