Humanitarian work and the new world order

There are challenges to producing a podcast and writing a newsletter every two weeks, chief among them that during the production process the chose topic may be overtaken by events.

Right now, global events are moving at breathtaking speed – reading the headlines each morning, it’s like being the red queen in Alice in Wonderland, trying to believe “six impossible things before breakfast.”

So when this week’s Inside Geneva was in production, just a few short days it ago, it was before Donald Trump’s surprise call with Vladimir Putin, it was before the astonishing (and astonishingly disrespectful, depending on your view) speeches by Pete Hegseth, secretary of defence, and vice president, JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference. Before headlines heralding a new world order.

But our topic this week is also about that new world order – on Inside Geneva we are taking a deep dive into the US freeze on foreign aid, and the destruction of the federal government’s aid and development agency, USAID. That decision is part and parcel of the US view, expressed so brutally by Hegseth in Munich, that “Uncle Sam” won’t be “Uncle Sucker”. Washington no longer sees any reason why it should help to solve the problems of others, and that is having a devastating effect on foreign aid.

From HIV prevention, to maternal health clinics in Afghanistan, to demining, to support for human rights defenders, humanitarian projects around the world have had to suspend their operations because of the US freeze. Although the funding stop is in theory only for 90 days while the value of the projects is assessed – value to whom, one wonders – there is little hope now among aid agencies that the money will continue after that.

So on Inside Geneva this week we ask why the US is doing this, whether it can really serve Washington’s interests in the long term, and what it means for fundamental rights worldwide.

Legal challenges

Our analyst Daniel Warner suggests the White House may not get away with cutting foreign aid so savagely, pointing out that the president appears to be usurping the power of elected lawmakers in Congress.

“The freezing is not democratic,” Warner tells Inside Geneva. “Congress has voted for some of these programs and it’s Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk, etc. who are cutting them out without the approval of Congress. So legally, I don’t see how they can do this.”

Court challenges are now underway, but these typically take a long time, particularly as Trump and Elon Musk say they will appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, presumably spending taxpayers’ money on their legal fees. How comforting for young mothers in Afghanistan to know that the money once spent on modest healthcare for them is now lining the pockets of already wealthy Washington lawyers.

But in the US, there appears to be widespread support among voters for the cuts. Perhaps it’s understandable – US citizens are worried about the cost of living at home, and, since only around half have a passport, thinking about the rest of the world – and having empathy for it – is clearly a challenge.

Worthwhile investment

In the hopes of creating a better understanding, Geneva-based aid agencies are trying to appeal to US self-interest. Tamar Gabelnick, Director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, has, in the last few weeks, seen partner organisations from Cambodia to Colombia forced to suspend demining operations because of the US freeze.

“In Colombia, they’ve just had to lay off 200 staff that were doing the demining in the south of the country,” she tells Inside Geneva. “So all of a sudden these families have no work. And the alternative in the area, you know what it is? Coca plants. So how is that in the US interest?”

And although US voters are being told that millions of dollars have been wasted by USAID, in fact the total money the US spends on aid and development is just a little over 0.2% of the US gross national income. European countries spend a good deal more, with the UK at 0.5% and some Scandinavian countries pushing up towards 1%. Saving that 0.2% won’t make much difference in the pockets of American taxpayers, but it does make a huge difference abroad.

So why exactly is the US doing this? Dawn Clancy, a journalist based at the UN in New York, believes the strategy has more to do with politics than saving money

“President Trump and Musk will say that these cuts to USAID, it’s about shrinking a bloated bureaucracy, it’s about getting rid of waste and fraud. But I’d say that this whole thing has more to do with ideology and politics.” What Trump and his administration really want, Clancy believes, is a purge of people who don’t share their world view – and they believe aid and development staff are exactly those kind of people.

Threats to fundamental rights

So is the US strategy more than just “America first”? Is it about undermining fundamental rights and freedoms?  Some Trump allies regularly describe projects to help the disadvantaged as an obstacle to business, or as inherently unfair, claiming they offer unearned privileges to minority groups. That view seems to colour opinions of work done outside the US, to aid and development programmes abroad.

Phil Lynch of the International Service for Human Rights, who also joins us on Inside Geneva, is now witnessing the impact of the US funding freeze on human rights projects abroad. ISHR supports human rights defenders in some of the most repressive countries in the world, from China, to Venezuela, to Russia. Now many of those programmes too have had to stop.

Lynch sees a chilling effect on human rights standards worldwide, and warns against hoping that we can simply wait until 2028, and a possible new US administration.

“We don’t have four years,” he says. “The international legal framework and universal human rights are at a critical juncture and are being eroded and threatened and instrumentalized in some unprecedented ways. Now is the time to step up.”

To hear the whole discussion, join us on Inside Geneva. And, heads up, join us on Monday February 24 for a special episode on Ukraine: what kind of peace will this really be? What is the future for Europe’s relations with the US? And where is the UN in the negotiations?

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