Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

The gnawing suspicion is a common one. In one 2024 study, researchers analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits. The study’s co-authors called it the “conflict of interest theory”: that dating-app companies (which want customers) have interests fundamentally at odds with those of many dating-app users (specifically, those who want to find someone and delete the app ASAP). The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.

Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love. Last year, a class-action lawsuit argued that Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and several other apps, locks its users into “a perpetual pay-to-play loop” at the expense of “customers’ relationship goals.” (“We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps,” Match Group responded in a statement. “Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.” In December, a judge sent the case to arbitration.)

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Whether for-profit app companies are in fact trying to hinder people’s romantic game is questionable. Match Group keeps the details of its algorithms and strategies under lock, but a spokesperson told me that “the best scenario for us is for someone to find their partner using one of our products, and then tell other people about it … Our algorithms are designed to prioritize active users and mutual compatibility—not to keep people stuck in an endless loop.” And it’s not like companies need to worry about there being a finite supply of single people. You wouldn’t expect a therapist to undermine her clients’ treatment for the sake of income; plenty of people have problems that could use some talking through. Brutally, that 2024 paper determined that app skeptics might just be avoiding responsibility for their own “dating failures,” blaming a lack of matches on evil capitalist overlords instead of “their own actions or attractiveness.” (I flinched.)

Regardless, the fact that so many believe the theory suggests that modern dating isn’t working for a lot of people—and that for-profit matchmaking companies have, to a significant degree, lost the trust of their base. American romance isn’t exactly thriving, as I’ve reported: Some singles are quitting the apps, and others are quitting dating altogether. But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date (rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute). What I wanted to find, really, was a site that doesn’t try to make money: a nonprofit dating app.

A handful of them actually exist. Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.

The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Last fall, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government launched a dating platform, Tokyo Enmusubi, which uses AI to suggest matches—and which, according to the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, cost $1.28 million to develop. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in 2023; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates. Terengganu, a region in West Malaysia, is developing an app too, which the local government said on Facebook is designed to “strengthen the family institution in the state.” If it sounds a little creepy for political leaders to be reaching into people’s intimate lives in this way—well, you might not be wrong.

Researchers did tell me that state dating apps have some potential benefits. Users might hope, for instance, that such platforms share their goal—that governments looking to raise marriage and birth rates, as well as increase trust in the state, want people to swiftly find love. And governments may have less incentive to share users’ data with third parties, or to inundate them with sponsored profiles and advertisements, than some for-profit apps do.

A state platform could also be effective at providing certain kinds of security. Luke Brunning, a University of Leeds philosopher who co-runs the Ethical Dating Online research network, told me that some for-profit companies might fear that requiring too much information at sign-up could turn away potential customers. Many governments, by contrast, are accustomed to collecting data on their residents and might not hesitate to demand information from dating-app users—which, in some cases, could help ensure that people aren’t bots, catfishers, or scammers, and could help keep track of users in case of bad behavior. (Tokyo Enmusubi, for one, mandates that users provide a photo ID, proof of income, and even official proof of singlehood; it also asks them to sign a pledge promising that they’re looking to wed.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

The major commercial dating apps do grant users the ability to report a profile in the case of perceived abuse. They use AI and human moderators to detect suspicious activity, and have begun allowing, though not demanding, people to submit a selfie video in exchange for a mark showing that their profile is “verified.” Tinder users in the U.S. can run their own background checks on potential dates (for a fee, after two freebies), though the process requires people to enter information they might not have—including, for a criminal background check, an individual’s last name, city, and birth year. Even with these safeguards in place and many millions spent on trust-and-safety teams, users of commercial dating apps continue to encounter fake profiles—and to report sometimes-harrowing experiences.

Of course, even if governments collect more information on individuals, one can’t assume that they will be earnestly invested in protecting their apps’ users. The Communist Party of China has been accused in recent years of censoring women’s accounts of gender-based abuse and of using sexual violence for political ends. When Iran launched the dating app Hamdam in 2021, Firuzeh Mahmoudi, the executive director of the NGO United for Iran, told Vice World News that the app “treats women like property,” matching them with bachelors and then keeping those couples “under the watchful and constant eye” of marriage counselors employed by the state. The administration decreed all other dating apps illegal.

That’s the major underlying issue: Inevitably, a government platform will be shaped by political motivations. Imagine if South Africa’s government had created a dating app during the apartheid era, Jennifer Lundquist, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist, told me; it certainly wouldn’t have facilitated interracial relationships. And even if you trust your current leaders, power changes hands over time. A future state, Lundquist pointed out, might become more autocratic or fascist—and would have, thanks to its dating app, a trove of data on people’s romantic and sexual preferences.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

Beyond all that, apps designed to boost birth rates serve only certain users. Lots of people aren’t looking to marry or have kids, or to find one person and then delete an app forever, Brunning told me. Anyone who’s queer or polyamorous or kinky, he said, or who wants to have casual sex, might be better served by commercial options. He’s not expecting to see a state app that “facilitates gay BDSM hookups” anytime soon.

Even if the state were committed to guiding people to whatever kind of relationship they want, it might not be the right candidate for the job; no evidence suggests that governments know any better than commercial apps what makes lovers compatible. People also might hesitate to use a government dating app because, let’s face it: It’s not cool. Singapore’s Social Development Network, a governmental body that for many years held meetup events—singles’ cruises, tango-dancing sessions, speed dating—was initially called the Social Development Unit, and people joked that SDU stood for “Single, Desperate, and Ugly.” In 2023, the SDN, citing declining membership, announced that it would end its dating events and instead focus on funding other organizations’ initiatives. “Today,” a ministry spokesperson told Singapore’s The Straits Times, “there are better alternatives offered by the private sector, including online dating apps.”

God help us, I thought to myself at this point in the search: Are dating apps all run by institutions that people famously do not trust? Then I heard of another type of nonprofit player, one that many Americans also dislike but perhaps not quite as much: scientists.

For the past couple of years, Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon, University of Michigan researchers, have been working on Revel, a dating app being beta tested by 200 students. The problem with online dating, if you ask Bruch and Gordon, is that the major apps aren’t in the business of relationship science. Some of them do have behavioral scientists and other researchers on staff, but they’re likely to be somewhat limited in their ability to figure out what makes people click. For-profit companies aren’t always well suited to carrying out long-term scientific investigations, which can stretch on for many years and might not yield immediately useful (read: profitable) results. In a commercial setting, Bruch told me, a CEO can decide on a dime to prioritize some new direction, and a whole research project can be abandoned.

Besides, even researchers who study romantic chemistry for a living don’t yet understand it. In one 2017 study, psychologists tried to predict people’s compatibility using a mathematical model based on more than 100 measures of traits and preferences that their subjects self-reported; every combination of those characteristics failed to correlate with how much the participants hit it off when they met.

That’s why Bruch and Gordon started wondering if, however strange it might sound, they could be the right people to make a dating app. Bruch is a sociologist who has studied how people look for mates, as well as the idea of dating “leagues” (as in, she’s out of my league); Gordon is a psychologist interested in what makes some relationships work and others fail. Their app doubles as a scientific study—“For science,” Revel’s website reads, “not profit”—and they collect data in the name of research: seeing who matches, asking why a user did or didn’t “like” someone, following up continuously with pairs who’ve met in person. How many profiles, they want to know, can a person see in a day before feeling overwhelmed by “choice overload”? Does seeing more information about other people lead to better connections? How can the app help support different relationship goals, whether a long-term partnership, a short fling, or a meaningful platonic connection?

[Read: The people who quit dating]

Scientific knowledge might truly be a better incentive than financial gain—not only because people like Bruch and Gordon are invested in unlocking love’s mysteries, and because studies legally have to adhere to certain ethical guidelines, but also because the research community has norms around transparency. Unlike private companies, which generally fear helping out their competitors, or governments, which aren’t always open with their citizens, scientists tend to be eager to publish any findings of note. Revel’s website lists exactly what user data are collected and on what basis pairs are made. Bruch and Gordon plan to open the app to the whole University of Michigan community this fall; eventually, they intend to share their discoveries with other researchers and also with the app’s users, in hopes that doing so might illuminate a dating experience they know can be confusing and emotionally fraught.

Making scientific advances and, in turn, ameliorating the pain of courtship: That’s a lofty aim, and also one that could take a lot of time to work toward. Not all single people want to play the long game in their own life; they might be less concerned with society’s collective grasp of human chemistry, or even with understanding their own romantic needs and tendencies, than with finding a partner—or a kiss, or a wedding date, or a threesome—right now.

Perhaps more significantly, existing apps have already conditioned people to a new way of dating, and a not-for-profit platform is unlikely to reverse that. Scrolling through people on an app makes looking for love or sex feel like choosing products in a grocery store, Anil Isisag, a consumer researcher who studies dating-app user experiences, told me. An abundance of options, he said, “gives people the idea that there could be something better around the corner,” which is a solid recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction. At this point, many people may be so deeply Tinder-brained that using a different product—or even meeting potential dates in person—wouldn’t change the way they think about courtship.

Still, who’s running those platforms, and how transparent they are, matters a great deal. The people frustrated with dating apps aren’t all bellyachers who expect only romantic success; they just know that a consequential, incredibly personal part of their life is at the whim of a mysterious strategy, and they feel helpless. Perhaps, to empower them, app companies don’t need a flawless product. They just need to be more open, about both the workings of their algorithm and the fact that no algorithm can predict the coveted spark—not now, and maybe not ever.

President Cyril Ramaphosa tells grouping international law is key to solving world crises.

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.

Lawyers defending Yoon, who stands charged with trying to incite a rebellion, called for his release from custody.