Aid Was America's First Line of Defense in East Africa

From January to August 2013, I served with a U.S. Navy public affairs team in East Africa at Camp Lemonnier. During those months in the Horn of Africa, I witnessed both extraordinary hardship and extraordinary resilience. I saw communities struggling through drought, poverty, displacement, and the lingering scars of conflict. I also saw something else: the stabilizing power of American humanitarian leadership.
For many Americans, foreign aid is often discussed as a budget item or political debate. In East Africa, it was something far more tangible. Food assistance, medical care, refugee support, HIV treatment, and clean water programs were often the thin line separating stability from desperation.

That is why recent reports detailing the collapse of USAID operations across Africa are so alarming.

Anyone familiar with East Africa understands why this matters.

When food systems collapse, desperation spreads quickly. When governments cannot provide basic stability, extremist organizations exploit the vacuum. Terrorist groups such as Al-Shabaab have long thrived in regions weakened by famine, displacement, and institutional fragility. Humanitarian assistance was never separate from security policy; it was part of it.

America understood this for years.

The Horn of Africa sits along some of the world’s most strategically important shipping lanes, connecting the Red Sea to global trade routes. Instability in the region does not stay contained. It fuels migration crises, strengthens extremist recruitment networks, undermines allied governments, and creates openings for geopolitical rivals such as China and Russia to expand their influence where American leadership once carried weight.

I still remember the faces of the people I encountered in 2013: mothers searching for food for their children, families rebuilding after violence, and entire communities surviving on fragile supply chains most of the world never notices until they disappear. For millions across East Africa today, humanitarian aid is not an abstract political argument. It is survival.

America once recognized that compassion and national security were not opposing ideas. We understood that helping stabilize vulnerable regions before chaos takes hold was both morally right and strategically smart.
Walking away from that responsibility will carry consequences.

The collapse of humanitarian support across East Africa will not simply produce suffering abroad. It risks creating exactly the kind of instability, extremism, and geopolitical disorder the United States has spent decades trying to contain. Aid was never America’s weakness in Africa. It was one of our strongest tools of leadership.

East Africa changed me forever. Watching America retreat from the people and partnerships that once defined our presence there feels deeply personal — and deeply dangerous.

Jerome W. Mapp is a veteran communicator with experience in newspaper reporting, U.S. Navy public affairs, and federal media relations.