If the world has had enough of helping others, then somebody forgot to tell Spain.

Yes, Spain. The same country that, a little more than a decade ago, desperately accepted billions in bailout money from its European neighbors to keep its economy afloat. That Spain is now doing something almost unthinkable. It’s ramping up aid spending just as the United States notoriously retreats. And in the process, Spain is trying to remind the world why we give back in the first place.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) — the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor by far, whose work in recent years saved upward of a million lives per year — was officially dismantled earlier this month. Its scattered remains were subsumed by the State Department and its empty headquarters given to the FBI. But America isn’t the only one putting itself first these days. The UK, France, Belgium, and Germany all slashed their development budgets this year thanks to a wave of right-wing populism painting foreign aid as an unnecessary expense against the national interest.

The crisis is steep. The pot of money going to global development is set to shrink by 17 percent, or $35 billion, in 2025, on top of a $21 billion drop the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s a $56 billion funding vacuum where global aid for mosquito nets, vaccine research, and food assistance used to be. And the declines are likely to become even steeper in the years ahead, as cuts in the US take full effect.

But while President Donald Trump was gutting USAID, Spain made moves to rebuild its aid agency and committed to more than doubling its aid budget by 2030. Nor is it alone: Ireland, South Korea, and Italy also all made recent pledges to boost their foreign aid budgets.

It’s far from enough to fill the foreign aid gap, however. And while the pain will fall primarily on impoverished recipient countries, foreign aid doesn’t just help the countries that receive it. It helps everyone.

Diseases and conflict don’t recognize legal borders and aid helps keep these deadly problems at bay. Every $100 million spent on preventing tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria helps prevent about 2.2 million new infections total. And global cuts are already expected to exacerbate the spread of diseases; former USAID officials anticipate cuts from the US alone could cause 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year. “Even if you’re in this isolationist mindset, you can’t actually isolate yourself from the rest of the world,” said Rachael Calleja, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development.

The fact that some countries have managed to fight the impulse to isolate — convincing their citizens that problems abroad are interconnected with our problems at home — could help reshape the future of aid for the better. Their decisions point to the possibility of a new future for foreign aid that could be more collaborative and less paternalistic than before.

Aid has long been dominated by a small club of wealthy nations — chief among them the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom — that give the most, and in doing so, set the tone for how to help the rest of the world. Too often these well-intentioned solutions perpetuated the same exploitative power dynamics that made poor countries poor and one-time colonial powers like Spain and Italy rich in the first place. Western aid often comes with strings attached, like forcing Mali to privatize its cotton industry or requiring that funds be spent on consultants and supplies from the donor country — even though such policies have been shown to make aid less effective and much more expensive.

Ready or not, the old club’s grip on global influence is now breaking down.

”Nobody who works in development sat around saying, ‘The system is great. We’re awesome. Let’s just spend more money to do more of the same,’” said Dean Karlan, who was, until recently, the chief economist at USAID. “There is a blank slate. Let’s put in place a better system.”

Why are some countries bucking the trend?

Spain, Ireland, Italy, and South Korea are all increasing aid — but most have a lot of room for growth.

The United Nations set a lofty goal in the 1970s for wealthy countries to give away 0.7 percent of their gross national income (GNI) as development assistance. Half a century later, almost none do.

That includes this year’s overachievers. Ireland spent 0.57 percent of its GNI — $2.47 billion — on development aid last year. Spain spent 0.25 percent or $4.35 billion, and Italy, 0.28 percent or $6.67 billion. South Korea spent 0.21 percent or $3.94 billion.

It’s not a lot, especially compared to the $63.3 billion the US spent in 2024, although that only added up to 0.22 percent of its GNI. But these countries are moving forward at a time when everyone else seems to be moving backward. According to the global development consultancy SEEK Development’s donor tracker, the US is now projected to spend just 0.13 percent of its GNI on overseas aid this year.

There is a growing recognition that someone has to fill the gaps left by the US, but everybody balks at the price tag, Arturo Angulo Urarte, a Madrid-based development expert, said in Spanish. “It’s like, ‘Yes, but gosh, and how much does that mean? Oh, it means money? Well, then no.’”

Spain’s aid increase, however, has been a long time coming. Spanish activists launched a kind of Occupy Wall Street in favor of overseas aid back in the 1990s. A group of global development workers and grassroots activists staged hunger strikes and protest encampments, chaining themselves to government buildings to demand that Spain give at least 0.7 percent of its GNI to aid. At the time, Spain was giving around 0.24 percent of its GNI to aid, but the protests helped propel the country to double its commitment to a high of nearly 0.5 percent in 2008.

Then the 2008 economic turmoil left Spain once again with a wisp of an foreign aid budget. By the time its economy crawled closer to pre-crisis levels in 2015, its development spending had cratered to 0.12 percent of GNI.

But the idea of Spain becoming a bigger player in global development never really left the public consciousness, remaining broadly popular even during the country’s worst financial straits. In 2023 the country passed a law promising to rebuild its aid agency and bump up spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030 — effectively tripling its current rate.

Spain has since increased its aid budget to about 0.25 percent of its GNI, or $4.4 billion last year — roughly $490 million more than it spent the year prior at 0.24 percent of its GNI — and says it will continue to give more in the year ahead. That’s more money for climate resilience projects in Morocco and Algeria, LGBTQ rights in Paraguay, and HPV vaccine campaigns across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The dismantling of USAID has destroyed longstanding and hard-won infrastructure for implementing aid programs, especially in critical areas like HIV prevention. There’s little that anyone can do to bring that infrastructure back, but countries like Spain, Ireland, or South Korea have been able to uplift and increase funding to the initiatives most affected by the cuts, like Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Ireland also aims to increase its aid spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030. It inched closer to that goal this year by boosting its development budget by about $40 million to $925 million. “We wouldn’t expect Ireland to be able to fill the USAID gap in any shape or form,” Jane-Ann McKenna, who heads Dóchas, an umbrella group for Irish development organizations, said. “But that’s where our positioning and our voice becomes more important.”

That said, foreign aid has always been about more than just charity. It’s a geopolitical tool that countries have used for decades to win friends and influence people.

It’s no coincidence that, according to a 2006 study, US aid increased about 59 percent to nations when they temporarily joined the UN Security Council. The birth of PEPFAR — the HIV/AIDS program that saves around a million lives per year, which makes it perhaps America’s most effective ever form of foreign aid — helped boost public opinion of the US across sub-Saharan Africa. Much of Italy’s recent aid budget has gone to its $6 billion Mattei Plan in Africa, which aims to collaboratively influence the continent’s energy development and migration flows, but which some critics contend recreates old colonial patterns by relying too heavily on European priorities — not local expertise — to decide where the money ought to go and how its vision should take shape.

But if you take countries like Ireland and Spain at their word, their approach to foreign aid is not just about soft power anymore. These countries also have something in common that can differentiate them from other larger donors: recent histories of underdevelopment. Some of the newcomers might have been aid recipients rather than donors just a few decades ago.

South Korea received billions in foreign aid in the decades after the Korean War, which helped it grow to the point where it became the first former recipient to join OECD’s forum for major aid providers in 2010. Spain’s wealthier neighbors offered the country major financial support when it began integrating with Europe in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship.

That dynamic can make it easier, Calleja says, to empathize with others who need aid today. (Though let’s not forget that Spain once colonized much of Latin America and the Caribbean — places that now receive the bulk of Spanish foreign aid — and therefore laid the groundwork for many patterns of exploitation and inequality there that its aid now seeks to resolve.)

Ireland was never a colonizer, but was once colonized itself by Britain. That legacy, McKenna said, means that many Irish people are passionate about human rights abroad and highly supportive of overseas aid.

“We have the history of the famine and we’ve had conflict on the island and we’ve had to engage in a whole peace process ourselves,” McKenna explained. “That’s there in the background of all of our psyches.”

As these smaller players like to say, it’s about “solidarity.” Spain’s own development agency’s four-year plan mentions the word solidarity 84 times. It explicitly calls for a move away from the old model, where wealthy nations dictated terms to grateful recipients, and toward a more equitable and collaborative model built on shared priorities and mutual respect.

Of course, not everybody is buying it.

Henry Morales is an economist and director of the Movimiento Tzuk Kim-Pop, a Guatemalan human rights group. He let out a little laugh when I asked him about Spain’s solidarity plan. After all, he’s seen foreign funders renege on their promises before.

He’s seen European powers pledge numerous times to do more to promote climate resilience in low-income countries before watching them give up when the politics become too difficult. Spain’s plan for development stresses that it aims to approach its funding priorities — like combating climate change and promoting gender equality — from a place of consistency and genuine partnership, the kind that can’t be abandoned on a whim when a new government takes power.

Whether Spain’s plan represents a form of global reparations or just colonialism with better PR remains to be seen, he said, but regardless, the old top-down model is clearly cracking.

Countries who receive aid now want “a voice and a vote, so that the decisions are no longer made by a private club of the big donors, the big traditional financiers,” he said. “But by debates and global agreements that are much more transparent and much more democratic.”

Fifty countries in the Global South now have their own agencies to exchange ideas, technical advice, and reciprocal funds for solving poverty, fighting climate change, and improving education.

Ensuring that recipients have a big say in how aid gets around is not only good for building a better, more democratic system — it can also make it much more efficient. According to Vox’s previous reporting in 2022, aid programs tend to work better when people from the countries they’re targeting play a big role in directing how and where the money’s used. Morales thinks that kind of collaboration is the real future of aid, which he prefers to see not as charity but as “simply the fair distribution of wealth.”

He’s not the only one who thinks so. The director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called foreign aid “a thing of the past” at a meeting with African leaders in February.

For his part, Karlan, the former USAID economist, doesn’t think USAID will ever come back as the acronym or institution it once was, and although that’s mostly a very bad thing, he sees a flicker of opportunity.

Still, he isn’t sure if he believes that a real change to the aid paradigm is afoot. “Solidarity strikes me as a little bit of a softer way of saying soft power,” he mused, even if countries like Spain or Ireland aren’t necessarily “looking for flyover rights for the military.”

What he is sure of is that the US is moving in a very different direction. If Spain’s soft power is softening, then the United States’ is calcifying into something more toxic, more transactional, and — as Karlan likes to add — less efficient than before.

“Imagine a marriage in which you never did something considerate for your partner just because you cared about them,” he said. Instead, everything is a negotiation. “That isn’t a healthy relationship. What we’re risking is losing these long-term relationships, those long-term friendships.”

By the time the US is ready to reopen the door on them, it may find a world that has already moved on.

Vox reader Brian Diederich asks: Why and how do so many collegiate basketball teams — both men’s and women’s — now have so many international student-athletes?

If you’ve turned on March Madness this year, you’ve witnessed the most international players ever in college basketball’s signature competition.

Across both the men’s and women’s brackets, 264 athletes — 15 percent of all NCAA players in the tournaments — hailed from outside of the US. They are a cross-section of humanity, representing 45 countries in the women’s tournament and 52 in the men’s.

The number of overall international college basketball players more than doubled from 2010 to 2025. It is a trend across sports: 25,000 of all US college athletes were born in another country.

Forty years ago, US schools put little thought into recruiting players from Africa or Europe. A handful of players started to come to the US to play college ball in the 1980s, as the NBA was becoming more popular and thinking more globally. But international players were almost exclusively identified by word of mouth, recommendations from a friend of a friend. Sometimes, the US coaches wouldn’t even see any game tape before signing a player to a scholarship; in 1984, Dutch player Rik Smits got a scholarship offer from Marist University based on nothing but his height (7’4”); he says the coach never even saw him play.

But today, the NBA and NCAA have built out an international pipeline for players, while the internet has made it easier than ever to scout from abroad. A lot has changed.

What has driven more international recruitment in college basketball?

NBA legend Hakeem Olajuwon, who came to the US in 1980 to play NCAA basketball, is a pivotal figure in this evolution. Then a relatively unknown Nigerian teenager, he was offered a chance to try out for the University of Houston’s team because a coach had heard from an acquaintance that Olajuwon was a promising prospect. After his star college career and a successful transition to the pros, Olajuwon had set the blueprint.

Olajuwon became one of the NBA’s best players in the ’80s and ’90s, winning an NBA MVP and two championships. His rise was paralleled by Jamaica’s Patrick Ewing, who moved from Kingston to play high school basketball in the US before attending Georgetown and then going on to make the New York Knicks one of the consistently best in the league. Smits played for 12 seasons and made one All-Star team.

Their success, and the next generation of players who followed, pushed the NBA — and, with it, college basketball — on the path to globalization. By the turn of the century, even elite prep schools were starting to recruit international players.

A recruiting arms race got underway in the ’80s and ’90s, and then an NCAA rule change in 2010 made it easier for more international players to come to the US.

Basketball is typically one of the most popular and most profitable athletic programs that a university will have, second only to football if the school has a football team — and for some schools, like Duke, basketball still maintains primacy. The pressure to compete is intense. If you’re at the University of North Carolina and you see your top rival, the Blue Devils, recruiting abroad, you are going to start doing the same thing. International recruitment went from happenstance in the ’80s to an indispensable recruitment tactic that teams across the NCAA used to keep up.

In 2001, the NBA and NCAA doubled down on the strategy and set up a formal pipeline, the Basketball Without Borders program, to get promising international players in front of American scouts. The NBA has more recently set up academic training camps that teach basketball skills while also offering more general education classes to prepare participants for a US college experience.

The program proved to be a success. One of Basketball Without Borders’s graduates is Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian player who came to basketball as a teenager, played as a Kansas Jayhawk, and won an MVP at the professional level in 2023.

Technology helped revolutionize basketball recruiting. In 1984, Rik Smits’s Marist coach had to hope that somebody had recorded Smits playing on some grainy VHS tape and then physically get his hands on that tape. Without that, he had nothing to go on but height. Today, player highlights from all over the world are uploaded to YouTube — where American coaches can view them easily at any time, and players can even build hype on social media to get attention from recruiters.

Those recruiters are offering players not only the chance to come to the US for an education — they’re also offering a financial opportunity.

How has money in college sports affected international recruitment?

Money is changing everything about what it means to be a college athlete — including for international players.

An opportunity to make money for themselves — and not just for the schools — is steering even more foreign basketballers to US colleges. NCAA athletes can now earn money through endorsements and other activities thanks to the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rule that took effect in 2021.

In the ’90s and early 2000s, as international recruitment was spreading, playing college basketball wasn’t necessarily the smart move for the most elite foreign players. They could instead play in the expanding overseas professional leagues, earn a salary, and then enter the NBA draft without ever attending a US school. And that path was well trod: Luka Dončić, the subject of a media frenzy after his trade to the Los Angeles Lakers, played in the EuroLeague and leapt to the NBA in 2018 — three years before the NIL provision took effect.

But today, you can make real money playing college basketball in America and earn a salary that rivals those of foreign professional leagues. International players do have to jump through some extra hoops, as students on an immigration visa earning money raises legal questions, but athletes and their sponsoring institutions are quickly becoming savvy about how to navigate that issue.

The potential to make money while in school might even convince some players to stay in the college game longer instead of jumping to the NBA as quickly as possible.

Michigan center Vladislav Goldin, who was born in Russia, helped lead the Wolverines to their Sweet 16 berth last weekend, but he almost wasn’t there at all: He’d declared for the NBA draft in spring 2024, but changed his mind and transferred from Florida International University to the U of M, a more prestigious program with more earning opportunities.

A decade or two ago, that would have been unthinkable. But the business of college basketball has changed — and so have the players.

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