Description: The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has stated they have conducted a financial restructuring and are now requesting for a budget of $29 billion in aid instead of the predetermined $44 billion requested in Dec. Cuts in funding and personnel come after the UN’s largest donor, the US, under the Trump administration, unilaterally withdrew funding for foreign aid organizations with other countries also significantly reducing their contributions. Humanitarian and aid needs across the globe have surged in the past couple of years with wars in Sudan, Ukraine, the DRC and Myanmar causing refugee and humanitarian crisis of massive proportions. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk warned that the cuts in funding would offer a wide variety of options for authoritarians and dictators and would considerably reduce the effectiveness of early warning mechanisms for the violation of human rights.
Impact: The US foreign aid program cuts have crippled international and aid organizations and left a financial and soft power vacuum which could be substantially exploited in warring countries and countries in desperate need of humanitarian aid. The aid programs more often than not served as a backdoor for soft power influence within international organizations such as the UN. The US by withdrawing from funding such organizations despite effectively aggravating global war zones and humanitarian crises also provides adversarial countries such as China a window of opportunity to extrapolate their portfolio of influence operations across the globe. China is already the world’s biggest lender and has recently announced free trade with almost the entire African continent. Recent diplomatic campaigns throughout Asia also solidifies China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the home front and provides the country with a variety of options to gain global geostrategic advantages by asserting itself as a humanitarian aid facilitator. Global geopolitical turmoil would further deplete UN’s capacities which could eventually lead to increased number of conflicts, humanitarian and refugee crises across the globally affected regions such as Africa, the Middle East, southeast Asia and South America.