Standing for Solidarity in an Age of Retreat

My speech to the Rotary Club

This is an edited version of a speech I gave to the Rotary Club of Denver Southeast on Thursday, March 10. Big thank you to Rotary for having me, and to Rotarians around the world for all you do! If you are a Rotarian and want to take advantage of a discounted subscription to support my work, click the link below.

I have been covering the United Nations and global humanitarian issues for nearly 20 years. I started off as a political journalist in Washington, D.C.—this was the early 2000s when blogs became an important force in political and policy discourse. I had been covering the UN, so I started a blog about the UN, UN Dispatch, which still exists to this day.

About 13 years ago, I began to appreciate this new form of media engagement they were calling “podcasts,” so I decided to launch a podcast called Global Dispatches. I’ve published two episodes a week, every week, since then. Each episode is structured around a roughly 25-minute interview with someone who is an expert in some aspect of international affairs. In each episode, I draw out that person’s expertise in an informative and, hopefully, entertaining way.

While I do regularly cover topics that are hot in the news, like the latest Trump foreign policy move or Ukraine, I also very deliberately focus on important global stories that may not be front-page news but are nonetheless critically important for understanding the world today. These stories often impact a huge number of people—even if those people live in places not politically or culturally proximate to us in the United States. For example, in recent weeks, I did an episode on the unfolding crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and another on South Sudan.

One other thing I focus on deliberately is not just global problems, but global solutions—because despite the mess, there are still remarkable people, organizations, and policy ideas nudging the world to a better place. I do my part to tell those stories, too.

And finally, I started a new podcast—To Save From Hell—that focuses exclusively on the United Nations. The title is drawn from a famous quote by the second UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, who said: “The UN was not created to deliver us to heaven, but to save us from hell.” My co-host is Anjali Dayal, a professor of international relations at Fordham University in New York, who specializes in the UN. We have a lively chat about the significance of the latest happenings at the UN. That show is a bit of a different format because I do more talking—and a bit more opining—as well.

I share all of this because I want to demonstrate that I talk for a living; I communicate. Yet, in recent weeks, I’ve struggled to convey the sheer magnitude of the changes unfolding in the international system.

But for our purposes today, I want to do my best to articulate the changes I’m seeing—particularly as they relate to three connected stories I’ve been following.

The foreign aid freeze and the dismantling of USAID

Let me start with an example that I believe is near and dear to Rotarians: polio. It is not an exaggeration to say that Rotary is responsible for one of the most important global health successes of the last 40 years—the near eradication of polio. Before Rotary launched the Global Polio Eradication campaign, 1,000 children a day were paralyzed by polio—hundreds of thousands of children a year. In 2024, there were just 64 cases of wild polio, confined to two countries—Pakistan and Afghanistan—and really, to just a few regions within those countries.

Rotary provided the backbone of a partnership that now includes UNICEF and WHO as key implementing partners. But the U.S. is now out of the WHO, and the Trump administration canceled UNICEF contracts for polio eradication worth over $100 million. A leaked memo from a USAID official projected an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year over the next decade as a result of these funding cuts.

Other global health challenges are equally dire. With cuts in U.S. foreign aid, malaria deaths are expected to rise by up to 166,000 each year. For tuberculosis, projections show a 28 to 32% increase in incidence globally.

Just a few weeks ago, I was speaking with a source who worked on USAID-funded TB programs in Central Asia. They emphasized how inexpensive TB control can be—there are cheap treatments and diagnostics for it. I’ve visited TB programs in places like Bangladesh—it really is a straightforward infection to treat. It requires surveillance, diagnostics, and timely treatment. However, TB becomes very difficult and very expensive to treat when it turns drug-resistant, and potentially deadly. If treatment is interrupted, regular TB can morph into multidrug-resistant TB—or worse, XDR-TB (extremely drug-resistant TB). Treating these forms can cost as much as $500,000 per patient. By suddenly interrupting TB treatments, the likelihood of drug-resistant strains proliferating increases significantly. And people are mobile—it’s not hard to get from Central Asia to Europe, and then from Europe to the U.S.

I mention these global health cases because the big-picture point I want to emphasize is that over the past 20 years—when I started my career—there has been clear, if sometimes slow, progress against these diseases and against extreme poverty. And that progress was largely due to platforms and projects backed by the United States.

In the early 2000s, we launched PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—which dramatically drove down HIV/AIDS infections and deaths globally. Around the same time, the U.S. backed initiatives like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and GAVI—the Global Vaccine Alliance—which expanded access to vaccines in the poorest countries in the world. Beyond these U.S.-backed programs, we also had global goals that the U.S. signed onto—first, the Millennium Development Goals, and now the Sustainable Development Goals, set to expire in 2030.

Together, these programs and platforms led to remarkable progress. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. But steady. There was a dip during COVID, but the world largely bounced back—and progress on most Sustainable Development Goal indicators resumed.

But I fear we are entering a new era in which progress on global health and development is no longer assured—and may even be reversed. That’s because all of these platforms and projects are now under direct assault by the Trump administration. Their very viability is being challenged.

A world in which progress against disease and poverty is declining is not a world that most people alive today have experienced.

We are in for an unprecedented shock to the international system, the implications of which I don’t think we’ve fully grasped. Of course, more people will needlessly die and suffer. That, to me, is the greatest tragedy. But these cuts also threaten to upend an entire system premised on a degree of international solidarity—that wealthier countries would help poorer countries with money and technical support to confront disease and poverty. In doing so, these efforts have helped bind the world together around a common purpose, despite our wide differences. If that solidarity is pierced, the world becomes a more fractious, violent, and chaotic place.

Our global humanitarian system is on the verge of collapse

By “global humanitarian system,” I mean the way in which the international community responds to natural or manmade disasters—things like hurricanes, earthquakes, or the fallout from armed conflict. Effectively and efficiently responding to humanitarian crises is one of the things the United Nations and its partners in the NGO community do best. Over the years, we’ve gotten very good at saving people’s lives. There is a professional cadre trained specifically in this work. These are not just idealistic do-gooders parachuting into crises to lend a hand—these are seasoned experts in the field of humanitarian relief. They work for UN agencies like the World Food Program, UNICEF, and the UN Refugee Agency; for international NGOs like Mercy Corps and Oxfam; and for hundreds of local NGOs operating in crisis-affected communities around the world.

The current system, as it exists today, was largely born out of mistakes made and lessons learned following the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004. At that time, you had a lot of different agencies duplicating efforts in some areas while neglecting others—it was somewhat chaotic. In response, the UN developed what is now known as the “cluster system,” in which individual agencies take on discrete tasks during an emergency. For example, WFP is responsible for setting up communications and providing food aid, UNICEF is responsible for water and sanitation, the UN Refugee Agency is responsible for setting up shelter, and so on. All of this is coordinated through the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, called OCHA.

This is a very streamlined process, and it works well to keep people from needlessly dying or suffering in a crisis—but there’s a big catch.

Whenever a disaster strikes, these agencies need to go to donors, hat in hand, to fund the response. International humanitarian response essentially functions as a charity. On rare occasions—when a crisis has clear political or cultural relevance to wealthier countries, like Ukraine—the response is well-funded. But most of the time, the funding appeals net less than half of what is requested—sometimes closer to only one-third. Meaning, humanitarian needs in crises always exceed the money available.

That’s been the trend for some time. But over the past several years, the gap between needs and available funding has widened dramatically. It’s getting larger and larger, stretching the humanitarian system to a breaking point. Last year, OCHA put out appeals for $49 billion; only $23 billion was committed.

So, the global humanitarian system was already under strain. Then the United States announced its foreign aid freeze—an action that threatens to collapse the system altogether. The U.S. has accounted for 40% of global humanitarian funding, serving as the financial backstop for relief efforts worldwide. That money is no longer materializing, and the consequences are already being felt, both on the ground and throughout the international humanitarian system.

NGOs with specific expertise in humanitarian relief are laying off staff and threatening to go bankrupt. Clinics are shuttering. I recently spoke to the head of an NGO that runs primary health clinics in crisis zones. He told me they are being forced to shut clinics in South Sudan that serve displaced people and refugees from the Sudan civil war. Among other services, they were performing dozens of emergency C-sections a week. Now, what will happen? These women may die, and newborns may never get a chance at life. And that’s another key point—this was not a gradual drawdown. It was a sudden and swift halt, giving neither communities nor humanitarians time to prepare.

For 2025, the global humanitarian appeal seeks $44.7 billion to provide life-saving aid to 190 million people across 32 countries and nine refugee-hosting regions. Three months into the year, only 6% of that funding has been committed. That is simply not sustainable.

Much like what is happening in the global health and development space I discussed earlier, we are on the verge of an epic reckoning. What does it mean to live in a world without a reliable international humanitarian system? In which people in crisis, displaced by natural or manmade disasters, can’t count on external help for basic survival? Where will they go? What will they do? How destabilizing will it be for the regions surrounding the disaster? For the world?

We don’t yet know the precise answers, but in the coming months and years, I am certain we will see broader geopolitical reverberations as people in crisis zones move with their feet, potentially sowing even deeper instability in some of the world’s most vulnerable places.

The United Nations is Under Threat

We are entering very uncertain times for the United Nations. As expected, the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the WHO on day one. This move stems from residual animosity dating back to COVID. Trump blamed the WHO for his own mishandling of the pandemic and sought to scapegoat the organization. There was always the potential that his animosity was a product of the time and the grudge would fade. But it clearly has not, as evidenced by his immediate order to withdraw from the WHO.

And now, there is mounting evidence that Trump is planning to target many more parts of the UN system. This includes UNICEF, a longtime partner of Rotary in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

He is targeting these agencies under the rubric of fighting DEI.

Fighting DEI has become a prime directive for the Trump administration at the UN. It is the cudgel being used to attack the UN system. Let me give you an example from deep in the weeds of UN bureaucracy.

Every year, UNICEF’s in-house experts put together what are known as Country Program Documents—strategies and programs for supporting children’s health and welfare in specific countries. It is the job of UNICEF’s 36-member Executive Board to approve these plans, and historically, approving these CPDs has been routine—until now. The U.S. attempted to block UNICEF’s country plans at a recent Executive Board meeting, arguing that they promoted DEI.

The Trump administration’s anti-DEI proposal was overwhelmingly rejected, 35-1. But this move is significant because it shows that the administration is willing to engage in the minutiae of UN bureaucracy to push its anti-DEI agenda. The U.S. doesn’t even have a confirmed UN ambassador, yet it is already taking its culture war to the farthest reaches of the UN system.

This move at UNICEF signals that the administration is both prepared and determined to use the UN as a platform to advance its political crusade against DEI.

An even more disturbing example came just last week. The Trump administration fired off questionnaires to several UN agencies—including UNICEF and the UN Refugee Agency—demanding yes-or-no answers to 23 questions. These questions were absurd. For example, one asked the agency to affirm that it “does not work with entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties, or any party that espouses anti-American beliefs.”

Of course, UNICEF does—because it’s an agency of the United Nations! The UN is a member-based institution composed of 193 countries. Some of these countries are run by communist parties, like China and Cuba. A couple can credibly be called totalitarian, like North Korea and Eritrea. Some are run by avowedly socialist parties, like certain countries in Northern Europe, and a few are expressly anti-American, like Iran.

The UN is not a club of like-minded governments—that’s what groups like NATO are for. Rather, the whole point of the UN is to serve as the one entity that can bring every country together to find opportunities for cooperation, despite wide differences. This is what UNICEF does every day: provide a platform where countries can find ways to support the world’s most vulnerable children, despite vast political and cultural divides.

Another set of questions asked by the Trump administration of UNICEF concerned diversity—and they were equally absurd. UNICEF was asked to give a yes-or-no answer to the question: “Can you confirm there is no DEI project or there are no DEI elements in this project?”

Again, the UN very deliberately reflects the whole world—it is a global organization and therefore seeks to embody the entire diversity of humanity. It is, ipso facto, a diverse place. As former U.S. diplomat Thomas Shannon put it: “At the UN, where you have 193 countries that represent every race, gender, and language, diversity is a fact. It is not an ideology.”

Like the question about the political ideologies of member states, this question is an attempt to force UNICEF to affirm its core identity in a way that gives the Trump administration the ammunition it needs to target the organization. Make no mistake—the administration is coming for these agencies one way or another.

Beyond attacks on the UN as an institution, last month the United States did something that was not unexpected, but still deeply shocking to the international system. In a vote at the General Assembly on the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States sided with Russia in an attempt to block condemnation of Russia’s actions and to block a statement affirming Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That vote was not just a procedural moment at the UN. Rather, it may be a harbinger of changes to come. If the most powerful nations no longer stand firmly behind the basic principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, then what remains of the system designed to prevent wars of conquest?

Like the foreign aid freeze and the impending collapse of the international humanitarian system, the targeting of the United Nations by the United States—historically its most important backer—means we are entering uncharted waters. We do not know how Trump’s attacks on the UN will play out, but we do know that a multilateral system designed and propped up by the United States for nearly 80 years—a period in which the U.S. enjoyed unparalleled prosperity—is losing the support of its most influential member state. The consequences and reverberations of that are something we will all experience in the coming months and years.

What You Can Do About It

I know this talk has been largely doom and gloom, but I do want to leave on a hopeful note. Much of what I do falls under the rubric of what’s called “solutions journalism,” which means that instead of exclusively focusing on problems, I also focus on solutions—specifically, what is working to make the world a more peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable place.

And let me be clear: there are still good people in positions of power doing good things. Despite the enormous challenges I’ve outlined, organizations and communities around the world are stepping up. Even in the face of systemic upheaval, there are people and institutions designing and implementing innovative policy solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. It’s incumbent upon me, as a journalist, to tell those stories—and upon us, as engaged citizens, to rally around these ideas and initiatives.

The pace of cooperative problem-solving on a global level may well slow during these next four years without reliable American leadership. But it does not stop. And in this context, the role of civil society groups like Rotary becomes even more important. It is civil society—you—who will need to carry the torch through these uncertain times. Rotary has already demonstrated that it can do the seemingly impossible: rally the world around global polio eradication to the point where today we count polio cases in the double digits.

That kind of affirmation of international solidarity is needed now more than ever—so I thank you, Rotary, for being a beacon of cooperation and compassion when the world needs it most.