The totalitarian playbook that Donald Trump seems to follow lacks a chapter. Power-crazed the president may be, but he fails to grasp soft power. Wise military and diplomatic minds understand it well. George C. Marshall, the nation’s top general through World War II and later secretary of state and secretary of defense, lent his name and his energies to the greatest exercise of soft power in American history, the Marshall Plan. Such was his stature that, with help from President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, he persuaded an isolationist post-World War II Congress to approve the costly program and so secured western Europe from Soviet political control, while defining the preeminent battle line of the Cold War.

More than six decades later, Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as secretary of defense in the first Trump administration (when experience and professionalism were sometimes entertained in the Oval Office), championed soft power as Marshall had done. In testimony to Congress in 2013, he said, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I have to buy more ammunition.” He was endorsing the soft power of diplomacy — to which he might have added the soft power of non-military assistance and moral and cultural influence. Soft power is the ability to “obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion and payment” — through means, that is, other than bullets, bullying, and bribery.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was a lineal descendant of the Marshall Plan and an embodiment of soft power. Its abandonment and ultimate destruction by the second Trump administration marks a watershed moment in the projection of American influence globally. Next to its headstone in the graveyard of institutions, one might also place a marker for the era that publisher Henry Luce once labelled “the American Century.” Like a married couple, the agency and its century deserve to be buried together, their lives having been intertwined and their dates nearly the same.

The Murder Was Not Premeditated

A possibly ketamine-pumped Elon Musk, brandishing a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, proved an apt image for the Trumpist demolition of government institutions this year. The hideously misnamed Department of Government Efficiency, then led by Musk, performed no meaningful analysis of which government functions were essential to preserve, let alone which civil servants had the expertise and experience to make such functions viable. Employees were simply fired en masse in the bureaucratic equivalent of a meat-cleaver amputation (no scalpels involved).

Initially, there was no plan to demolish USAID, just shrink it. However, what began as layoffs and the appointment of unqualified individuals to positions of authority led to resistance from employees loyal to their agency and their mission. That, in turn, prompted further cycles of layoffs and demolition. When the red mist of fighting finally lifted, there wasn’t much left of the agency. Its remains were swept into the State Department, accompanied by solemn assurances that vital humanitarian programs had not been and would not be compromised, assurances no more real than an invitation to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Yes, USAID had problems. What $30-billion-a-year organization doesn’t? Some of its long-term advocates decried its faults as loudly as any MAGA cheerleader. In the words of one veteran partner of the agency, “The bureaucracy… was legion, hugely frustrating. In order to donate/spend a dollar you had to spend three, just to make sure the treasury wasn’t getting ripped off.”

It’s vital to understand that the agency’s sclerotic procedures and glacially slow decision-making resulted not from the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse alleged by Trumpists but in order to avoid those evils. As a top executive of one of USAID’s largest contractors told me, “Outside auditors were never not in our offices.” Every expenditure was examined, checked against the highly detailed contract and program of work, and verified.

In cases where speed was necessary or where........

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