Peter S. Goodman
speaker
737 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 10 Jun
Peter S. Goodman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
We've got climate crises around the world, and yet...
We've seen international humanitarian relief drop from $43 billion in 2022 to $28 billion last year, and it's still coming down.
Yes and no.
I mean, look, the Nordic countries and the European Union as a bloc are still holding the line on overseas aid.
And yet the political appeal in many countries, and especially this one, the United States, of saying, hey, how about we solve problems at home instead of trying to save starving kids in some faraway place that I'll never visit?
That has a lot of political punch.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I think it's important to remember that while politically it's sometimes very convenient for people to attack overseas aid and treat it like it's just sort of a discretionary type of charity, the people who designed it and continue to advocate for this system have argued that, you know, in addition to the humanitarian aims, it's also been an instrument of foreign policy.
It's traditionally been about
national security policy.
And while it might be tempting to say, well, what do people in some faraway place have to do with the voter in Ohio or New Jersey or wherever, history tells us that when you leave tens of millions of people in a situation where they don't have enough food to eat and their already difficult lives become that much more traumatic—
That can play out a lot of different ways, but they're not good.
First of all, you could end up with the mother of all migration crisis.
Now, I'm not here to fearmonger about immigration, but if your perspective is you don't want millions of people heading to the Darien Gap in Panama or streaming toward places like Greece and Turkey and on toward northern Europe, well, you got to give a thought to what's going to happen if you remove all of this aid and then add on an enormous crisis.
Right.
People are not going to sit in their villages and starve.
People are going to go to where they can better support their families.
And the worse the crisis gets, the more likely that people will be on the move.
It's also worth reminding people that, you know, al-Shabaab, which is this al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militia, is active in the Horn of Africa.
And certainly trauma, like famine, provides recruits.
Showing 41–60 of 737 · page 3 of 37
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