The End of U.S. Soft Power
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the interim head of USAID, for however much longer the agency lasts. For 60 years, the massive bureaucracy was a vehicle for American soft power abroad. Trump, Elon Musk, and all their creatures don’t like it. It might soon be gone.
Nicole Widdersheim is the deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch with a long history of humanitarian work. She’s here on Angry Planet today to walk us through this new era of the American Empire.
- A brief history of USAID
- The size and cost of USAID
- Critiquing a bureaucracy
- People like you when you give them stuff
- Defense, diplomacy, development
- The real world consequences of the ending of foreign aid
- A mallet, not a scalpel
- Supporters need to get cynical
- USAID did a bad job of defending itself
- Americans don’t care about the human cost
- The Glorious Republic of Jasonvania wants food aid
- Congressionally approved rice to North Korea
- It turns out the cruelty is, in fact, the point
- At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep
- No one read those reports on Afghanistan
- How China’s “Belt and Road” actually works
- The end of USAID will screw over American farmers
- Trumpism is a lack of consistency
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:15.6 | Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. |
| 0:23.4 | I'm Jason Fields here with Matthew Galt. |
| 0:27.0 | And Nicole Wittersham is also joining us. |
| 0:29.9 | Did I pronounce that properly? |
| 0:31.4 | That's right, Wittershund. |
| 0:34.4 | And can we start off? |
| 0:36.3 | Would you be able to sort of describe, say who you are, describe what you do, and we'll take it from there? |
| 0:43.4 | Sure. My name's Nicole Wittersheim, and I am the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Washington office. |
| 0:51.1 | So I primarily do advocacy and policy for this global human rights organization |
| 0:55.8 | that does documentation of human rights abuses all over the world. And so I forward face or take |
| 1:05.6 | those findings to U.S. government on the Hill and in the White House and all the different agencies and departments here. |
| 1:14.5 | You've been with USAID. You have a lot of experience with them. And that was actually the motivation for reaching out to you because USAID is changing fast or disappearing or something like that. |
| 1:29.4 | I'll say it's under attack. |
| 1:31.3 | Under attack, yeah. |
| 1:32.4 | I think it's fair to say that. |
| 1:33.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:34.6 | And I just want to put just to put this in a moment in time, this is February 6th, 2025 that we're having this conversation. |
| 1:42.6 | Things are changing so rapidly. |
| 1:43.8 | I've seen a lot of |
| 1:45.1 | stories that get outdated, you know, almost 12 hours later because things are happening so fast |
| 1:50.6 | and things are happening so strangely right now. So just to kind of put us in that moment for the listener. |
... |
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