The Trump administration is pressing governments around the world to sign a "trade over aid" declaration ahead of a planned introduction of the initiative at the United Nations at the end of this month.

In a cable sent Wednesday to all US embassies and consular posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered American diplomats to issue formal démarches, official calls to action, to foreign governments by no later than Monday, soliciting their endorsement before the initiative is tabled in New York.

The Washington Post, which reviewed a copy of the cable, reported on its contents.

The declaration frames the push as an opportunity to use the UN system to "promote America First values and create business opportunities for US companies," according to Rubio's directive.

It asserts as a foundational doctrine that "it was private business that developed all the world's successful economies, not government aid," a claim that echoes the ideological core of the Trump administration's wholesale dismantlement of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year.

A template already in motion

The declaration does not emerge in a vacuum.

In December 2025, Washington signed its first bilateral agreement under the new paradigm with Kenya, a five-year, $2.5 billion health deal covering HIV/AIDS, malaria, and polio, replacing the patchwork of USAID-run programmes that had operated for decades.

Under the terms, the US committed $1.6 billion while Nairobi was required to co-finance the remaining $850 million and assume progressively greater financial responsibility over time, a model the administration has signalled it intends to replicate across the Global South.

The Kenya deal revealed the new aid architecture's defining features, namely bilateral rather than multilateral, politically conditioned, cost-sharing, and tied to strategic compliance. Rubio praised Kenya for deploying forces to Haiti, telling reporters that if five or ten countries were willing to do what Kenya had done, "it would be an extraordinary achievement."

Alternatively, the Trump administration excluded South Africa, which has the world's largest HIV-positive population, from the new framework, citing political grievances.

A Senior State Department official, who spoke anonymously to WP, said the new framework solidifies the US's "stance on dropping aid completely and letting companies enrich themselves on newer markets."

Dismantling the architecture

The "trade over aid" push is the declaratory capstone of a structural demolition that has been underway since January 2025. The Trump administration gutted USAID, historically the world's largest aid agency, and pulled back funding from multilateral UN programmes, arguing the system had bred "dependency, inefficiency, and corruption."

Major Western donors, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have followed Washington's lead, contributing to what analysts describe as a "great aid recession." Studies have estimated the cumulative toll of this rollback at up to 22 million preventable deaths by 2030, many of them children.

The OECD estimates its members will provide between 9 and 17 percent less in official development assistance in 2025 alone, a reduction of up to $35 billion compared to the year prior.

The scholarship Rubio ignores

The declaration's central ideological claim, that private business, not public institutions, built the world's successful economies, runs directly counter to a substantial body of established economic scholarship.

UCL economist Mariana Mazzucato, in her landmark work The Entrepreneurial State, has demonstrated comprehensively that the United States' own economic rise was built on state-funded risk-taking, not market spontaneity. The private sector, as Mazzucato shows, characteristically enters only after the state has already absorbed the pioneering, high-risk phase.

"If the rest of the world wants to emulate the US model," Mazzucato writes, "they should do as the United States actually did, not as they say they did."

Critics have also noted that the "trade over aid" logic is internally contradictory. Developing nations cannot compete as trading partners without first building the industrial, agricultural, and institutional capacities that sustained public investment makes possible. The approach, analysts at Johns Hopkins' SAIS argue, ignores the continuing structural needs of countries that lack the foundations to participate in trade on equitable terms.

Resistance at the UN

Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former senior humanitarian adviser to the US mission to the UN, told the WP that the approach would likely be poorly received, noting that it "comes across as undermining the UN," a perception compounded by Washington's simultaneous push for the so-called "Board of Peace," which several governments have interpreted as an attempt to bypass the multilateral body altogether.

The signing event is expected at the US mission to the UN before the end of April.

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