Watchlist 2025: Safeguarding the World's Most Vulnerable Nations

David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), presents the new IRC Emergency Watchlist report, highlighting the countries at highest risk of humanitarian crises in 2025 and examining where the international community has made progress or fallen short.

BRENNAN: Good afternoon. Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting, “Watchlist 2025: Safeguarding the World's Most Vulnerable Nations.”

I’m Morgan Brennan, co-anchor of CNBC’s Closing Bell: Overtime. I’m also a Council on Foreign Relations member as of this year. And I will be presiding over today’s discussion.

So I would also like to welcome the more than one hundred CFR members participating virtually on Zoom.

And today I am joined by David Miliband. He is president and CEO of International Rescue Committee. David oversees the agency’s operations in forty crisis-affected countries, and its refugee resettlement and assistant programs throughout Europe and the Americas. He previously served as secretary of state for foreign affairs for the United Kingdom. So there’s a lot for us to get to here today.

But before I bring David onstage, I do want to turn your attention to a short IRC video that we’re going to play for you.

(A video presentation begins.)

NARRATOR: The world is out of balance. We feel it every day. But in twenty countries, the effects are felt more deeply than anywhere else on Earth. These twenty countries are home to just 11 percent of the world’s population, but they account for over 70 percent of the world’s displaced, hungry, and those in humanitarian need. Why? Because leaders are choosing weapons over diplomacy as conflict rises. Wars are devastating entire communities as families become targets. Over the past decade, attacks on civilians have risen by 66 percent.

Tilting the balance further, wealthy countries are accelerating the climate crisis. Whereas these twenty countries contribute less than 4 percent of carbon emissions, people in these countries risk losing everything to climate change. And as stable countries are getting richer, conflict-affected ones are getting even poorer. In several of the top twenty countries debt is so overwhelming that more is spent on repaying it than on health care.

The International Rescue Committee’s Emergency Watchlist is all about these twenty countries. It explains the trends, why they’re hit the hardest, and what we can do. The challenges people face are immense, but they deserve to be solved. The world has the resources to do more good now than at any other time in human history. Read the Emergency Watchlist to see how, together, we can help rebalance the scales in our world.

(Video presentation ends.)

MILIBAND: Good afternoon, everyone. Very nice to be here. I’m David Miliband. I have the great good fortune to be the president and CEO of the IRC. And I’m very glad to add my welcome to Morgan’s welcome to you, both those of you here enjoying your lunch—I know that’s an attraction for these CFR events—but also those of you online in CFR’s office in Washington, D.C. and around the world. Really pleased to be part of this.

We’re going to make this as interactive as possible. I’ll speak for about fifteen to twenty minutes; Morgan will do a short Q&A with me for about fifteen, twenty minutes; and then we’ve got fifteen to twenty minutes for your questions and comments.

I want to call out that this report has been a huge team effort across the IRC, led by our brilliant vice president of policy and solutions, Amanda Catanzano, who’s here, and her team. And it tries to bring out the best of the IRC, which is to have real facts, real evidence, real commitment to people in need, but also a bias to action to focus on solutions, not just focus on suffering. And this report, I think, speaks to those virtues, and I’m going to try and speak to them today myself.

Just by way of background, the Watchlist uses seventy-four quantitative and qualitative datapoints to establish the list of the twenty countries most likely to suffer from humanitarian crisis in the year ahead. This not an abstract exercise for us; it actually informs the preparation that we do for the year ahead. Both in organizational terms, management terms, procurement, we try and use it as a guide. And we claim that 85 to 95 percent of humanitarian need has been well-predicted by the Watchlist in years gone past.

It’s also, though, increasingly—this Watchlist—a call to action beyond the IRC, to the wider world.

Oh, someone’s phoning me to tell me I’ve misspoken or—(laughter)—don’t know.

I think it’s worth, given the news that we’ve been watching, all of us, over the last few days, Syria remained on our Watchlist throughout the period, last four or five years, when supposed experts were saying the war is over and Assad’s won. We still had Syria on the Watchlist. And the fact that Syria was on the Watchlist over the last four or five years speaks to the notion that our job is partly to sound the alarm and rally attention, not just to do our own internal planning.

And we’re certainly doing that in respect to Sudan today, which is top of the Watchlist: 30 million people in humanitarian need, 10 percent of the world’s total; 15 million forcibly displaced; 25 million suffering crisis levels of food insecurity. It’s not just the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today; it’s the world’s largest-ever humanitarian crisis.

Now, the story of the Watchlist, I think, is unambiguous. It’s that the world’s crises are severe, they’re growing, they’re concentrated, and they’re protracted. And there will be a short test at the end of these remarks—(laughter)—to make sure that you’ve all taken the appropriate notice.

Just to run through some of the stats, severity. Two million people experienced catastrophic levels of food insecurity in 2024. Catastrophic levels of food insecurity are the international phase classification level five. That means that they’re eating so infrequently that they’re in physical pain, that the body weakens, that death rates spike. Those who survive are going to have health complications for the rest of their lives. And I often say to people malnutrition, and especially catastrophic levels of malnutrition, are the apex of the humanitarian pyramid, because you can more or less guarantee if you’ve got that level of food insecurity you’re going to have a broken health system, a broken economy, high levels of conflict underneath them.

The second part of the story, that the crisis is growing: 305 million people in humanitarian need, up from 78 million—nearly 80 million—in 2015. So, essentially, in a ten-year period we’ve seen a more than quadrupling of the number of people in humanitarian need. The numbers in food insecurity and displaced also doubled.

Concentration. This is where, I think, I want to try and turn what can seem like a mountain—305 million people in humanitarian need; how on—how the hell do you do something about that?—I think we’ve got to somehow bring it down a level, and the concentration speaks to this. Eight out of ten people—in fact, 82 percent of people—in humanitarian need are in just these twenty countries. It’s not as simple as fix these countries and everything will be fine, because they’re often part of regional and other problems, but I think if—getting granular is a way of getting a grip on how we can begin to address this scale of humanitarian suffering.

But just to understand what this concentration means, since the 2000s—and the video referred to this a bit—extreme poverty, which means living on less than $2.15 a day—extreme poverty has gone down in stable countries by between 30 and 40 percent. It’s not just a Chinese and Indian phenomenon; stable states are seeing lower levels of extreme poverty. But in unstable states, fragile and conflict states, the rise in extreme poverty has been 85 percent. So you’re seeing a real sort of scissors effect there. And of course, climate shocks—which, by the accident of geography but also by deliberate choice, because money is not going into climate resilience—these countries are more exposed to the climate crisis.

Also, I want to say a word about the protracted nature of the crisis. Fourteen of the twenty countries were on the list ten years ago, and they speak to chronic problems; Myanmar or DRC being an example of that.

I do think the Syria story—Syria comes out at number four on our Watchlist this year. It’s a devastating testament. We don’t claim to have predicted the events of the last ten days or two weeks, although we did have—we still have 450 people working on the northwest of Syria. We have 400 people in the northeast of Syria. So we may come to that in the questions. But we have been clear that the humanitarian needs were ongoing and real inside Syria, 16 million people in humanitarian need; that the fears of refugees preventing them going home—if you talk to any family in Jordan or Lebanon or Germany and ask, can you go home; they say, no, I’m scared to do so because I fear that my son’s going to get put into Assad’s army—those fears were real. And the evidence that unmet humanitarian need is the companion of political instability seems, to me, to be compelling. Which is why there’s not just a moral case that we’re making here but also a strategic case for attention for these countries.

Now, the theme of this year’s Watchlist is the idea of a, quote/unquote, “world out of balance.” And I think you were given on the way in a short version of this. And I just want to put it in a bit of context. Twenty-five years ago, in 1999, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens gave what are called the Reith Lectures, which are these annual lectures, BBC lectures. And he gave it on the theme of the runaway world. I think it’s a really evocative phrase. And he was talking about, in a way, a world out of balance, which is where we’ve got to in our report here. One of the things he pinpointed, which I think is interesting, is that risks in this runaway world were increasingly, quote/unquote, “manufactured not natural.” In fact, he argued that the climate crisis was evidence that even nature was no longer, quote/unquote, “natural.” Nature itself is manmade because of the impact of carbon emissions, of greenhouse gas emissions on our natural environment.

And the idea of a runaway world is captured in this title of the Watchlist: A World Out of Balance, because it’s the world that we see. And because I like lists, we’ve got four imbalances, as you may have seen on the video, that I think are worth keeping in mind. First is the imbalance between hard and soft power, between conflict and diplomacy. Wars today are more frequent, more longer-lasting, and increasingly internationalized. And I’ll explain what that means. Just in terms of the numbers, fifty-nine active conflicts around the world today—the most since World War II. A third of them involving foreign powers, foreign sponsorship.

These are civil wars, in the main, but there’s foreign sponsorship of them. Conflicts in places like Sudan and Yemen are prolonged by international interventions. Meanwhile, the mechanisms to resolve them are in retreat, or are actually—in the case of the U.N. Security Council—paralyzed. That body, tasked with maintaining global peace, has been undermined by the use of a veto thirty-six times in the last decade, which is just twice the rate of the decade prior. And I probably don’t need to point out to this audience the use of the veto is outnumbered many times by the threat of the use of the veto, which is also a constraint on action.

Second imbalance is about the balance between civilians and soldiers, because we’re seeing more attacks on civilians with fewer consequences for the perpetrators. Wars today are not just fought in villages and cities. They are targeting them. Attacks on civilians have risen 66 percent in the last decade and health facilities, schools, and aid workers are under siege. From Gaza to Ukraine, 2024 has marked the deadliest year ever for aid workers. Health care attacks have quintupled, increased fivefold since 2016. These violations of international humanitarian law leave deep scars on communities, making recovery almost impossible even after the conflicts subside.

Third imbalance, was pointed to in the video, is between people and planet. The statistics are remarkable. These nations contribute 4 percent of global carbon emissions, but in the Sahel region temperatures are rising more than 50 percent greater than the global average. So when people talk about 1.4, 1.5 degrees rise in global average temperatures, in the Sahel it’s much greater. Yet, only 13 percent of global climate adaptation funding reaches these high-risk nations, with around $1.50 per capita allocated for adaptation compared to over $24 per capita outside the Watchlist countries. And finally, and obviously, there’s the imbalance between wealth accumulation, which is going on at a scale unprecedented in human history. That’s why the video says there’s more resources to do more good than any time in human history, but not enough poverty alleviation. And I gave you the figure of the 85 percent rise in these fragile and conflict states earlier.

Now, part of our job is to issue a warning, but part of our job is also to make sure that people don’t have so much despair that they think nothing can be done. And what’s frustrating, or doubly frustrating, is that actually there’s quite a lot that could be done, even to mitigate the worst of our conflict-ridden world. But it’s not being done. And part of our job is to try and advocate for the changes that are necessary. I just want to run through a few of the ideas that are in the longer version of the Watchlist that we’re publishing today. And it’s actually on the back of the little handout that you were given.

First, and I think this does need saying as the United States moves to a new government, a new administration, there’s a lot of scrutiny of international aid programs. The first thing to say is that humanitarian aid works when it is evidence based, when it’s outcome oriented, and when it takes seriously cost effectiveness and cost efficiency measures. That is the IRC way. And we’ve shown, for example, how to treat malnutrition at 21 percent lower cost, how to deliver a year’s worth of pre-primary education programming in Lebanon in the space of only eleven weeks of programming, through our partnership with Sesame Workshop. And how to deliver seven million doses of vaccine to kids under the age of five in four countries in East Africa, in areas that were called, quote/unquote, “inaccessible” by the mainstream system. Eighty-five percent of kids have been vaccinated. The traditional structures couldn’t reach the next 15 percent, but we’ve shown how to do so. So the Watchlist is a call on donors, whether they be in the government sector or in the private sector or in the philanthropic sector, to step up with us, to invest in solutions that do work, and to pioneer new ways of delivering humanitarian aid.

Second, we know that if we can’t reach people we can’t deliver aid. And the evidence around the world is of more and more people not just being, quote/unquote, “inaccessible,” but of being denied access to aid flows. By the way, the right of civilians to have access to aid in conflict situations is not just a moral right, it’s actually a legal right that is being denied. We’ve thought about this. And for the last couple of years we’ve been advocating for an independent access organization that shines the light on the denial of humanitarian access, because too often when there are access complaints made there are allegations that those making those complaints are somehow biased or not providing an objective standard. And we think an independent access organization could do that. A bit like the convention on the prevention of chemical weapons. There’s an independent institute that monitors that—on the use of chemical weapons.

Third, the impact of extreme weather, which was a feature of last year’s Watchlist—the overlap between climate-affected states and conflict states. Essentially, sixteen of the twenty countries in the Watchlist are in the top quartile of climate vulnerability. as well as being conflict-ridden. But the climate finance sector, the climate finance systems, operate pretty much independent of the humanitarian finance systems. They’re operating in their own silos. Now it’s also the case that basically 100 percent of humanitarian aid is reactive to disaster, rather than anticipatory of disaster. Only one country in the world, Germany, has a commitment that a percentage of its aid should go in anticipation of crisis—5 percent, they say. Now, that’s doubly frustrating given that we’ve done a research study in northern Nigeria to show that if you give people cash, even a week in advance of a flood disaster coming, it has outsized benefits for them, compared to giving them the aid after the flood. So anticipatory finance. Third set of recommendations.

Fourth set of recommendations, we can go into this in the questions if it’s of interest, is about the humane, orderly, smart treatment and support of people who are refugees or are seeking asylum. I went to the southern border of Mexico. And I met a woman that we were helping. She’s a political refugee from Venezuela. She said, my participation in IRC Economic Livelihoods Program reminded me that migrants are allowed to have dreams as well. And we stand for the idea that migrants are allowed to have dreams as well, and that they deserve their cases to be treated with humanity and dignity, just as host populations deserve those cases to be addressed in an orderly and effective way.

The final thing to say is that we can’t ignore the global economy. Since interest rates rose in the West, they’ve become catastrophic in the countries that we work in. So health and education budgets are being raided in order to pay for credit—in order to pay interest payments to creditors rather than to address domestic problems. The U.S. has just done a billion dollars debt relief for Somalia. That’s a start. We’ve got our own proposal for the world’s first humanitarian debt swap, which would buy out some debt using an underwriting of that debt to lower the interest rate, and then to deliver a portion of the proceeds that come from the lower interest rates into humanitarian help in a country. At the moment there are plenty of examples of environmental debt swaps. There’s no example of a humanitarian debt swap.

So, for us, these actions are not just moral imperatives, they’re also practical necessities. And by reaffirming the value of humanitarian aid, by reinforcing access to it, by ensuring humane migration pathways, and by tackling the root causes of crises, we think we can begin to restore balance in the world that desperately needs it. We know that politics is roiled by polarization. We want the Watchlist to bring people together with urgency and with agency, because a world out of balance—as Syria shows—is not a world in steady state. If we don’t make things better, they’re going to get worse/ And making things better is our business. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause.)

BRENNAN: Well, David, it’s a privilege to sit down with you and have this conversation, especially if you do release this report. You just put a lot in front of us and so there’s a lot to dig into. I would also just like to remind everybody that we are on the record and in about twenty minutes or so we will open this up to questions, both in the room and virtually. But to get this conversation started, I do just want to take a step back because I think one of the things that struck me is how incredibly accurate your report is every year in terms of targeting the areas, the countries, the populations that are most at risk, and how that shapes how you’re thinking about the aid situation and the solution moving forward. So maybe we could just take a step back and talk a little bit about the methodology and everything that goes into how you compile this report.

MILIBAND: So, as I said, it’s no credit to me. It’s credit to our teams. They have these seventy-four indicators, which are quantitative and qualitative. And it involves a set of calculations, of rankings, but then putting it through the filter of our regional teams and our country teams to try and anticipate what’s happening. And I think it is credit to the teams of the way it works. I wish there was more we could do to take the report and then anticipate where are we going to need health tools, where are we going to need plumping up to feed—to tackle malnutrition, where are we going to need aid workers, can we start hiring? We don’t sit with that kind of resource. We’re dependent on a reactive system which reinforces the sense of a cat chasing its tail. I mean, that’s the problem. But I think you’re—I’m glad that that struck you. There’s a clear lesson here that we need to get ahead of these problems, rather than just wait for them to—wait for the whiplash.

BRENNAN: Hmm, I—

MILIBAND: And of course, the other thing to say, sorry, is that with AI, with the predictive analytics around climate, we can get even better at this. And I should have said some of that we try and incorporate.

BRENNAN: So you’re already starting to incorporate some of that?

MILIBAND: Yeah.

BRENNAN: But just the fact that Syria is in the top five. We’ve seen the events that have played out over the last, call it, two weeks. How does that speak to how quickly you are collecting this data, and what you are hearing from your teams on the ground? I think you said roughly 850 people.

MILIBAND: Yeah. I was in touch with our team just before I came here. I mean, it is interesting, we’ve been working in the northwest of Syria, where Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have been one of the leading presences in establishing order and, quote/unquote, “governing” that province, you know, around Idlib. The prime minister of—the new prime minister of Syria was previously in charge of the Idlib government, more or less. And our dealings were not with HTS. Our dealings that were with the civil administrative authorities that were established to facilitate humanitarian aid. Obviously, you remember, there was an earthquake in February 2023. That brought into stark relief the need for that kind of authority.

Now, here’s the thing. And you can either take it as indicative or not. We’ve been able to get on with our work in a way that has been straightforward and—I don’t want to say easy to do business—but has been straightforward. We’ve had no interference with who we serve. We’ve had no interference with our supplies. We’ve had no attempts to direct us. And that’s the hopeful side of what lies ahead. Obviously, there are massive dangers when a state collapses in the way that it has. And, goodness knows, there’s going to be a remaking there. But the Syrians who we’ve spoken to—our clients and our staff, because, of course, it’s mainly Syrian staff—someone said to me today, are they optimistic? I said they’ve got hope for the first time in a long time.

And so they’re very acutely conscious of what could go wrong, but the experience that we’ve had so far suggests that the words about respecting, for example, the diversity of Syria—remember, 5 percent Christians, different denominations, within the Muslim community—there’s evidence of how that can work, from the northwest. Obviously, the Kurdish issue in the northeast is a different—is different, but there’s diversity there too.

BRENNAN: Hmm. So, in light of that, what can go right? What needs to happen for it to go right?

MILIBAND: Well, number one, the aid flows, which have been restricted—there are four aid crossing points. They’ve been closed at various points by the Assad regime. They need to be opened up. Secondly, the health—if you don’t have a functioning health system, everything else collapses. We’ve had to sustain the Syrian health system. Thirdly, you’ll have read about hyperinflation and the danger of hyperinflation. That is—that’s a clear and present danger. That’s a very high priority. The fourth thing, obviously, is about the movement of people, refugees—three million in Turkey, one million in Lebanon, 780,000 in Germany still. We stand foursquare behind the idea that return has to be safe and voluntary.

European countries have paused their processing of asylum claims because, they say, well, we can’t adjudicate because we don’t know what the situation is going to be. But literally millions of Syrians are thinking, when’s the right time to go back? And that’s right that it’s their choice. Worth saying, quite a lot are leaving into Lebanon, often Shia denomination. But quite a lot are arriving. Quite a lot of movement in the northeast, because there’s been some fighting, though there was a ceasefire this morning in the northeast. So I think those are the very basic priorities, underneath an umbrella which is the government has to establish itself. And it has to establish itself on as inclusive a basis as possible.

BRENNAN: It sounds like you have hope that could happen.

MILIBAND: You got to. I mean, what’s the point of presuming that everything’s going to go wrong? There’s plenty of evidence that things go wrong, but if you presume that everything’s going to go wrong, then that really is dire. We have—I’ve learned, in my years at the IRC, you have a bias to action, you have a(n) embrace of risk, and you have to speak up for universal values. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

BRENNAN: If I shift gears here to number one on your list, it’s Sudan. And you just said it at the podium, the fact that this is not only the worst humanitarian crisis currently, that it is—it is the largest ever in history, period. How did we get—how did we get here?

MILIBAND: Well, there’s a simple answer to that, which is that in 2023—in April 2023 two factions of former President Bashir state decided that they would take each other on for the resources of the country. And then external support—this internationalized civil war I think is incredibly important. External players, not necessarily the ones you’d expect, piled in on each side. And each side has enough strength to carry on fighting. And so that’s the simple answer.

The more complicated answer is that since independence there’s been series of problems in Sudan. You know that Sudan and South Sudan separated. The resources are in South Sudan, but the oil gets piped through Sudan itself. And the history in Darfur this country knows very well. I mean, the tragedy is there’s nothing like the reaction that there was in 2003-(0)4 to what’s happening in Darfur. And some of you may remember—I don’t, but some of you—I’ve read about it, Operation Lifeline Sudan from 1989. So there’s a much more complicated version of the story. But essentially, the problem today is that both sides think they can win. And both sides have access to, I don’t want to say infinite, but very large, arms supplies to continue the fight.

And peacemaking is in retreat. The AU, which is responsible through its peace and security committee for conflict in Africa, is split. And so the—there’s a part of it that’s a Russian story, because they’re supporting the rapid support force. But it’s not really an American story. It’s not really a Chinese story. It’s not a French and British story. So the Security Council doesn’t really—hasn’t really got much locus. And the people that we’re trying to help are absolutely desperate.

BRENNAN: So, in light of that, I’m going to ask the big, obvious question, but what is it that actually begins to reverse the situation in Sudan? And I ask that, knowing that it is probably a very stark and probably the most glaring example of how civilians are caught up in warfare and conflict and even outright targeted.

MILIBAND: Yeah. So we have a sort of bifocal lens on this. There’s a humanitarian lens, which is about stopping the dying, and there’s a political lens about stopping the killing. And essentially both of them have to be addressed. On the humanitarian side, it’s pretty clear what needs to happen. It’s about aid flows, which, frankly, is about stopping the crime of preventing the flow of aid—which both sides have been responsible for. And that is just the clear and pressing need. There’s an economic question there as well, because people need to be able to buy food not just have to be given food. So there’s a set of humanitarian imperatives.

On the political side, it’s all about the pressure, the leverage on the supporters of each faction. That’s the way that change is going to come. And it’s a range of regional players, which you know. And until they are pressured to see that the cost of this facilitation is greater than the—that the cost outweigh the benefit, they’re not going to change. Now one interesting point post Syria, which is connected, the Iranians are quite important supporters, interestingly enough, of the Sudan Armed Forces, of the government. And so that’s—there’s a piece of Jenga taken out of the stack. But of course, that may only incentivize the other side to think they’ve got more chances. So we need to pull on both sides of this.

BRENNAN: How does that speak to this—I keep hearing the phrase, this materializing new world order—the players, and how all of that is manifesting across the world stage, particularly in some of these most vulnerable areas of the world?

MILIBAND: Well, I think that’s—I mean, I’d love to—it’s good thing we’ve got another couple of hours to go through that. (Laughter.) I think that the two crises we’ve discussed so far, Syria and Sudan, do show the new world order coming into play. What is that order? Many people would say to you, and this is me speaking personally. This isn’t the position of the IRC. Many people would say to you, oh yeah, it’s a multipolar world. And by that, they would mean that instead of it being bipolar, between, you know, Cold War one, Soviet Union and the U.S., instead of being unipolar, which was the post-1990 American-led global order, we’re now in a world of five or six main powers—China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey.

I don’t think that quite captures it, because multipolar suggests it’s quite stable. But actually, the evidence of Syria and of Sudan is that it’s not stable and that those main powers can’t necessarily bring order. And there’s a(n) Indian diplomat called Shashi Tharoor, who’s now an opposition politician. In 2006, he gave a speech about a multi-aligned world, which is more transactional, more fluid, with more players, many of whom are state actors but some of whom are nonstate actors, so businesses, terrorist groups. And I think that that notion of a fluid, transactional, multi-aligned world captures what’s going on.

And you can see it, because who would have said two weeks ago, yes, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will be leaders of Syria? That speaks to the multi-aligned world, in which the elephants, if you like, can’t necessarily bring order. And America is still 25 percent of global GDP, which is extraordinary if you think thirty years after the end of the Cold War, because in 1990 America was 25 percent of global GDP. So America’s economic throw weight hasn’t changed in that time. Europe gone down. Japan gone down. India gone up. China gone up, a lot. But its political throw weight hasn’t been sustained at the same level. And I don’t think it’s multipolar. I think it’s multi-aligned, in this much more fluid way. And, in a way, you asked what’s going on in our—the place that we work. We’re a symptom. What’s happening in the place that we work is a symptom of a multi-aligned, runaway world.

BRENNAN: Hmm. Just this idea of economic power from the U.S., but maybe the political piece of this is not—doesn’t carry the same weight that it did. Is that just this—is that a reflection that soft power and how it’s been understood and how it’s been wielded is changing, and has to be thought of differently now, in this so-called new world order? Or is it something else?

MILIBAND: Well, I think it’s about how hard power and soft power are combined, because the U.S. aspires to be a full spectrum power. In other words, from hard to soft, and globally oriented. In many ways, it is. It’s got nineteen military partnerships with countries around the world. It’s got soft power in all parts of the world. But the combination is frustrated by a range of things that you know well. When ambassadors don’t get nominated and countries don’t have an ambassador there, that sends a signal. When policy is inconsistent, that sends a signal. Dare I say it, when words and actions don’t align in a perfect harmony, that raises questions about intent and about consistency. So there’s a competition out there. And there are more players. And it’s a more complicated game.

BRENNAN: So what does Trump 2.0 bring?

MILIBAND: Well, I looked at this, obviously, with some direct interest, because we are dependent in various ways on the decisions of the incoming administration, in respect of international aid policy, international political engagement. And we’re a refugee resettlement agency in the United States. And in respect of the external-facing, I think that it’s still a very open question because there are different parts of President Trump’s coalition. Some parts, very much focused on the home front. Some parts very focused on China as a sort of Cold War two. Some parts asserting a more traditional sense of how to sustain American primacy. We don’t yet know how those—just even those three different parts of the coalition will play out.

Unfortunately, we have slightly more clarity in respect of refugee resettlement and what might happen in that domain, because we went through severe reductions in the refugee resettlement program in 2017 to 2020. And our approach is very simple. We are the expert witnesses that can inform government policy. And we’re going to be presenting to the Trump administration in the same way that we do to other administrations. Here’s the evidence of what works. Here’s the evidence of the positive impact for America. Here’s the way in which your aspirations for reform of the global system—which it says in Project 2025 are about value for money and about more local responses—here’s how we can play into that. Because we’re not a political organization. We accept the politicians who are elected by the different countries that we work with, but we try and work with them to make sure that their decisions are informed by what we know.

BRENNAN: So if you have the small collection of countries that is, what was it, 82 percent of the people in need are in these countries. And you’re outlining what is essentially a toxic feedback loop—war, climate, economic shocks—that are keeping these countries and the people in these countries in dire situations. Then how does that speak to, I guess, the types of solutions that you are going to present to an incoming Trump administration, that you are having conversations on the international stage with organizations where I think there’s even just a question—I’m sort of holding in a bunch of things here—but even just questions about how—about whether that process, the international organization, process, is broken and needs to change. Does this—does this present a moment to present solutions in a more cost effective way, as you just mentioned at the podium?

MILIBAND: Well, we’ve been on this drive of reform, cost effectiveness for ten years. We do—30 percent of all of the impact evaluations on what actually works in the humanitarian sector is done by the International Rescue Committee, even though we’re only 3 percent of the total sector. We’ve done 400 cost effectiveness and cost efficiency analysis of not just our programs, but those of other NGOs that have opted into that work. And we do that not in response to politics, but because we want every dollar or every euro or every yen that’s spent on humanitarian aid to go as far as possible, and we want it to reach as many people as possible. So if we can deliver malnutrition treatment for 21 percent less cost, we can help 21 percent more kids for the amount of money that we’ve got. So it’s not it’s less reactive, in that sense.

Obviously the concern is that if the table gets tipped over, then that makes it very, very difficult to make things work. And there are organizational structures that need reform. But they need reform, not demolition. And that’s going to be important going forward. There are parts of the system that work well, and we need to make them work better. There are parts of the system that don’t work well, and we need to make them work much, much better. And that’s been our engagement with the Biden—with the Obama administration, then, in my time, end of the Obama—last months of the—last years of the Obama administration, then with the Trump administration, then with the Biden administration.

And we’ve just got to make sure that we find the right ways to ensure that our—what we know is passed on. Because if something can be done more cost effectively, it’s a no-regrets move. So let’s start with those. If there’s good that can be done at high value, let’s do it because that should be bipartisan, not partisan. If there’s more contested terrain that speaks to values and to direction of this country or other countries, well, there are political choices that should be made, but let’s make them on the basis of facts. I love facts. (Laughter.) I know it's not—I know it’s not fashionable, but—

BRENNAN: We love hearing—we love hearing it. I do want to open it up to the room to see if we have any questions. Yes.

Q: Thank you, Morgan. And thank you. Mr. Secretary. It’s Pamela Falk from U.S. News and World Report.

In the days since Syria changed, which is only a handful, you have been somewhat cautious about your statement, saying the new reality is unclear. And we’ve seen the U.N. with Geir Pedersen, and the U.K. with your prime minister, sound out the idea of lifting—well, at least lifting the designation as a terrorist of several of the groups. Do you think that’s appropriate right now? And it was particularly on HTS that they’re thinking about lifting it. Do you think it’s appropriate to do that right now? How will you know when it is? And is your staff, in the belly of the beast in Idlib, do they—do they have a view on all this? Thank you.

MILIBAND: Well, I can give a very clear answer on that. We are about engagement with whoever is governing the places where we work. Without fear or favor, we engage with everybody. And we’ve done that. Equally without fear or favor, we never get into who should be designated as a terrorist organization or who should not be designated as a terrorist organization. So when you say, you’ve been cautious, I’m, like, yeah. That’s a compliment. Thank you very much. (Laughter.) We’ve been—we have a bias to caution in what we say because we’ve got staff in danger. And it’s just much simpler to say we never comment on that. But are we for engagement? Hundred percent we’re for engagement.

Q: And you’re not worried it will become—(off mic)?

MILIBAND: I have to worry. We have to worry. The team in Syria, of course, they have to worry. They have to worry about a dangerous situation where it’s not clear how it will go. And they’re clear that Syria will only be stable if it’s pluralist. They don’t know if Syria will be pluralist. But that’s what they are serving their communities for, because they—I mean, they were essentially trapped in northwest Syria for the last ten years. And they know what they’re hoping for. They know what they fear. And they’re working to make sure that they can do anything possible at a very human level to try to—I think it’s interesting. You know, the first messages that have gone from the justice minister, the prime minister, the president, have been about, we need all parts of Syria to be part of Syria’s future. So of course, then it’s right and understandable why politicians say actions and words are not always the same thing, but better to have—better to have good words rather than bad words.

Q: Thank you.

MILIBAND: Yeah, thank you.

BRENNAN: Just a reminder that this is on the record, and we’ll go around the room. Yes, sir.

Q: Thank you. Hi. I’m James Heimowitz with Center for China and Globalization.

First, a quick comment. I was startled. I spent a chunk of time in quite a few of the countries on the list, including Myanmar recently. And I was quite startled to see it at number three, way ahead of place like Haiti, where I’ve also spent time. And my question is, what do you have going on in Haiti? And how is it possible that a place like Haiti isn’t viewed, from your organization’s perspective, in as much in need as a place like Myanmar? Myanmar civil society—the government’s a mess, but civil society—there’s still schooling and education and health care. There isn’t violence in the streets in the same way. I mean, there is violence. So I guess the quick question is, what’s going on and what are you’re doing in Haiti.

MILIBAND: Yeah. The good news is that when there are difficult questions I can phone a friend. And the young man right behind you, Marwan, is the master of the methodology. But I won’t—I’ll give him a few seconds to think of the answer. But the—just a couple of things from me. One, in Haiti we’ve got partner organizations that we work through. We don’t have our own country program, but we’ve got well-established partners. Secondly, in Myanmar, it was—it was much lower in previous years. It’s vaulted to the top because the violence is now on a huge scale, multiple conflicts across the country. I’ve got in my head 11 million people displaced. I may be wrong about—

Q: But in Myanmar it’s not—(off mic)—areas that are—(off mic).

MILIBAND: Yeah. So Marwan can tell me why I’m wrong in a minute, but just—and it’s probably unwise of me. It’ll probably turn out you’re a professor of Myanmar politics. (Laughter.) So I venture into this—I venture into this carefully. But my understanding—first of all, it’s important to say across the piece the fact that it’s in one part of a country not a whole country doesn’t mean that that country is excluded. And so the seventy-four indicators include displacement. They include food insecurity levels. They include the nature of the conflict. So the fact that it’s partial—

Q: (Off mic)—random.

MILIBAND: Neither partial or random. Marwan, why don’t you help out on this?

SAFA: One of the things that we’re trying to understand in the ranking of the countries is less that there is more need in Haiti or more need in Myanmar, and more that we—there is a risk of deterioration of the humanitarian crisis over the next year in Myanmar, and that risk is higher than Haiti. That’s what the ranking is. And in Myanmar in particular, the coalition of armed groups recently has made it that over the next year there is going to be a risk of more conflict in the government—overall in the country. And so with that risk of deterioration over the next year, we’ve assessed that it would be more than what would happen in Haiti.

MILIBAND: Great answer, I think. (Laughter.) Thank you, Marwan.

BRENNAN: Yes.

Q: Rita Hauser. Thank you, David. As always, very good.

Your organization is splendid. Let’s put that on the table. But there are lots of other NGOs—(off mic)—splendid. What’s happened to the U.N.—(off mic). What’s happened to UNRWA? What’s happened to—(off mic)—all countries—(off mic)—much less attacks on them for doing what it’s doing—(off mic). I’m very fearful—(off mic).

MILIBAND: So let me say two things. First of all, let’s not glide over too quickly what you said about the IRC being splendid. (Laughter.) As you know, this is a particularly generous time of year in the United States—(laughter)—where the—although I’m British, so that means I don’t like talking about money, I’ve now lived here for long enough that it comes much more easily. (Laughter.) So I would remind you, all of you, that the needs are growing. IRC’s capacity to meet them is growing as well, and is going to depend on the end-of-year fundraising effort that we do.

So please remember, Rita says IRC is splendid. And remember too that we are the only organization that’s focused on people who are victims of conflict and disaster. No one else has that calling. We’re the only organization that can say it does 30 percent of all impact evaluations in the humanitarian sector. And we’re the only organization that is both an international humanitarian aid agency and a refugee resettlement agency in America, which in good times means we have the double bonus of American generosity, but sometimes can mean we’re on the wrong end of government policy in both areas. So splendid, IRC, I wanted to just draw attention to that.

Look, the question of our international institutions is really fundamental. And I think there are two parts of the answer to this that are very, very important. First of all, many people within the U.N. system would say it’s only as strong as the support it gets from its member states. And there’s truth in that. That when the U.N. Charter and its principles and its requirements are in retreat in countries around the world, that is because of decisions in those countries—sometimes by governments, sometimes by nonstate actors. Remember the U.N. Charter put into international law, for the first time ever in human history, that not only do states have rights, but human beings had rights. So it was a major change.

And it was built, yes, with Western leadership, but it was also, I mean, if you read Rana Mitter’s book about Xi Jinping’s thought, there’s been claims for—he was claiming the Chinese were present at the creation, as well as the West, even though it was pre-1949. And so whether you’re a communist or capitalist, whether you’re democratic or autocratic, it was your charter. But there’s been retreat from the principles of the charter, sadly, not just in autocratic countries. There’s been retreat from the charter in democratic countries as well. So, number one. The U.N. is plagued in various ways, and the apex of this is in the Security Council, by the diffidence at best and antagonism at worst of countries in their engagement with the U.N.

Now, the second thing is the U.N. has been tasked, including post 1990, with doing more and more. And that’s made it harder and harder to reform. And so many people would say to you that the internal reforms of the U.N. have been set back. And that’s a—that’s a question of agency and how it is driven forward. So I think there’s two parts of the—two parts of the equation.

Just in respect of the situation in Gaza, you mentioned UNRWA. There’s no way that we can step in to do what UNRWA are doing. There are 13,000 people working for UNRWA in Gaza. There are many more in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, 30,000 people in total. There’s no world where we are ready to step in to do what they’re doing. So if the legislation that went through the Israeli parliament to ban contact with UNRWA is implemented, and we don’t yet know if it’s going to be implemented. But if it’s implemented, that will have a major, major impact on the lives of people there, not just on the—not just on the institution.

Q: Thank you. I’m Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group. Was a terrific presentation.

I wanted to ask you about the comment you made about the rise in conflict, and particularly over the last two years. At the same time, we’ve seen a rise in populism—well, that goes beyond two years—but, you know, in the United States and across the world. I was wondering if you had thoughts on whether those two trends are interlinked.

MILIBAND: First of all, the rise in intrastate conflict really goes back to 2005-(0)6. If you remember the high point of liberal internationalism, so called, was the responsibility to protect. There was a resolution passed in 2005-(0)6. And really since then you’ve seen a ticking up in conflict. Now, you’ve also seen a ticking up, or a ticking down, in Freedom House’s measure of freedom. If you go to something called the Varieties of Democracy Project, which is run by the University of Gothenburg, every type of society, whether it—wherever it started, on the democratic versus autocratic spectrum, has become less liberal, not in the sense of left wing but in the sense of affirming individual rights. And so there’s two trends going on.

Personally, I’m very committed to the idea that the real divide globally today is not democracy versus autocracy, it’s accountability versus impunity. I chair the advisory council of something called the Atlas of Impunity, which ranks every country in the world on five dimensions of accountability and impunity, published every year at the Munich Security Conference in February. And I think it’s a very powerful set of lenses, or lens through which to understand what’s going on.

Now, how does national politics interact with global conflict? You’ve got to be careful about that. I do think one—we should remember that when the postwar order was built, it was built in order to establish rules internationally, not to establish democracy internationally. And the importance of rules internationally was seen to be that it would buttress democracy at home, not export democracy abroad. So what I—my short answer, sorry to be flannelling about this, is that the decline of the rules-based order internationally has been correlated with declines in democratic health. But the causal links, I think, are much harder. And they probably run both ways.

BRENNAN: We have three minutes left. Let’s see if we can squeeze in a few more questions.

MILIBAND: Oh, sorry. Sorry, you need short answers, I’m sorry. (Laughter.) Twitter answers coming.

BRENNAN: No, there’s nuance that’s needed too, so let’s see what we can do. Yeah.

Q: Sorry. Sarah O’Hagan. And I’m a board member of the IRC.

MILIBAND: My boss. (Laughter.)

Q: But, David, you said a word earlier about the creation of an international organization to promote or secure humanitarian access. Where does it stand? Who can drive it? How can it be created? Because over the years, there’s been this marvelous concept of presence is protection. And while governments don’t love to be held accountable for what’s happening inside their borders, it has functioned that way. And I wonder if you might say a word in conjunction with that about the safety, let alone the sanctity, of humanitarian action in the Watchlist countries.

MILIBAND: Well, it’s author, my colleague Andy Sweeney, is sitting two tables behind you. And I think the short answer is it’s not as popular as we would like it to be. That’s why we keep on banging on about it. So we need to find some—we need to find some sponsors for it. We thought we had the EU on the hook, but then they went to a broader human rights indicator. And we think there’s real value in just being very narrowly focused on access. Trying to be short. (Laughter.)

Q: Farooq Kathwari. Sorry. Farooq Kathwari, also involved with IRC.

David, my question is, these problems that we have been talking about is due to dictators, people wanting to take control all over the world, whether we’re using religions or using whatever. Is it increasing or is going to be coming down?

MILIBAND: Well, it’s good to be answering that this week because it’s not always—it’s not—you know, dictators don’t last forever, as we can say if we look—if we if you look at what’s happened in Syria. I mean, it’s quite salutary, really. Dictatorship has a single point of failure, and it doesn’t build coalitions. So, I mean, globally, we know there are more coups and more autocrats than before. And there’s an interesting—one thing we didn’t get a chance to talk about, the rise of de-facto authorities. Forty-two de-facto authorities present around the world, but also more coups. I think eleven is it Marwan, or twelve coups in the last three years? Much greater rate than before.

BRENNAN: How do you define de-facto authority?

MILIBAND: A nonstate—you know, Taliban, HTS, et cetera.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

MILIBAND: Who’s next?

BRENNAN: Any other questions? All right, so I guess—I mean, we do—we did only just scratch the surface. So any parting words or thoughts or insights to share before we wrap this up?

MILIBAND: Many, but I’ll contain myself. Thank you for coming. Please read the whole report. It’s a rainy day in New York, which also makes me happy as a Brit—(laughter)—but please, please read the whole report. I reread it at the weekend and found it—you know, learnt stuff, even though I’d read it five times before. Please engage with the IRC. Please remember what Rita Hauser said about massive donations at the end of the—(laughter)—at the end of the year. Yeah, it’s a command. We shall—we shall know this now as Rita’s command. And we shall report you to her in January, depending on how we do. But obviously, the last thing is to say that we do want this to be a place and a force that unifies people and gives them a sense of agency. And so please argue for what we are saying, and argue with what we’re saying, like the expert on Myanmar, because that’s what we need. And thank you to you, Morgan.

BRENNAN: David Miliband, thank you.

MILIBAND: Thank you very much.

BRENNAN: Honor and a privilege. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.