"Armageddon" is the word veteran human rights campaigner Phil Robertson uses to describe the sudden shutdown of most of the US' aid programmes around the world.
In January, US President Donald Trump ordered a 90-day pause on foreign aid, and weeks later, decided to terminate 90% of contracts providing such aid worldwide, including in Thailand.
"Perhaps most prominent is the work that was being done on the Thai-Myanmar border, particularly with the refugee camps," said Mr Robertson on the podcast Deeper Dive. "As soon as the cuts were made, groups like the International Rescue Committee had to shut down their hospitals that were servicing refugees. There were a number of cases of elderly refugees who all of a sudden couldn't get the medical care they required and died."
"And on the other side of Myanmar, in Bangladesh, in the refugee camps that are housing the Rohingya who fled ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity inflicted on them in 2017 by the junta -- those aid programmes largely stopped that were provided by the US.
"The aid freeze directly affected the US response to the March 28 earthquake in Myanmar, with several USAID staffers receiving termination notices just after arriving. But the foreign aid programmes axed go far beyond disaster relief and medical treatment.
"There was a big Myanmar education consortium that was providing education to children all over eastern Myanmar, and that has all been shut down," said Mr Robertson, the former deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch and current Director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates Consultancy.
"And we've also seen the democracy and governance programmes that were, for instance, being run by Freedom House, that was providing safe houses for people fleeing the military regime in Myanmar… those have all been shut down. So it's been a complete and total disaster."
Thailand's responsibility?
It's fair to ask why an upper-middle-income country like Thailand doesn't fund these programmes itself. "I would love to see Thailand step up and fund some of those programmes," Mr Robertson told the podcast. "But there's been a reluctance to do so by Thailand. Their claims are that, you know, we have a lot of poor people still that we have to support. And the refugees are a burden."
"The US assistance has helped persuade Thailand to not try to push them back. People should remember what happened back on the Cambodia border, you know, 40 years ago where there were pushbacks. And ultimately, you know, it was the international community stepping in and saying to Thailand, 'You can't send those people back. You need to treat them humanely. And we're going to provide resources and support to allow them to stay'.
"That was persuasive in getting the Thai government to change course. So, I mean, I think we have to be realists here: there's an effort, I think, by some other donors to try to step up, but they're just not going to be able to meet the scale and breadth of what the US was funding."
Aside from the suffering directly caused by the cuts, Mr Robertson argues it's in America's own interest to stay engaged with the world and solve problems before they land on US shores -- for instance, strains of disease that are resistant to antibiotics.
"There's a larger interest in the US, for instance, supporting malarial initiatives along that border, because the Thai-Myanmar border is the source of the various resistant strains of both tuberculosis and malaria, where, you know, if those get into the United States, there's going to be a major problem.
"So when you talk about providing assistance to try to deal with international health challenges like malaria, there's an incentive, I think, from the US to recognise that those things can come to the US if they're not dealt with somewhere else.
"'Make America go at it alone' is not 'make America great again'. It's 'make America stand by itself'. And I think that America standing by itself is going to be weaker. It's going to be less connected, and it's going to be more easily surprised and shocked by these sorts of things that arrive at its borders.
"They basically have cut off the links and cut off the connections with other communities and governments and organisations around the world that previously would have alerted the US and said, you know, time to step up and try to figure out the situation right here where it's easier to fix, it's cheaper to fix, and it's going to result in less human suffering if we fix it right now, rather than let it get worse."
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