May 02, 2018
From the article:
The Trump administration is under fire for contributing nothing to a Syria donors conference, helping lead to a $5bn shortfall in a UN fund for Syrian civilians in need inside the country and in refugee camps around the region.
The unprecedented US failure to contribute anything to the Syria humanitarian fund came soon after Donald Trump called for a rapid withdrawal of US troops from the country, and for wealthy countries in the region to bear more of the financial burden of the Syrian crisis.
...However, aid experts and critics said that contributing nothing at the Syria donors conference in Brussels this week was not the right way to encourage other nations to step up their own contributions.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who was head of US foreign disaster assistance in the Obama administration, said that typically the US made aid announcements rather than pledges at donor conferences – so the US declares money already donated or about to be donated, rather than predicting what will be given.
“Fundamentally, that means the US is choosing not to announce what it has already given,” Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “What this says to me is that they wanted to send a message of US retrenchment and for others to step up. But if you want to send that message it’s much more effective to actually say it.