Amidst the devastation of early twentieth century Europe, when capitalist decline and the failure of liberal democracy led to the rise of extremist ideologies, the Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci famously remarked, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of Monsters.”
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His warning seems no less compelling a century on. We inhabit a volatile geopolitical era where the 80-year-old global order is collapsing but no clear alternative has emerged. Concerted international cooperation to make the world a better and fairer place is fading and is being replaced by transactional foreign policies and a disregard for established global norms and principles.
The United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NATO, and other post-war multilateral institutions are struggling for relevance as nation-states increasingly abandon the pursuit of the common good. Simultaneously, the rise of populist, authoritarian leaders and the radical right is destabilizing democracies. While the liberal order led by the United States is unlikely to return due to profound disruptive forces, the shape of the future remains uncertain. We are drifting toward multipolarity, but the outcome is obscured by a haze of caveats.
The current period of global flux has proved most dangerous and damaging for the formal humanitarian system, which was a bold experiment in internationalism that emerged from the urge to rebuild societies in the aftermath of World War II. The humanitarian system was built—and runs—on a singular impulse: the obligation to help others in distress. Long treated as a precondition of political peace and stability, that impulse has since grown into something far larger: a lens through which much of the world understands itself and its responsibilities.
Now, international aid is fighting for its very survival. The humanitarian system isn’t merely broke. It is broken.
A broken aid system
The post-war humanitarian system was never a singular thing. It was a welter of United Nations agencies mobilized for crisis response; the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement; a network of powerful, secular NGOs; and the institutional arms of religious missions. It was also a system that came into being less through grand design than through something closer to the force of gravity—an almost inevitable accumulation of weight and momentum.
The expansion of the humanitarian system was untidy and asymmetric, driven by the organizational self-interest of the bigger international NGOs and UN agencies involved in crisis response and their desire for greater market share. And yet, within quarter of a century, this ungainly apparatus had established itself as a vital pillar of global governance.
One only needs to consider the ongoing humanitarian emergencies in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan to realize the consequences of giving up on our global responsibilities toward those who live with the extreme vulnerabilities that come with war. Lacking basic access to food, shelter and clean water, the 436 million people who by 2030 are predicted to reside in states affected by fragility, conflict and violence will continue to rely upon receiving lifesaving aid to survive.
The humanitarian system has been hobbled by a growing number of governments aggressively exploiting and militarizing aid for political advantage. And there is a more troubling problem: at the very moment that governments are retreating from multilateralism, the global aid regime—long overdue for reform—seems struggling, and perhaps unwilling, to confront the sweeping changes it so urgently requires.
The aid regime is not only unraveling under pressure from external forces; it is suffering from its own internal failings. What is needed, then, is not a change in the system but a change of the system. The reckoning cannot stop with a change in donor behavior alone. The plethora of international agencies that deliver emergency relief and work to reduce poverty must now put their own houses in order.
Reimagining global aid
Trying to reimagine a global aid system built by the Allied powers in 1945, and later reshaped by the post-1991 liberal order over which America has presided, requires taking its history seriously. The aid sector has long served as a global safety net—and it is now approaching its own great re-ordering moment, in a geopolitical context that is colder, more chaotic and more complex than any it has navigated before.
Virtually every challenge humanitarians face today has a deep historical context. The first challenge is austerity. The global aid system is confronting savage budget cuts—from Washington above all, but also from other longtime donors. This is especially difficult because the aid system previously restructured itself for growth and developed the tools and habits needed to manage an expanding pool of resources. Its agencies know how to compete for more funding. What they do not know, and have never had to learn, is how to function with much less.
The second is representation. The system has repeatedly failed to treat non-Western actors as equals, and is now widely condemned by emerging powers for reflecting a shrinking diversity of worldviews, even as it tries, belatedly, to bring the Global South meaningfully into its governance structures.
The third is climate. Humanitarians have historically addressed extreme weather as a series of discrete, localized emergencies. They are only beginning to reckon with a world in which such events are not episodic but constant.
The fourth is inclusion. The barriers to new entrants remain stubbornly high. Diaspora communities, for instance, remit an estimated $700 billion annually to their countries of origin — nearly three times the total global Official Development Assistance — and yet they remain largely outside the system’s formal structures.
The fifth, and perhaps most consequential, is power. For decades, the humanitarian world has loudly proclaimed its commitment to devolving authority to the people it serves—ensuring that aid recipients have a meaningful voice in setting priorities and defining purpose. That commitment remains, almost without exception, unfulfilled.
Reckoning with the past
The past sits in judgement as we enter a period of global backsliding on major international commitments. Assumptions about the influence and authority of major humanitarian organizations are contested across the board. The burden of history is ever keenly felt.
Breaking the “reform paradox”—reform long overdue and yet whose prospects seem poor — requires understanding why today’s humanitarian system has evolved to resist systemic change and to be prone to fracture when under pressure to make changes of any magnitude. Without such understanding, international aid risks remaining trapped in its past and unable to move forward.
History shows us that to change the world, humanitarians sometimes must change themselves. By returning to their post–World War II roots and reassessing their failures, they will may rediscover a legacy of internationalist principles, powerful social movements, and collective remedies that remain ripe for revival in our equally troubled times.
The dismantling of USAID by the Trump Administration—an institution created 60 years ago during the Vietnam War as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy—has only amplified the current sense of rupture. An atmosphere of crisis pervades among the organizations responding to the mounting humanitarian challenges of the century. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, never waste a good crisis. And Milton Friedman believed that only a crisis, whether real or perceived, produced real change.
A crisis can be as generative as it is destabilizing. The current crisis can yield the kind of far-reaching, lasting reform that has evaded the global aid regime since its inception. And reforming the global aid system now feels more urgent and perhaps more attainable than ever before.