A scholarship program training the next generation of democratic leaders was named “Diversity and Inclusion” specifically to hide it from a military dictatorship. On day nine of the Trump presidency, that name got it canceled.
Matt Pietz spent a decade in Myanmar for USAID working on democracy and education projects. His last project gave 450 of the country’s most promising young people four-year scholarships — because a dictatorship that had spent decades keeping its population uneducated knew exactly what an educated citizen could do. One semester in, the White House called and said cancel it. No questions, no review, no interest in where the money actually went.
In this episode, Matt breaks down what the work really was, who it served, and why Myanmar’s instability is America’s problem too — where the absence of rule of law has produced the world’s top supplier of heroin and meth, a haven for online scam centers, and a power vacuum that China is filling fast.
This is what democracy promotion looks like from the inside. And what it looks like when it’s dismantled from the outside.
