The tragedy of all ongoing wars is that both sides think they can still win.

That's the story of Sudan, it's the story of Ukraine.

And those places are not sustainable.

That's why people are leaving them.

That's why people are dying.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are talking about a global crisis that gets far less attention than it should.

We'll start with the number, 123 million.

That's how many people are forcibly displaced from their homes right now.

It's the highest number ever recorded.

It's double what it was just 10 years ago.

Since 2022, the global population of refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people has exploded, driven by war in Ukraine, violence in Sudan, state collapse in Venezuela, Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and a worsening humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

The UN's Refugee Chief, Filippo Grandi, put it bluntly.

This is a season of war.

This is a time of crisis.

Violence has become the defining currency of our age.

These aren't just numbers.

They're families walking across deserts, children growing up in tents, entire communities that no longer exist.

Where do they go?

Not usually to the countries with the most money.

The vast majority are hosted in low and middle income countries that are nearby.

Nations already struggling with poverty, with conflicts, with food insecurity.

Places like Colombia, Uganda, Iran and Pakistan.

Millions never even cross an international border, meaning the world's most dangerous and under-resourced places are shouldering a disproportionately high share of the burden.

Yet just as the need is skyrocketing, the global aid system designed to respond to this crisis is unraveling.

The United States, its largest single donor, has dramatically scaled back its commitments.

What happens when the poorest countries are left to solve the hardest problems, and who, if anyone, is stepping up to help?

Because the imbalance isn't just unfair, it's dangerous.

When unstable nations are pushed past their limits, they risk collapsing entirely and exporting their problems to the rest of the world.

Joining me now to help make sense of this crisis and where we go from here, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband.

And later, an indigenous group in Argentina fighting for its home and ancestral lands.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, health care, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... Dave Miliband, good to have you back.

Yeah, good to be here.

I want to start with something positive.

You were just in Syria.

You made it back.

A lot of people go in these days.

You probably wouldn't have gone to Syria a couple of years ago.

Well, we've worked in Syria for the last 10, 12 years, we, the International Rescue Committee, both in the northwest of Syria, where you had rebel groups in control, northeast Kurds.

Look, it's a remarkable situation in Syria because the destruction is enormous.

I mean, great tracts of land, great towns just flattened, across the road from the citadel in Aleppo, destruction.

But at the same time as all this destruction, enormous sense of possibility.

Every single person you talk to, an IRC staff member, a client, a doctor in a hospital, when you say to them, are you optimistic about the future, they say, I'm more optimistic than I was six months ago.

And then they have been for decades.

Much more than they have been, because 50 years of Assad family rule, and a chance that they can make their own future.

Obviously, massive pressure on the government to get its timeline for politics and social renewal and economic change in sync, but a real sense of possibility.

I mean for the last 10 years, conversations with you have been about more and more and more displaced people, more refugees.

Syria, are we starting to see large numbers go back and rebuild?

Globally there are more and more refugees, 122 million refugees and displaced people.

But Syria, 450,000 people have gone back since December last year.

In six months.

About 80 to 100,000 have left, so it's not all one-way traffic.

A lot of people going back, checking out the situation, going back to their families out of Syria, many in Turkey, many in Lebanon and Jordan, many in Germany, Sweden.

So there's a lot of movement, but there's also a sense in the government, I had a chance to speak to the President, the Foreign Minister, as well as our own staff and clients there, they know they've got to make Syria a welcoming place for all Syrians.

As you go in, it says at the passport office, if you're a Syrian coming home, welcome back to rebuilding your country.

So there's a sense that it's got to be, if not pluralistic, at least inclusive in its organization, in its politics, in its polity.

I know it was a short meeting and I know it was translated, but still, there aren't many people that are watching the show right now that have had a chance to meet with Syria's new leader.

Give me a little bit of a sense of what you took away from him as a human being.

I took away focus.

I took away clarity.

I took away real pride that he feels in having overthrown a regime who many saw as living forever.

I also saw someone who's quite worldly.

I mean, he's played the diplomatic game with the United States, with the regional neighbors very adroitly.

And this is someone who shouldn't be underestimated.

OK, so that's it's nice to start with some good news.

And for now, at least, very fragile, but good news.

Most of the world that you're looking at right now, that your people are on the ground right now are not facing good news.

The numbers are up.

The humanitarian crises are growing.

It doesn't feel sustainable.

I mean we're talking about dozens of essentially failed and failing states that no one's stepping in to fix.

What what do you how do you respond to that?

Well I think you're pointing to one of the symptoms of a G-Zero world a leaderless world a world without rules and without guardrails because in 20 countries in crisis there are about two hundred and seventy five million people in humanitarian need.

That means they depend on organizations like the International Rescue Committee to survive.

There's a total 300 million people in humanitarian need but the preponderance of them is in these 20 crisis-ridden countries led by Sudan, led by Gaza, led by until December Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There also Myanmar, places that get forgotten and tens of millions of people in each of those countries, Sudan to take an example, 16 million people in humanitarian need, 3 million refugees in neighboring very poor countries like South Sudan, a lot of regional meddling on all sides of the civil conflict.

And those places are not sustainable.

That's why people are leaving them.

That's why people are dying.

And the scale of impunity the loss of international engagement is epic really.

And we we face a new abnormal.

Ten years ago there were 50 to 60 million internally displaced people and refugees.

Now there's 120 million internally displaced people and refugees.

That's not economic migrants appearing at the southern border.

These are people who are fleeing conflict and violence.

You say Sudan you realize this is a political problem a political emergency not not an not just an economic.

And that's what about 10 million of that number just Sudan at this point.

Well yeah you're right in terms of if you add together the internal displacement plus the refugees who've gone into neighbouring states you're over 10 million people.

Now that is not a sustainable situation even if the aid system was working with full disbursements of money at 0.7 percent of GNP which is the UN target and it was being delivered in the most effective ways.

Neither of those things are happening at the moment.

The aid budgets are being shrunk led by the US obviously.

And there's huge challenge of the aid budget being spread too thin from the acute emergencies through to the preparedness against COVID, the next Covid, we're not doing a good enough job.

And so it's to go back to your question.

What you face is fragile states becoming failing states, failing states becoming so failed that they export their own problems, because none of these situations remain confined within the countries that they start.

Now, in the case of Syria, there's a failure of the international community, but there's success of the regional community after the revolution occurred.

Sudan, we don't have success of the regional community.

Why aren't even the regional actors doing more to bring this war to an end?

The tragedy of all ongoing wars is that both sides think they can still win.

That's the story of Sudan.

It's the story of Ukraine that you know well.

And you've got supporters of both sides in Sudan piling in to support each side.

The scale of the abrogation of responsibility of the international system is very very high.

Indeed the U.N. is blocked from doing its work.

There are all sorts of attempts to block what NGOs are doing.

So you've got.

Essentially the implosion of the country under the duress of on the one hand, sponsorship of war on the other hand, the retreat of diplomacy we talk about an imbalanced world a world out of balance and one of the imbalances is that between the use of hard power and diplomacy hard power on the increase diplomacy in retreat Sudan is the preeminent case of it.

- So if we were to look at all the conflicts out there is there another one or two that you think we might be getting close to a resolution and why?

- Well let me give you... - Sudan clearly isn't yet.

- Let me give you the case where there's so much tragedy if we don't get it right now.

The U.S. and Qatar have brokered some kind of halt in fighting in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

This is a 30, 40 year set of civil conflicts.

It involves external actors as well as internal strife.

The government's writ doesn't run across the whole country.

The need for implementation of this cessation of hostilities is absolutely preeminent because tens of millions of people's lives are at stake there.

And it's the kind of place that will so suffer if it doesn't have the world's attention.

A little bit of attention can make a big difference.

But if it doesn't get attention on the humanitarian track, on the economic track, because there's enormous rentier state there but also on the political track then the consequences are not just confined to the eastern DRC Democratic Republic Congo.

They spill out much more broadly indeed.

- All this is happening at a time that the United States has shut down USAID is dramatically reducing its foreign aid footprint.

How has that affected your operations around the world?

Yeah the U.S. was the anchor of the global aid system.

And I use that metaphor advisedly.

It calmed troubled waters through the scale of what the U.S. did and the breadth of what it did not just for my organization but for the whole system.

Everything from preparedness in respect of famines to emergency relief after earthquakes and everything in between.

The U.S. was more or less four in every ten dollars of the global aid system.

Three and a half to four in ten of every ten dollars.

At a global level it was a big and serious aid player more or less on a par with all the European Union countries plus the EU budget put together.

When you pull up the anchor on a boat in choppy waters you know well the boat rocks and the passengers get seasick.

That's what's happening at the moment.

Just to give you to bring it down to my own organization we've lost more or less 130, 140 million dollars of international funding.

We've had to close programs affecting about two million people in places like Afghanistan, education, South Sudan, help for refugees from Sudan.

It's a very big shock to the system, and it's on top of that, there's a lot of uncertainty because we don't know what's coming next.

We still have about 30 grants and contracts with the US government but they're all coming up for renewal because these are often short-term grants and our plea to the administration is not to pull the rug from under vital services.

They've said they want to continue them.

Secretary Rubio when he was a senator spoke very powerfully about the benefits, the soft power benefits as well as the human benefits of this American funding and for all the need for reform which we would put ourselves at the forefront of, higher impact, better evidence, more innovation, all of that needed, but the anchor being pulled up is costing lives and making a huge difference around the world.

So who's coming in?

I mean for an organization like yours, of course it's very popular to say, well the Americans are leaving, what an opportunity for China.

I mean have there been any Chinese leaders, formal and informal, that have said, "hey we could have a more of a role the IRC, that would look good for us?"

Yeah, I was in China in March and they're very disciplined in my experience of talking both in and out of government.

They see enormous opportunity in de-Americanization of the global system, but they're not going to move into the humanitarian aid business.

That's not their area.

They have done an agreement with UNICEF in Cambodia to step in, but they're not playing on the humanitarian track.

They have a very strong economic development drive, as you know, through Belt and Road initiative and related efforts.

They have quite grandiose strategies for global security, global development, global civilization, global security, but they don't want to get drawn in.

And the truth is, the great sucking sound you can hear is money leaving the humanitarian aid sector, but it's not being replaced.

There's some private philanthropy coming in, but if you listen to the Gates Foundation, they'll tell you we're having to rethink because we can't replace one for one, anything like one for one, what USAID and the State Department were previously doing.

Europeans are not in the position they were in in 2017, 2018, because they're super burdened by the Ukraine challenge, never mind their own debt issues post the COVID crisis.

So at the moment, the poorest people in the world are suffering a double whammy.

One, the reduction in aid flows.

Secondly, global interest rates are higher than they were a couple of years ago.

So health and education budgets in poor countries are being raided to pay off debts.

And that means there's less to go around domestically.

So no one sees this as a soft power opportunity?

Not at the moment, but you are seeing serious debate in the Gulf about what they should do with their money.

Now, we have to keep this in perspective.

The Saudi economy is a trillion-dollar economy, which is very high per head, but remember the US is a $30 trillion economy.

So we've got to keep a sense of scale, but nonetheless, there's real thinking there.

There's real thinking in countries like Turkey about what role they're going to play.

But I would say that for countries like Japan, which are very big development spenders, there are big challenges about what's the focus of their aid flow is going to be in the future and how are they going to play into this big soft power competition that's starting.

So if you had a crystal ball and the United States for the next three years, three and a half years, Trump administration is still going to continue to be largely absent from the space that it has served the anchor.

Who do you think is going to be the biggest player out there?

Well, the biggest player is going to be the European Union over that period because it's now the largest aid donor in the world.

Will they do it in a coordinated way?

Well, by definition, they are coordinated because... - The spend is, yeah.

And also, the spend runs until the 1st of January 2028.

The great thing about European Union budgets is that seven-year budgets often take seven years to negotiate, but once they're fixed, then you've got some certainty.

So until the 1st of January 2028, we know that European development and humanitarian spend is going to put it right at the forefront and I don't see anyone supplanting them.

The big issue is where does the money go?

Does it go towards the fragile and conflict states and does it have the political shoulder weight behind it to open up aid flows in places like Sudan and Gaza where people in desperate need are being blocked from receiving the aid that they require?

We've had a lot of shows on technology and particularly AI and when I think about sustainable development goals I think about AI one of the few things coming out there that could make a real difference.

Have you seen any use cases thus far that have been positive for refugees and for humanitarian aid that's come from these new technologies?

Yes, I can.

It's really important to highlight that data plus technology can mean massive performance and productivity gains for the poorest people in the world as well as for the richest people in the world.

So let me give you some examples.

When we deliver information now to people on the run from conflict through our signpost global program, we can translate through AI so that it's in every local language that you need.

When we try and help kids who are displaced by conflict and need to continue their education, we've now got an education program that uses computer-aided learning in very, very tailored effect.

We've got a very interesting example at the moment of diagnosing Mpox by taking photographs of lesions to ensure that we have quick diagnosis even beyond the reach of health systems.

So we have the use cases.

What we don't yet have is the investment in infrastructure or programmatic scale that could really deliver the kind of transformation that I think is made possible by this technological advance.

David Miliband, thanks for coming back on the show.

Thank you very much.

And now we turn from a global crisis to a more local one.

Will Fitzpatrick brings us this story from Argentina, where the indigenous Mapuche people are fighting the Mille government for the right to remain on their ancestral lands.

In Argentina's Patagonia region, the Mapuche people say they are facing increasing persecution under President Javier Milei, the libertarian leader whose promises of economic reform are intensifying longstanding conflicts over indigenous rights.

Facing a deep financial crisis, Milei views Argentina's vast natural resources as a key to its economic recovery.

Mining exports will top five billion this year and are expected to triple by 2030.

But indigenous groups like the Mapuche are often the loudest voices fighting for environmental protection and conservation, putting them in conflict with the administration.

The Mapuche live on lands that have been passed down through generations, often without legal deeds.

Territories now overlap with public land, private property, or national parks.

Previous administrations have tried to quell decades-long land disputes, but Malay's government says the Mapuche have no legal standing.

Soon, government officials began releasing videos of the evictions on social media.

>> In a statement, the government said that the law was no longer justified, arguing that it created unequal treatment among citizens and restricted economic and recreational use of public lands.

Soon after the raid in Los Alerces, wildfires broke out across the country.

On February 11th, the government raided 15 Mapuche communities searching for evidence of arson.

Every year on March 24th, Argentines fill the streets to remember the victims of the military dictatorship, a regime that disappeared nearly 30,000 people in the name of national order.

This year among the crowds were many Mapuche communities.

For them, state violence is not just a memory.

Despite increased pressure, Mapuche communities continue to push for legal recognition and the right to live on their ancestral lands.

As the conflict between economic opportunity and environmental protection plays out all over the world.

Here in Argentina, the Mapuche are a reminder of what will be lost if governments prioritize growth at all costs and abandon the indigenous people and cultures that have lived here for centuries.

For GZERO World, I'm Will Fitzpatrick.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, you've got a few spare tents, water filters, functioning international institutions lying around, help us out.

Come check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, health care, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... ♪♪