Initial $2 billion in aid through UN will go to Ukraine, Syria and Haiti
Daniel Greenfield | Jan 13, 2025
United Nations General Assembly. Photo by Mojnsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia
A few days before New Year’s Eve, when hardly anyone was paying attention, State Department officials visited Geneva and signed a $2 billion aid deal with the UN.
The State Department touted the deal as “more lives saved for fewer tax dollars” and called it a “Trump administration humanitarian reset”. The bottom line though is that it represents an initial commitment of $2 billion to the same corrupt and broken UN aid delivery system.
Administration officials have emphasized that ‘initial’ $2 billion is significantly lower than the past $8-10 billion in funding, that the deal requires consolidating some of the UN’s bureaucracy and allows for closer management of the money we send to the United Nations.
But some are questioning whether we should be providing any aid through the UN at all.
The Memorandum of Understanding signed with the UN provides that “initial” $2 billion to a list of 17 countries including Ukraine, Haiti, both Sudans, Kenya, the Congo, El Salvador and others. Some of the 17 countries raise major red flags including Syria, run by an Al Qaeda affiliate, Nigeria, where Christians continue to be killed, Guatemala, and Bangladesh, where an Islamist coup has unleashed Muslim mobs massacring Hindus.
But there is an even bigger red flag in that the agreement also reportedly directs money to the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund which is focused on ‘climate action’ and has provided millions to Afghanistan. The MOU will presumably allow for closer US supervision of CERF funding, but the UN group is still a radical operation. This list of 17 is not comprehensive, but an initial list of eligible nations, much as the $2 billion is an initial infusion of aid. It’s unknown which other countries may be added, only that Gaza and South Africa are for now excluded.
While the MOU will allow more American control over spending, the aid will still be moved through a UN system that is fundamentally corrupt and which has been caught repeatedly lying about famines in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere for political reasons, including to attack the Trump administration, blaming fake famines on entirely reasonable cuts in aid funding.
Without extensive verification, we will have limited ability to prevent the UN’s typical aid scams.
The UN has been caught faking famines in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Gaza and Kenya. While only one of these countries is on the current list of 17, there is no reason to trust an organization that lies this much, no matter what accountability mechanisms are in place.
The centerpiece of the MOU’s reforms is that funding will be run through the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) which is “going to control the spigot”.
Why should we trust the OCHA more than any other UN component?
OCHA was front and center in the Gaza famine and genocide hoaxes. Tom Fletcher, the UN official who signed the MOU with the State Department, and who would be in charge of the ‘spigot’, is a British diplomat who was nominated by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Starmer government is a radical leftist regime fundamentally hostile to Trump and to America.
“There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” Fletcher lied about Gaza. He claimed that “the vast, vast majority of the aid that we get in gets to civilians” when the UN’s own figures showed 95% of its trucks were being intercepted.
The lies about Gaza aid provide no reason to trust OCHA or the UN anywhere in the world.
Fletcher seemed to have come up with the “humanitarian refresh” as a way to sell the Trump administration on a UN version of DOGE, but the diplomat is mostly a hype man, Newsom with a posh British accent, prone to doing media tours and making grandiose statements like “we’re jumping off a cliff, not knowing whether anyone will catch us” and “we drive the ambulance towards the fire on your behalf, but we are also now being asked to put the fire out. And there is not enough water in the tank. And we are being shot at.”
Like many UN aid officials, Fletcher claims that the billions of dollars that the UN gets translates into millions of lives saved. Anyone familiar with the UN and foreign aid ought to be skeptical.
When you send money to the UN, you are not helping people, you are helping the UN.
Contrary to the Trump administration’s press releases, the United States gets no moral or strategic benefit from funding the UN. If we want to feed hungry people, we can send food directly to the affected areas. It may not be the most efficient system and the food may be stolen, but the end results are unlikely to be any worse than directing it through the UN.
When you consider the UN’s own figures of 95% aid trucks being intercepted in Gaza, why would we think that it and its ‘humanitarian partners’ are the best way to hand out aid in Haiti, Syria or Sudan? What in the UN’s track record suggests that it’s a trustworthy partner?
Have we learned nothing from the UN shipping stacks of hundred dollar bills to the Taliban? Or UN personnel sexually abusing kids in Haiti and the Central African Republic and fathering children on underage minors in exchange for food? Or Bill Clinton’s UN Oil-for-Food program in Iraq which managed to direct money to the UN Secretary General’s son?
Is there a single good reason to direct billions in taxpayer money and food through an organization where there were thousands of allegations of personnel trading food for sex, including 300 cases involving children, and an extensive record of aiding Islamic terrorists?
The MOU reforms are generally praiseworthy, but past administrations thought they could reform the UN only to discover that the United Nations is more corrupt than they could imagine. The Bush administration rejected a House Republican proposal to cut UN aid in half and instead pointed to various reforms that would fix it, but the UN has only gotten worse since.
Helping people in need is a praiseworthy goal, but it should not come at the expense of subsidizing the United Nations, an organization that long ago became hostile to America, or its ‘humanitarian’ arms which are notoriously corrupt and serve as mechanisms for aiding terrorists.
The Trump administration should end the partnership with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) which has been caught lying about famines around the world, stop funding UN mechanisms and the usual global NGOs and start distributing aid through credible Christian charities. If a Christian charity can’t operate in a particular country, we shouldn’t send it aid.
In Gaza, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund performed far better than the UN. It did so much better that the media, the UN and Hamas teamed up to smear it and drive it out. That’s a model for foreign aid elsewhere. Instead of funding the UN, we should fund real charities and real aid.
We don’t need the UN to help people. That’s a globalist fallacy we would be well rid of.
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