UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator Tom Fletcher has said the US “is challenging the international system in a way that we haven’t seen for decades”.
From pulling out of international and multilateral organisations such as the World Health Organisation to eliminating USAID, US President Donald Trump has made clear moves that business as usual would not suffice.
Speaking to The National in Davos before the start of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting, Mr Fletcher said: “This is a US-built world order after the Second World War. It’s the US that basically crafted and framed and often oversaw the way these international institutions operated.”
He added that he had been working closely with the US administration on several files, including getting aid into the Gaza Strip for the past year.
“In my experience, it’s a more transactional world, it is a more hard-power, raw-power world … but I’m not experiencing a US withdrawal from the issues that we’re working on,” he said.
“But I hear them wanting to engage overall, and so I take encouragement from that.”
Last month, the US committed $2 billion to the humanitarian sector, in addition to working with the UN to try to get access to areas in need of aid in Sudan and Gaza.
“There’s an enormous need out there, but $2 billion is a lot more than zero, which is what we feared that we would get,” Mr Fletcher said.
“It’s also significant because the US is coming in and saying very clearly, ‘This is in support of the humanitarian reset, the reforms that we’ve set out over the last year.’”
He added that having US support would ensure “that our sector becomes more efficient, reduces the layers, the duplication, the bureaucracy, and challenges us to make sure that every dollar is actually getting to where it’s most needed – and that’s the people who need their lives saved in 2026, so it’s significant”.
'Real estate-craft'
Mr Fletcher’s assessment of the US is that “the intention is still there to provide that engagement and leadership” in the world.
“What’s changed is the methods and what we’re experiencing is not so much statecraft as a version of real estate-craft,” he said.
Mr Fletcher’s framing of “real estate-craft”, in reference to Mr Trump’s deal making, is also reflected in the approach of his primary envoy, Steve Witkoff, who was also a real estate executive.
While the US is behind the greatest amount of disruption, other sources of unpredictability are adding to uncertain times causing concern to bureaucrats and civil servants.
Mr Fletcher stressed the importance of adjusting to this fast-paced world, saying: “Welcome to a driverless world.”
Mr Trump is due to address the World Economic Forum tomorrow, with expectations for much of the President’s commentary to be about his view of the future.
In a wide-ranging interview with The National, Mr Fletcher underlined the importance of access for humanitarians in a number of conflicts, but he recognised that the responsibility ultimately rests with politicians to make it happen. This is where diplomacy is most needed.
“The reality is that diplomacy is not dead,” Mr Fletcher said. “A few years ago, people were saying it’s over – diplomacy doesn’t matter any more.
“Now, watch this week at Davos, there’s a lot of diplomacy going on, and it's diplomacy that really matters to people’s lives and it matters most to the people I serve, the hundreds of millions out there who need that humanitarian support and need us to work together to end some of these conflicts.”
Mr Fletcher expects 2026 to be “a year of incredible diplomacy”.
“We’re actually going to end a number of these conflicts and, most importantly for me, we’re going to save 87 million lives that would otherwise have been lost, because of the plans that we have in place,” he added. Those plans rely on focusing on 20 to 30 countries to deliver life-saving aid, food, water, medicine and shelter.
Mr Fletcher has told key stakeholders that “as a result of the extraordinary reforms that we’ve implemented over the last year, what I need is the world to get behind that plan with $23 billion”, adding that the figure is “less than one per cent of what the world is currently planning to spend on arms and defence”.
To succeed, the plan for this year needs to be funded by March. “We’ve picked the most essential, highest severity crises and said, ‘If we do one thing in 2026, let’s get out there and save those 87 million lives.’ It’s a massive job ahead of us, but I’m confident we’ll succeed.”
Lack of access
In addition to funding, a lack of access is a major impediment to resolving humanitarian crises.
Mr Fletcher gave the Sudanese region of Darfur as an example. “I was trying to battle to get access ... and that’s not just the sort of physical access of being able to get our convoys there, but it’s actually the security we need to ensure we can deliver at real scale,” he said.
He had to go through 40 checkpoints on the way to Tawila, in Darfur, “negotiating border crossing by border crossing”.
According to international law, access to humanitarian aid should not be impeded. Mr Fletcher said it was a sign of “this time of impunity, and we’re seeing what happens to the world when the rules are stretched and undermined”.
He sounded his frustration, saying: “I shouldn’t have to ask for access. I should be able to literally drive those convoys through those checkpoints and to the people who most need that help.
“And yet, increasingly, people are using that leverage with us, restricting what we can and can’t do, and so our demand at the [UN] Security Council, first and foremost, is to insist on that access, but also to insist on the accountability for all those who are killing our humanitarians.”
Last year was the deadliest for humanitarians. They are also being targeted by groups – 73 UN workers are detained by the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
At a time of great polarisation on the Security Council, it would be difficult to reinstate the implementation of international law.
But Mr Fletcher warned that “if people neglect that fight, then everyone will lose. So we need the world to really stand up now and say, ‘We believe in this spirit of global solidarity and international co-operation.’”
He acknowledged that the UN was not perfect. “I’m not pretending for a moment that we are perfect, but we are the least bad idea there’s been so far for putting some scaffolding around the world and trying to protect humans and humanity from our worst instincts.”
Those worst instincts are being witnessed in Sudan, which Mr Fletcher said “really is the epicentre of human suffering on the planet … we cannot underestimate quite how brutal that conflict has become”.
However, he voiced a sound of hope, saying “there are some signs of optimism”, referring to the Quad of the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the US working together.
“When I look around the world at the big conflicts, big crises, that we face right now, Sudan is at the top of the list that we need to resolve,” he added.
“It’s one of those where I feel more optimism that there we’ve got an emerging package that could give us at least a humanitarian ceasefire and help us get the aid in and the civilians out of these areas where they’ve been besieged.”
Gaza aid
However, a ceasefire does not guarantee access. Gaza is a good example of where humanitarian aid is held up, even though the war on the enclave was, at least officially, halted.
The US is the main actor negotiating with the Israeli government to allow humanitarian supplies into the enclave.
With Mr Trump expected to reveal more details about his Gaza peace plan in Davos, Mr Fletcher pointed to the fact that “item nine of the 20-point plan is about UN-led humanitarian support to end that humanitarian crisis”.
While aid is not flowing sufficiently into Gaza, “over three months, we’ve made massive progress, we are now getting 1.5 million hot meals out every day in Gaza,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of shelters in, not enough, but we got a lot."
On what is required to meet all the humanitarian needs in Gaza, Mr Fletcher said: “We need to get much more aid in and that means we need all the crossings open ... we need our NGO partners allowed to operate at scale and not facing the restrictions that they’re facing.”
He also stressed that the UN refugees agency, which Israel refuses to work with, is crucial to those efforts.
“We need the entire UN family fully mobilised and UNRWA, of course, is a central part of that operation ... UNRWA is indispensable, irreplaceable.”
Mr Fletcher did not elaborate on the exact role for his agency, Ocha, or UNRWA, in the US plan.
However, he did say that “if you talk to the Americans negotiating this package, they’re very clear that they’ve got that overall control of what happens next, and that Israel and the other parties are part of that broader system that the Trump plan has put in place”.
He added that “since the ceasefire, it’s been the Americans that have led that negotiation with the Israeli side to ensure we get much, much more in than we could do before”.
Ocha is working with the Civil Military Co-ordination Centre, based in Ashdod. “We have a big team on the ground,” Mr Fletcher said. “We have a fantastic humanitarian co-ordinator who is massively part of that operation and the big agencies getting in huge amounts of aid every day.”
Mr Fletcher sounded less optimistic on Yemen. He stressed that his UN colleagues held by the Houthis “are some of the bravest humanitarians in the world, who are willing to go towards the sound of danger to help the survivors”.
He also spoke about problems of access in Yemen. “I feel quite pessimistic at the moment about the prospects of us getting the access we need when we’re facing such dangers and such threats to our work, when we’re effectively being pushed down,” he added.
Mr Fletcher will seek access for humanitarians in his meetings in Davos, but he will also search for opportunities for peace.
“As long as these conflicts rage, we’re the fire engine with the ambulance that’s going out there and trying to save as many survivors as we can,” he said.
But stopping fires and injuries will ultimately rely on peace deals.
In the interim, Mr Fletcher said that his New Year’s resolution is to “get out there and save 87 million lives while reforming the system further and demonstrating we can bring innovation and creativity and coherence across what is quite an eclectic sector, with that single-minded objective of there being those 87 million people alive at the end of the year, who would not be alive if we didn’t act in that way”.
