Topher McDougal

Humanitarianism, if you hadn’t noticed, is in crisis. As expected, the “stop work” notices issued in the US by the Trump administration have now turned into termination notices for most humanitarian and aid work. It’s important to understand that the engineered collapse of the US and possibly wider humanitarian systems is not a standalone event. It is both a signaling initiative and a devastatingly functional way to bring about a new world order.

If that statement sounds far-fetched to you, consider that the humanitarian enterprise has, since the 1863 foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, served to give voice and form to the highest aspirations of the liberal International order. Yes, we can all appreciate the terrible hypocrisy of nation states who make such aspirational claims after their own violently ethno-nationalist births and their continuing brutality, whether in the neocolonial, imperialist, or technocratic-developmental molds. But they still held the ideal: every person, regardless of national, religious, or other affiliation, shall be afforded the right to life with dignity. If they can’t find it in the place of their origin, it is incumbent upon other nations to uphold their right.

Such an aspiration tends, in practice, to lead eventually  to pluralist societies – the sorts of societies democracy was supposed to be uniquely well-equipped to manage as a vast series of institutional conflict-mechanisms. (See the writings of every Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century.)

And this is why USAID and refugee resettlement programs were among the first government functions to be targeted by the Trump administration. It is the same reason that, on the US domestic front, DEI practices have been eliminated in educational institutions, the only “refugees” allowed to enter the United States are white South African landowners, and why Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (which disproportionately help people of color)  have been targeted.

Pluralism is the real target.

But what about Ukrainians?, you might wonder. Aren’t they White, too? Well, yes, and of course we saw preferential treatment of them in the asylum-seeking process under the Biden administration. Racism is real.

But the new world order is about more than skin color. It is about ensuring that coherent civilizational blocks – “Grossraum” in the term coined by German Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt –  find coterminal borders with their legitimate governments (or “Reichs”). Far-right philosophers have for years built an intellectual apparatus on the foundations of Schmitt’s thinking that sees pluralism and equality as the ultimate insults. According to this logic, Ukraine (and thus Ukrainians) should properly be thought of as belonging to the Russian bloc, and a “Black Nazi” can receive Trump’s endorsement in the gubernatorial race for North Carolina.

Appropriating decolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Walter Mignolo, the likes of Alain de Benoist, , Aleksandr Dugin, and Renaud Camus argue for the “decolonizing” of their own civilizational blocks. They seek to dismantle the internationalist machinery that permitted the commingling in the first place and to eject the would-be “colonisers”: immigrants and refugees. Thus are the weak and vulnerable cast as the vanguard of powerful globalist despoilers in this inverted narrative.

Don’t bother pointing out the obvious irony that many rich countries have immigrant populations that somehow derive from their own colonial histories. Nor that Euro-Americans should by this logic all be sent back to Europe. Nor that African Americans’ ancestors were forcibly brought into the fold / under the yolk of American society by that colonizing power.  (On DEI initiatives like affirmative action, less euphemistically called “positive discrimination” in some places: a recently circulated memo notwithstanding, there is a strong argument to be made that discrimination of any kind in this country, whether negative or positive, is probably unlawful. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not fantastically cynical and, in effect, racist, for a nation to ALLOW skin color to be determinative of one’s susceptibility to enslavement, economic predation, and even killing for hundreds of years, and then to DISALLOW any attempt to make things right by the stroke of the same pen that supposedly guaranteed equality. DEI practices have functioned in society as a kind of fudge factor: you (the Right) won’t complain that this is illegal while we (the Left) won’t push hard for a true national reckoning with the legacy of slavery.)

And though we often think of religion as a major factor informing what’s meant by “civilization,” far-Right philosopher de Benoist disagrees, in part because of his dialectical materialism, in part due to any religion’s potential capacity to connect with any member of the human race. (Think, e.g., of the Book of Revelation, which envisions hosts “from every nation, race, people, and tongue” gathered at the end of time unto Christ.)

These xenophobic ideas have cross-pollinated with those of “techno-monarchist” Curtis Yarvin and others in the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” movement, producing an admixture of intolerance and anti-democratic thinking that has been influential in shaping the policy priorities of major MAGA billionaires like Peter Thiel, as well as insiders like Steve Bannon and JD Vance.

What, economically, is behind all this? Of course it’s a complicated story and involves the imbrication of technological advancement, the finance industry, and the failure of political machinery designed to regulate the former. But another large part of it is that our national economies have collectively grown to the point that they threaten the substrate of a functioning environment that they depend upon.

One of the central insights from my forthcoming (May 2025) book, GaiaWakes, is that effecting a transition to a more sustainable global economy will require the ability to make short-term economic sacrifices now in order to enjoy the benefits of renewable energy and regenerative practices down the line. This environmental reality and the sacrifices it entails have generally not been adequately explained to democratic electorates, in part because no one likes to make sacrifices and so the parties that try (e.g. various green parties) remain marginal political actors. Germany’s Green Party, for instance, has seen its own popularity wane recently. Parties that pretend nothing is wrong (e.g. climate change denying MAGA Republicans in the US who claim the warming planet is a “giant hoax”) tend to do better because they DON’T demand sacrifices. Indeed, authoritarian China has perhaps done the most to develop the nascent industrial infrastructure for a green economy.

Humanitarianism has always depended on international cooperation and financing, which were in turn incentivized and underwritten by economic growth. That economic growth that is now running up against the very real constraints of the environmental system that has permitted it to flourish. Ultimately, without a preponderant commitment on the part of the international community to the provision of global public goods that could counter environmental collapse, the global economy starts to look increasingly like a negative-sum game: get what you can while the getting is good. Such games are cut-throat, and not conducive to supporting the humanitarian impulses described by Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Hutcheson, Hume, Voltaire, etc. Instead, they benefit the very tech and fin-tech robber-barronial classes that I have written about. 

The upshots of all this are really too numerous to do justice to here, but let’s stick with humanitarianism for the moment:

• Humanitarianism is more bound up with environmental health than ever before. (See Hugo Slim’s new book, Humanitarianism 2.0.)
• Even as the US, Europe, and UK retreat from international forms of Humanitarianism (with a capital H), they also multiply the domestic needs for humanitarianism (with a small h) – growing human rights lacunas among the undocumented, the homeless, the un- and under-employed, those susceptible to systemic racism, and those willing to speak up for any of the former. In short, we must strengthen our democratic processes close to the ground and in the communities where we live, work, and play.
• Two visions of where the field goes from here were spelled out respectively by Richard Blewett and Tammam Aloudat in a recent Trumanitarian podcast episode:
  • Blewett urges a retrenchment of the field to a defensible position – something that will vary by national budget and preference, and therefore become more explicitly national in character. Here, humanitarians might make common cause with Human Rights advocates. In a parallel to Blewett’s argument, my colleague, Dustin Sharp, has argued that Human Rights advocates should seek to reinforce and defend and a shrunken “core” of rights-based principles, rather than continue to expand the HR regime to an ever-increasing number of aspirational realms that they can’t any longer hope to defend. (The HR regime has grown over the last decades to encompass perhaps around 350 distinct rights claims – far more than were initially envisioned in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights or even subsequent 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.) Surely the right to life is the most fundamental of these, and the humanitarian condition “with dignity” can’t be far behind.
  • By contrast, Aloudat urges us to use this moment to develop a reimagined, reformed, more inclusive, and perhaps more expansive agenda in solidarity with populations in need to counter the effects of capitalism, environmentally unsustainable practices, militarism, and policy cruelty. It should be noted that even in the absence of rich-world government funding for humanitarianism, however, a vast funding disparity exists: US charitable foundations sit on perhaps $1.6 trillion in assets, for instance, while those in Mexico – a populous and solidly middle class country – boast assets of less than one thousandth of that amount. Such funding disparities and the host of principal-agent problems they entail are not done away with simply because governments pull back.
  • My own take is that both avenues should be developed simultaneously. The former may have greater effect on immediate real-world problems demanding large-scale funding to operationalise solutions. The latter might serve as a kind of North Star preventing us from losing our ethical bearings while navigating tempestuous seas, seeking as we must new ways to reconnect our dispersed tribes in a common humanity.