The Weaponization of Humanitarian Aid
In July 2025, the Trump administration closed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), cancelling over 80 percent of the department’s ongoing aid programs and absorbing the rest in state departments (Faguy 2025). This decision is projected to result in the death of more than 14 million people by 2030 (Cavalcanti 2025). However, the decision to shut down aid provisions was not unique to the United States—it has become somewhat of a global phenomenon over the past few months. The U.K. slashed aid by more than 40 percent earlier last year (bringing their levels down to the lowest in 25 years), France cut humanitarian aid by nearly 40 percent, and Germany reduced their aid budget by nearly 50 percent (MacKinnon 2025; MacKinnon 2025; Fürstenau 2025). As economic conditions worsened, many countries sought to cut down their budgets for aid grants, framing these decisions as inevitable responses to fiscal pressures and domestic economic priorities (United Nations 2025). Yet, the scale, coordination, and selectivity of these cuts suggest a more deliberate shift in how wealthy nations view their obligations to vulnerable and marginalized populations.
Rather than broadly diminishing their scope, governments have disproportionately reduced funding for humanitarian relief, public health, and development programs that serve low-income countries, while preserving or expanding spending tied to national security and domestic economic protection (Abdel aziz 2025; Dreher et al. 2024). This pattern reveals a restructuring of aid from a moral or humanitarian commitment to a more strategic, conditional framework, laying the groundwork for aid to be repurposed in fundamentally political ways.
Aid has become worth more than just its dollar amount and resources: it is transforming into political and strategic leverage (Manurung 2025). As aid becomes scarcer, donor nations gain greater power to dictate the terms under which it is distributed. In this context, humanitarian assistance is increasingly functioning less as a moral obligation and, instead, as a bargaining chip in geopolitical negotiations. The remaining aid flows are being redirected toward countries that align with donor interests, support foreign policy objectives, or provide strategic advantages (VanRooyen 2025). Countries facing catastrophic disasters may find themselves unable to access assistance because they lack the geopolitical leverage to make their suffering command the attention of those in power. For instance, crises in regions such as Cameroon, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, and Mali, despite widespread displacement and severe food insecurity, remain among the most underfunded and least visible globally due to limited media coverage and perceived strategic irrelevance (Lawal 2025). The weaponization of aid thus transforms what should be an expression of human solidarity into an instrument of oppression, where survival depends not on the severity of need but on strategic calculations made in distant capitals.
While the concept of humanitarian law has been around for centuries, the modern system of humanitarian aid was born out of the principles codified in the Geneva Convention. However, even in its formative years, humanitarian aid existed in tension with political realities. The Cold War era saw both the United States and Russia use development assistance and emergency aid as strategies to secure allegiances and counter rival influence (Kramer 1999). The post-Cold War period brought new complexities to humanitarian action: the 1990s saw a rapid increase of crises in places like Somalia and Rwanda that challenged the notion of neutral assistance, the “War on Terror” in 2001 blurred boundaries between the government and independence, and in the late 2000s aid became more heavily integrated with stabilization and counterinsurgency objectives in places like Afghanistan and Iraq (McGreal 2015; Brauman 2016). Development aid and humanitarian assistance, which were once distinct concepts, began merging in practice, with long-term programs being designed to address the “root causes” of these crises while emergency aid was expected to contribute to broader political and security goals (United Nations Development Programme n.d.).
What distinguishes the current moment, however, is not merely the politicization of aid, but rather the degree to which humanitarian principles have been systematically subordinated to political control. In the past few years, the foundational separation between humanitarian principles and political objectives has been so thoroughly compromised that the recent wave of aid weaponization represents not a sudden departure from established norms, but a deeper culmination of decades of gradual erosion.
In contemporary conflicts, access to food, medicine, and shelter is becoming more dependent on political compliance and cooperation with security. This dynamic manifests in a multitude of ways: states may block aid convoys to areas controlled by opposition groups, condition humanitarian access on populations’ cooperation with stability efforts, or manipulate formal bureaucratic processes (Abdel aziz 2025). The result is a perverse system in which the most desperate populations become hostages in broader political struggles.
At the same time, however, international institutions tasked with coordinating humanitarian responses find themselves constrained by political pressures. Multilateral organizations depend heavily on voluntary contributions, leaving them vulnerable to donor influence and funding volatility (Dreher et al. 2024). When major contributors withdraw or redirect their support, agencies are forced to scale back operations, redefine mandates, or prioritize crises deemed strategically relevant (Dreher et al. 2024; VanRooyen 2025). This creates a feedback loop in which underfunded emergencies continue to receive less attention and deteriorate further. The architecture of humanitarian aid thus begins to mirror global power hierarchies, reinforcing inequality rather than alleviating it (Rejali 2020).
As aid budgets shrink and priorities reconfigure, the original principles that once defined the systems are gradually collapsing. What replaces this infrastructure is a more conditional and fragmented landscape in which relief is delivered selectively and withdrawn strategically. This new standard lacks the predictability and reliability that allowed governments and humanitarian organizations to plan long-term interventions. Instead, communities facing disaster must navigate an uncertain terrain where assistance may arrive or not depending on factors entirely beyond their control: whether their government has aligned with the right powers, whether their crisis generates sympathetic media coverage in donor countries, whether their geography holds strategic value, or where helping them serves some broader political agenda. In such contexts, deaths from preventable illnesses, malnutrition, and displacement-related exposure increase simply because aid is being withheld, delayed, or conditioned (Cavalcanti 2025). As we see countries like Sudan, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, and many others facing indescribably awful conditions today, we must remember that every death from preventable disease, every child who starves, and every family displaced without assistance represents a deliberate failure of the international system.
These consequences are the direct result of political choices made by those with the power to help but have decided that these lives are not worth the cost of aid, be it the systematic underfunding of humanitarian response plans, the suspension of life-saving health and nutrition programs, and the prioritization of aid flows to geopolitically strategic partners over populations facing comparable or greater levels of disaster (Abdel aziz 2025; Cavalcanti 2025). In a world where humanitarian aid is increasingly governed by alignment rather than need, suffering is no longer merely a tragedy of circumstance but rather an outcome shaped by design.
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