How to Think About U.S. Foreign Aid
The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour
Hillsdale College
4.8 • 649 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guests: Max Primorac & Christopher D. Heckel
Host Scot Bertram talks with Max Primorac, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, about the history of U.S. foreign aid and how the Trump administration is charting a different path. And Christopher D. Heckel, associate professor of biology at Hillsdale College, gives a primer on invasive plant species across the United States.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country. |
| 0:25.5 | Many of these countries are endowed with amazing amount of oil and gas reserves. |
| 0:29.7 | Under the Biden administration, they actually blocked investments into these sectors, |
| 0:34.6 | which would allow countries to invest in their own social services needs. |
| 0:39.6 | So lifting that up, promoting fossil fuel investment, they're going to generate the wealth |
| 0:45.0 | that they need in order to finance their own needs. |
| 0:47.4 | This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. |
| 0:57.0 | That was Max Primerac. |
| 0:58.6 | He is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation here on Hillsdale's campus as part of our CCA lecture series on issues in international relations. |
| 1:10.1 | We talked with Max today about how to think about |
| 1:13.5 | foreign aid. Max, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. Talking today about the |
| 1:19.5 | topic of your lecture here on Hillsdale's campus, you're here as part of our CCA lecture series, |
| 1:24.2 | how to think about U.S. foreign aid. We'll start at the start. When did the United |
| 1:30.4 | States first get into the business of foreign aid? What was the original nature purpose of various |
| 1:36.5 | foreign aid programs? Well, it started after the Second World War and in response to the Soviet |
| 1:43.0 | threat, especially when the Soviet Union was trying |
| 1:46.2 | to support Marxist-Lennonist insurgencies throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the response |
| 1:53.0 | was to create the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1961. |
| 1:58.3 | And what we did was respond to a lot of humanitarian organizations, humanitarian disasters that |
| 2:04.5 | occurred there, disasters such as floods, droughts, epidemics, things of that sort. It was the |
| 2:11.3 | belief that if we could respond to these crises, that we would diminish the attraction that the Soviet model had for these countries. |
| 2:21.1 | And it did a fairly good job. |
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