Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva is a podcast about global politics, humanitarian issues, and international aid, hosted by journalist Imogen Foulkes. It is produced by SWI swissinfo.ch, a multilingual international public service media company from Switzerland.
Inside Geneva
War, Peace and Cake: The World in 2025
2025 has been a year of conflict, upheaval, and huge challenges to the international system.
Gunilla von Hall, Svenskadagbladet: "It all started downhill from 20th of January. Since then, it's just, well, ‘the Ukraine war will be over in 24 hours?’ Nothing happened. It just got worse. Then we had Gaza, then we have Iran, Israel. Then we had the cuts of all the aid. It's very bleak. I think we should just not give up our hope, but it looks really... We have four years."
The humanitarian work Geneva does has been decimated. Nick Cumming-Bruce, contributor, New York Times: "What is disturbing is the very casual destruction of international institutions and agreements that have been pulled together over many years, decades of works since World War II, and which for all their many imperfections are trying, with some cases significant success, to address the critical challenges that the world faces."
Is everything bleak? Or can we find some hope somewhere?
Imogen Foulkes, host of Inside Geneva: "These are hard times and people I think are very anxious at the moment. Maybe we should still pay tribute, hat tip, to the humanitarian work that comes out of Geneva. People who, they don't live peacefully here in this quiet city. They are in Gaza, they are in Sudan, they are in Afghanistan."
Listen to Inside Geneva for a review of the first six months of a momentous year.
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Host: Imogen Foulkes
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This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Foulkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
Speaker 1:In today's programme, In the year 2525, if man is still alive.
Speaker 4:Tonight I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. We devastated the Iranian nuclear program. Many presidents have dreamed of delivering the final blow to Iran's nuclear program, and none could until President Trump.
Speaker 5:The world is watching with growing alarm. We are not drifting toward crisis, we are racing toward it. The expansion of this conflict could ignite a fire that no one can control. We must not let that happen.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva and, as you heard in the introduction, we've got something a little different for you today. I know it's not actually 2525, but indulge me, because the year 2025 so far has felt, I think we could say, pretty worrying, maybe even apocalyptic. So here we are, inside Geneva's little studio in the United Nations building. We're bringing you an analysis of the first six months of this year. I've got with me Gunilla van Hol of the Swedish daily Svenska Darkbladet, and Nick Cumming-Bruce, regular contributor to the New York Times, all experts in what happens in Geneva. And to comfort ourselves in this grim year so far, we even got some cake. I was being a bit flippant and wondering if we should call this episode war and cake. Let me ask you both first in this, this moment, before we reflect a whole lot on the first six months I mean, dare we even eat cake? Is it the moment? We had we our cake, so we?
Speaker 6:can't really regret that.
Speaker 3:But, as you said, it all started downhill from 20th of January. That's when it started and since then it's just well. The Ukraine war will be over in 24 hours. Nothing happened, it just got worse, and right now it's just black and nothing hopeful on the horizon. And then we had Gaza, then we have Iran, then we had Gaza, then we have Iran, israel, and then we have the cutdowns of all the aid and it's very bleak. I think we should just not give a hop our hope, but it looks really we have four years. Yeah, donald Trump, and he is the one who doesn't want to be involved in supporting humanitarian aid or having multilateral diplomatic solutions to anything, it seems.
Speaker 2:Well, you have given an excellent summary of where we're going to go in this podcast. But before we wind right back to January, Nick, what about you? How are you feeling halfway through the year? I mean, what do you sense in Geneva?
Speaker 6:Nothing but unmitigated gloom. At this point, as Gunilla has just said, really, we've watched essentially the unravelling of all the international frameworks that exist to try and mitigate the effects of conflict in the world, and instead we have intensifying humanitarian disasters on many continents, evisceration of international aid, which is already costing lives in ways that are probably never going to be fully counted, and the most powerful country in the world taking unilateral positions that are often at variance with international law, which has grim consequences for the rest of the international community.
Speaker 2:Grim, indeed. Let's start with a topic you both raised, and what I should tell our listeners is we're going to play you a few highlights over the course of this episode of earlier podcasts we did so you can find all of them. Wherever you get your podcasts, I'll put the links to them also in our show notes. In January, even before January, we knew there were going to be cuts to humanitarian aid agencies, so we were prepared. Still, I'm going to give you now a little flavor of the kind of things we heard then from a variety of aid agencies.
Speaker 4:Late today, the US State Department suspended all foreign assistance around the world for at least three months. It affects tens of billions of dollars for programs that extend from.
Speaker 7:In Colombia they've just had to lay off 200 staff that were doing the demining in the south of the country. So all of a sudden these families have no work and the alternative in the area you know what it is Coca plants. So how is that in the US interest?
Speaker 4:The Trump administration has issued a halt to nearly all existing foreign aid.
Speaker 1:Creating safe zones for Syrian women in refugee camps, providing medical assistance to pregnant women in Burma. This is the type of action the UN Population Fund has led. The US has been one of the UN agency's founders and main donors. It's now ceasing all contributions. Right now, a woman dies of a preventable form of maternal mortality every two minutes. Okay, so that's unacceptable. What is one of the grants that the US just cut is to support the training and salaries for midwives.
Speaker 8:The United Nations is saying that there could be 2,000 new cases of HIV due to the USAID cuts. This, as President Donald Trump puts millions of dollars of foreign aid on pause. We actually had something that was successful. This, as President Donald Trump puts millions of dollars of foreign aid on pause. We actually had something that was successful. We were one of the only 17 sustainable development goals that was able to see the end in sight. We're so close to ending AIDS full stop and we could very well be turning back completely.
Speaker 2:Well, you heard a variety of aid agencies there. They really set out their stalls at the beginning of the year. We heard from UN Population Fund. They run maternal health clinics. We heard from UNAIDS. Now we all know why it's important that that body continues to function. We heard from demining. Did anybody listen to them six months on? As far as I understand it, that three-month freeze has now become permanent.
Speaker 6:I think it's a mixed picture, because some of the programs that were suspended are back in action. Some funding is coming back to demining programs that went through.
Speaker 2:Of course you work quite closely with demining programs.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that were temporarily paused, but damage was done even to them. Opportunities were lost, things that should have happened didn't.
Speaker 6:People have been laid off in significant numbers who will probably never be rehired. In a lot of different programs. The US was the biggest funder of mine action in the world for many years. It may well continue to be, but significant damage has been done. And that's just one little kind of segment of one little corner of the international aid effort.
Speaker 6:There are much bigger swathes of humanitarian action which are dealing with more immediate crises in Sudan, somalia, afghanistan, wherever there is a major conflict running, and these are suffering acutely. And then you have, of course, the loss of funds to institutions like the Human Rights Office here, a loss of about one third of their budget this year, which will mean cuts in staff, which will mean cuts in their ability to support all sorts of programmes that are not very high profile but help states to implement legal reforms that basically help stabilise societies. And those are all suffering. So there's a lot of intangible costs as well as the very visible costs in terms of the loss of funding for the UNAIDS programme. The loss of funding for the UNAIDS programme, the loss of funding for the WHO and the essential work it does fighting diseases like TB and polio.
Speaker 2:These are costs that are going to be weighed for years to come. I think one of the things, gunilla, is that when these things stop, it becomes also incredibly costly to restart them. I mean, you and I were at that evening last week in Geneva, that rather nice party where everybody from Geneva was there, and I don't know if you bumped into it. I bumped into the head of UN Humanitarian Affairs, tom Fletcher. He's in town to basically say I know we're not even going to get half what we need. So he's basically triaging now. People who are suffering famine or caught up in conflict, I mean very hard decisions.
Speaker 3:It's really, really sad. And then the other aspect, too, is this the cuts in money and helping people who really need. And then the other side is how the agencies are being told not to use to wash off on the websites, basically words that have to do with equality, inclusion, diversity, climate change.
Speaker 9:Women.
Speaker 3:Women. You can say extreme weather, but they should not talk about climate change. This censoring of words, that kind of, is the basis for their work. I think that's also very, very scary. Then I think the cutdowns are extreme. What is it? 83% of USAID programs cut down, meaning that in Sudan, 80% of all the community kitchens are now closed.
Speaker 2:And let's remind our listeners that it's what 12 million people are displaced, 13 million in Sudan. This appalling conflict, because of all the other conflicts, doesn't get nearly enough attention.
Speaker 3:No, Emergency food distribution in a country like Afghanistan, wfp says we have to close it, we have to stop it, we do not have the money. I mean the suffering and then the censoring of the work that they are doing and the ideas that they're building. This work on all agencies. That is very ominous.
Speaker 6:Which basically feed into the whole sort of dynamic that's driving instability around the world. So in whose interests does this work? It certainly isn't in the long-term best interests of any of the governments in the United States.
Speaker 2:It's exactly the point that Tamara Gabelnik in that clip we heard there she's the head of the international campaign to ban landmines. People will turn to farming coca in Colombia because they're demining. I mean, colombia is infested with mines.
Speaker 6:Their demining was providing good livelihoods as well as doing good work but it also raises the question of what is the rest of the world going to do about it? I mean, here has been the United States, shouldering a massive percentage of the international humanitarian budget for many, many years. There are plenty of other rich states that could be contributing. What are they going to do about it? Everybody is very much focused on the damage that the United States is inflicting on the multilateral system, and deservedly so, but what are other states going to do to protect it? The international humanitarian budget every year is funded largely by a very small group of Western states. So where is the second biggest economy in the world, china? Where is India? Where are rich countries like Singapore, which like to sit on the sidelines of these kinds of debates? They have the resources. What are these states going to do to shore up and contribute to refashioning the international system, if that's what we're now doing, in a more durable and sustainable way?
Speaker 3:But maybe that's where they're going to see their chance right now China, for example. They're going to see the chance to move in and take over in this power financial, but also power vacuum. It will be an opening and we know for China that they're moving into a lot of international organizations. They want to have much more impact and countries like Qatar Qatar now tries to attract a lot of UN agencies.
Speaker 2:Come here, put up your headquarter here, cheaper than Geneva, cheaper, and they can pay. We'll give you a free, air-conditioned building.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's kind of a blue wash. So we have to be these countries. Yes, where are they? Well, they might see a chance now to come in and get the influence they wanted and they want for the future in this new world order.
Speaker 6:Yeah, I think that the only caveat to that is that clear preference is for unilateral programs. The Saudi Arabias of this world, the Gulf states, china, they like to. It's not that they're not spending money, but they're not putting it through a system that basically reinforces international norms and standards. They're doing it unilaterally in ways that serve a national agenda.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I just want to add one thing there. On the other hand, there is also in the UN. There was a need to make things more efficient and to scale down and to I mean there has to be said too that there is. It's not good all this money is disappearing, but has the UN, all the agencies, functioned efficiently? Has money been wasted? Have there been, you know? Hasn't the work that been done in an efficient way? I think there is a need when you talk to people in the UN saying, yes, this was needed, but it wasn't supposed to happen like this.
Speaker 6:Can I just come back at that?
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, I want to come back at that too, because I have a different opinion, but you first, nick.
Speaker 6:Because I think you're absolutely right, the UN system was grotesquely inefficient in all sorts of ways.
Speaker 6:But I think what is disturbing is the very casual destruction of international institutions and agreements that have been pulled together over many years, decades of work since World War II, and which, for all their many imperfections, are trying with some cases, significant success to address the critical challenges that the world faces.
Speaker 6:And you know, I point to a story in the New York Times today which says that, you know, when Donald Trump sat down and signed his executive order 14169, pausing all humanitarian aid, it was in nobody's mind in the administration at that point to wrap up USAID and it just unfolded in a kind of rather sort of shambolic process where Elon Musk rolls in and basically tosses a $35 billion program into the wood chipper and so a program that Marco Rubio used to be a major supporter of is shuttered and abandoned and all the soft power that goes with it is also cancelled. How does that serve American interests? Let alone the damage that it does to people who are on the receiving end of that massive aid programme. But at the same time, the United States has shouldered a huge share of the international aid burden over many years.
Speaker 2:Well, but not in proportion to its economy. European countries pay more.
Speaker 6:No, but as a percentage of the total it's been a major share, and as they pull back, the question then is what are other countries in the world going to do to fight for the multilateral system and to fight for multilateral aid programs? How are they going to step forward? Multilateral aid has been funded by a small handful of European countries, so where are the Chinas? Where are the rich countries like Singapore? Where are the other big economies? Where is another aspiring global power, India, in supporting the multilateral system? It's time for us to see that and to see what they can do to reinvigorate a multilateral system and to give it the strength to really fight for all the values and legal advances that have been made since World War II, precisely to prevent the world slipping back into another major conflagration.
Speaker 3:But perhaps it wouldn't have happened otherwise. I spoke to someone who works at Optra the other day and he's saying, yeah, it shouldn't happen like this, but if it wasn't this kind of extreme wake-up maybe it would not have been done. He's not defending what's happening. Not defending, but just saying.
Speaker 2:I just want to jump in on that because I think I mean, like you, I've been reporting in Geneva for some years. When I came here, which was actually 20 years ago, we were having similar conversations about cuts and there was a change to coordinate much more. And I would honestly say and I've been in the field quite a lot with with in crisis zones, with humanitarian agencies I'm not sure, with humanitarian agencies, that there's that much left to cut. And just coming back to China, when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, we saw his withdrawal from the multilateral system and Chinese diplomats came here to Geneva and said that's okay, because we're here, we will step in.
Speaker 2:Did they invest more in humanitarian work? No, they didn't. You're right, nick, they want to do it all bilaterally. I think they want to have control of these countries, as the United States does, over an aid project, so that it fits into their own view of what's in their interests, which, of course, is antithetical to the whole principle of humanitarian work. Utter humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the fact that the agencies with years of experience have been shut out, blocked for months on end, and then somehow, our dear friend Donald Trump.
Speaker 2:I don't want to make this programme a total criticism of Donald Trump to be, fair to me, he did notice that there was a crisis in Gaza and decided that the US would do something about it with Israel enter the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. I'm going to play you a little bit of an excerpt of a podcast we did about that because I think to me this development is really significant for how Geneva works.
Speaker 4:We're going to help the people of Gaza get some food. People are starving.
Speaker 3:A US-backed aid organization aims to start work in the Gaza Strip by the end of May.
Speaker 5:This seems to be militarized, politicized, manipulated. People have to walk long distances through the rubble to get aid.
Speaker 9:After more than 80 days of a total blockade, Israel has started allowing a limited amount of supplies into some parts of the Strip. This is not child's play. It is not a military operation. It is a different thing that requires years and decades and decades of experience to get where we've got to now Hunger and fear.
Speaker 2:Palestinians in Gaza say going to new food distribution sites comes with the risk of death.
Speaker 6:Reports from Gaza say at least 26 Palestinians have been killed and many more wounded after Israeli tank fire hit people near a US-funded aid distribution center.
Speaker 9:It's a not-so-disaster. The writing was on the wall from quite a long time ago. All of the actors the UN, the humanitarian agencies, the NGOs have been saying that from the start. Militarizing aid is not going to work.
Speaker 4:Israeli forces have opened fire again on hungry Palestinians desperate for aid.
Speaker 9:It breaks my heart to say it, but it wasn't a surprise to see those horrendous images from the first day of operation of the GHF in Gaza.
Speaker 2:Just ending that there, that was Chris Locke here, the Secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders. He has a team, a big team, in Gaza. He goes there regularly himself, and he's quite right. Delivering aid is not child's play and, my God, what have we seen since that foundation started?
Speaker 6:Well, according to one news report today, in the space of a little more than three weeks, up until around June 18, there were 18 mass casualty events, more than 1,800 casualties delivered to hospitals. More than 1,800 casualties delivered to hospitals, the great majority of whom saying they were injured in the process of trying to collect food from one of these hubs, Israel denying point blank that it's shooting at civilians. We've got 1,800 casualties, some of whom probably were victims of shots fired by other criminal gangs. But when you're talking about tank fire, drone fire, fire even from naval vessels at these kinds of gatherings of people, there's very little doubt where the great majority of these casualties have been caused.
Speaker 2:Even if it wasn't, even if not a single IDF soldier fired a bullet that hit one of these people. The way they have set this up is designed to create this kind of catastrophe.
Speaker 3:I mean when the UN had 400 points already set up and organised since a long time, where families and people would go and get organ in an organized way, the food and medicine and what they needed. Instead now, and they can't do anything, they're paralyzed. You cannot go to these 400 places where people, where it's close, where people live. Instead they have to go all the way to the end of the road, basically, and then they are pushed through this like cattle, pushed through these metal corridors where they have to run with the bag on their back, or children, women, handicapped, people with disabilities. It's so humiliating. And then the UN. Meanwhile, I interviewed someone who was in Gaza the other day, in Gaza City, working for the UN, and saying that all we can do there's maybe one or two trucks coming in and we can deliver some medication to the hospital and bread to the bakery, but nothing else. We can do nothing else.
Speaker 6:Yes, but as WFP said, you know, since the beginning of the blockade on March the 3rd, they've been able to deliver 9,000 tons of food, very little of which has actually reached any distribution point. And 9,000 tonnes in itself is completely inadequate for the requirements of more than 2 million people who have been deprived of any real access to aid for the better part of several months.
Speaker 3:And the other thing is that this is creating. You see the images of people being filmed in Gaza and you hear kids screaming revenge, revenge. This will create a new, maybe more vicious, Hamas. This is the big problem that I don't know if Israel is realizing, but they are creating a monster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. Sometimes I go home after a day in Geneva talking about this and listening to the aid agencies and I literally cannot watch the news. Yet another child screaming over the body of its mother. It's appalling, appalling the idea that the UN, trying to bring aid with all of its experience, has been somehow vilified in this and bypassed by an organisation which has not filled the needs and has, by its strategy, caused the deaths of hundreds of people.
Speaker 6:And which you know, given the effectiveness of the aid delivery that did occur up until the point the blockade was introduced, which is evidence of how that system can work.
Speaker 2:In February, we had the ceasefire. There was not looting, there was not people desperately struggling. The UN knows how to do this. I think there's a very important point that Chris Lockyer of MSF made is that they know how to deliver aid in conflict zones. That is what they are trained for.
Speaker 3:It's not a bring-and-buy Tennessee potluck, which seems to be a bit how it's being run and even if it's chaos, it's a country, it's a place that is in complete chaos. If some food is taken in a way it shouldn't be taken, maybe okay, then let that be, instead of having children starving to death, it has to be so proportionality. You know you may take risks, there might be some things that don't work exactly as planned, but you can't let people die in the streets and kids die from hunger pragmatic aid workers will tell you, yeah, sometimes something disappears.
Speaker 2:But I have been in the field with these kinds of distributions not Gaza, but I see how they work it so that women with children don't get pushed aside that they have gone into the community. Who can't come, who might be in a wheelchair. You know all this kind of thing. They do it. As Chris said. Chris Lockyer said it's not child's play. There was another little subject I wanted to touch on, related to this. I won't play any clips, but we have with the bypassing of the traditional UN organisations. We've seen not just funding cuts and bypassing, we've seen actual leaving. So the US has left the World Health Organisation. Another country, argentina, has decided to do that too. What do you think? Is this a rush for the door or is this just some game playing which could be corrected in a few years?
Speaker 6:It's hard to say, but I mean, when the most powerful country in the world takes these kinds of initiatives, there are going to be people who follow in the slipstream.
Speaker 3:It's difficult to believe that this will be like the end of the World Health Organization, after we had the worst pandemic in this century.
Speaker 2:And we got the pandemic treaty.
Speaker 3:We got the treaty, yeah. We treaty, yeah, without the US.
Speaker 2:Who's going to suffer most from that? Is it going to be the United States, if there's another pandemic, or is it going to be the rest of the world? I mean, they might get left out of stuff.
Speaker 6:Exactly. I mean, I think you know the pandemic treaty was greeted with great celebration, and rightly so. After three years of very difficult negotiations, you get 191 states to sign up to it. But you know, let's not get too carried away. It's very symbolic because nobody's actually signed it yet. Signatures won't happen until there has been an annex negotiated yeah, that's right the detail.
Speaker 6:The devil is in the detail that deals with the very nitty-gritty issues of sharing pathogen data and working out the mechanisms for delivering and sharing vaccines. That's got to be negotiated for over another year, and then we've got to get 60 states to sign up to this thing for it to become an actual deal. So there's a lot of water yet to flow under the bridge before this becomes a reality. Nonetheless, on a positive note, it's a framework which provides an opportunity for a lot more to be built on, and the countries that are outside it are those that stand to lose from that agreement yeah, 191 states, as you said, showed willing.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, nothing. Yeah, it's not nothing. I mean I think if we're gonna here in geneva, we're going to talk about the benefits of multilateralism, um, that certainly could be won.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and if countries like you said, if china, brazil, india, south africa would sign, that would give it clout, would give it weight, but then would china sign? You know you exchange, we know what happened during the pandemic and how hard it was to get any information about anything that happens in Chinese labs. So it's a long way to go.
Speaker 6:This annex is really it's key, it's critical. This will either give it some real muscle or leave it as a rather symbolic, wishful kind of.
Speaker 2:Let's get back together when they're actually fine-tuning that, because I think it would be really interesting to do a whole podcast just about that and why it is that countries have hesitations, because it's not just China Obviously China does but other countries too, the countries with the big pharmaceutical industries.
Speaker 2:They have hesitations about how much sharing they should be doing, how much sharing they should be doing. So, yeah, let's make a date for that, to let our listeners know a bit more in detail what a treaty is and why it's not necessarily something to be frightened of, as apparently some ordinary people on the streets are. My last topic because Geneva's called a city of peace is conflict and diplomacy, and we're just coming out of a day of intense diplomacy last week in Geneva between Europe and Iran, and I was reminded that we got together earlier this year to talk about the prospects for peace of that other conflict Russia, ukraine which, of course, again the current president of the United States. He was really optimistic about being able to end it quickly. So first of all, let's hear a little flavour of that show and then we can talk about where we think peace negotiations anywhere actually are.
Speaker 8:Tonight, in a radical break with the past, the US and Russia agreeing to work together, the two sides discussing how to end Russia's war in Ukraine, but doing so without any Ukrainian officials present.
Speaker 1:We couldn't have imagined a better result after this session.
Speaker 4:But today I heard oh well, we weren't invited. Well, you've been there for three years, you should have ended it. Three years, you should have never started it, you could have made a deal.
Speaker 6:How are you approaching this? Do you want just to stop the war or do you want to win it? And that's the point we don't know even what President Trump would think is a win. One suspects it's a win that would be purely transactional in US interests, which is bad news for.
Speaker 4:Europe Returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.
Speaker 3:Europe is expected to be responsible for the reconstruction of Ukraine, having troops on the ground to oversee a ceasefire. So the US will take the decisions together with Russia, with Putin, but then who is going to do the real work afterwards? It is Europe with Putin, but then who is going to do the real work afterwards?
Speaker 2:It is Europe. Can you assure this audience that?
Speaker 9:Ukrainians will be at the table and Europeans will be at the table.
Speaker 7:The answer to that last question just as you framed it the answer is no.
Speaker 5:It started before dawn.
Speaker 2:Ukraine woke to explosions around the capital Kiev capital, kiev, and that's what people in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities have been hearing basically all year. There is no peace, certainly not in 24 hours. I mean, was there any merit in right? Let's cut to the chase. Let's go straight to the aggressor alone and say let's do a deal, because it is the style of the united states at the moment. I mean, I've reported on a lot of tricky diplomatic negotiations here in geneva. I've never seen it done like that well.
Speaker 6:It's difficult to see that working to the benefit of neutral parties and parties to conflict if you adopt the narratives and the playbook of one of the combatants, and notably the combatant who actually started this crisis by invading Ukraine. And what we have never really gotten away from is concern over where the Trump administration stands in its relationships with the Kremlin, because we see disdain for Ukraine in many statements and we don't see the United States apparently using the leverage that it has got to increase pressure on Vladimir Putin and Russia. The pressure it's applied has really all been on Ukraine, so I don't know that this is really a formula that offers much prospect for a settlement that Europe would find comfortable to live with An acceptable settlement that's acceptable.
Speaker 2:I mean, Gunilla, you've been in Russia quite recently. Are they war-weary? Are they happy that they've got somebody in Washington who's maybe?
Speaker 3:going to bat for them.
Speaker 4:In the beginning.
Speaker 3:when they started, when Trump and Putin had their newfound relationship, people were hopeful. They said, oh, trump is our hope, he will end. Because people are so tired of this war, or the special military operation, like it's called, in Russia, they're really, really tired to hear about it. In Moscow, people are not so affected, but they are tired just of hearing about this operation every day and they are scared because the suppression of people, the repression, has really increased. So in the beginning and then it didn't really happen, the war wasn't finished. I would say, are they happy about having someone like Trump there Right now on the battlefield? As we see, russia is winning because they have the weapons and they have the manpower, because they pay. They pay people coming from the regions and they just throw money on the problem, so to speak, while Ukraine has a problem in getting manpower and getting soldiers. So it's looking very bleak and I think in Russia, yes, some people still put their hope in Trump to perhaps somehow freeze the front lines or freeze the conflict to be negotiated perhaps later.
Speaker 2:And in the meantime we've got no resolution really in Sudan, no resolution in Gaza, a ceasefire which, to be fair, apparently America did put pressure for a ceasefire, but then it all collapsed into even worse violence and deprivation. And now we have Iran. I mean and here, contrary to like I'm a peacemaker America has gone in on the side of Israel when.
Speaker 2:Israel kind of unprovoked attacked Iran. I mean, where do we go? I mean, I suppose we need to get back to the point of this. Is Geneva traditionally the home of diplomatic resolutions to conflicts? But it's also the original home of the League of Nations, which died in the 1930s precisely because it could not anymore resolve conflicts between states who basically just weren't interested in this kind of diplomacy. Do we have a feeling of the League of Nations now about Geneva?
Speaker 3:A little bit, don't we Today? Yes, perhaps, but things will change. You know, we are into three and a half more years with Donald Trump and it's true, we have three, if not more, big wars in the world right now, while Trump said he's going to go into no more wars and it's going to be peace in the world, right now, while Trump said that he's going to go into no more wars and there's going to be peace in the world, and this is not happening Today. It looks bleak, but let's see. I mean, the world is waiting to see how Iran is going to respond after the attack from the bombing from the Americans, and I still believe that it's going to be some kind of sooner or later.
Speaker 3:Everyone comes back to negotiation tables. That always ends with some kind of sooner or later. Everyone comes back to negotiation tables. That always ends with some kind of talks. And I think and I might be in minority here, but I think that the EU has a role to play in Iran, israel, us in this conflict sooner or later, because Iran would not talk to Israel, would not talk to the US, but they would probably still speak to the Europeans and that could be a little light of hope.
Speaker 2:What do you think, nick? I mean, I'm just thinking there's conflict, there's the moving away from multilateral bodies, there's the cuts to humanitarian funding, and we should really we can't really take the US out of the equation. It's so important, but there are other countries who are distancing themselves from humanitarian aid and, to a certain extent, from the multilateral effort as well.
Speaker 6:I think it's a very hard question to answer, though, at this point, where the Iran conflict has the potential to escalate into something really very much bigger and far more sort of consequential, where it would take us into a whole new kind of ball game, and so I think we're in a very sort of testing and uncertain time where there are far more questions and answers. But, but I think, rather like Gunilla, hopefully sooner rather than later, we're going to find people are wanting to get back to the process of diplomacy and negotiating tables, and it's very difficult to see how giving full reign to escalating conflict in Iran by the United States, for example, would in any way serve its own longer term interests, either in the region or globally. And so we've got three and a half more years of Mr Trump, we've got an international system that is struggling to maintain its relevance, and we come back to again the question about how effectively the UN can reform itself and to what extent states will support it in that process.
Speaker 2:And I know you have a meeting to go to about precisely that, this UN80, which is apparently the Secretary General's plan to a leaner, fitter, more efficient, more relevant United Nations. So we should probably do a programme about that too. But we agreed that at the end of this programme we would try not to be too bleak, because these are hard times and people I think are very anxious at the moment that maybe we should still pay tribute. Hat tip to the humanitarian work that comes out of Geneva, people who they don't live peacefully here in this quiet city. They are in Gaza, they're in Sudan, they're in Afghanistan and we heard from some of them, from MSF, from UN Population Fund, from the Norwegian Refugee Council, jan Eglund they are not giving up. So we should perhaps also try to maintain some faith in this international system.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think they're going to be. I mean, as you're talking about how they are in the field and so forth, there's a whole generation now and there's a future generation and they consider themselves, they label themselves, as humanitarians and that's not going to go away. I think we're going to have that, especially when we have these crises. We see these wars, this suffering, these images in Gaza, in Iran, in Israel, in Russia, in Ukraine. People see, people feel you know the generation coming after us. They're not just going to give up and say we're not going to do anything. I think there might even be more appetite to be wanting to help and be a humanitarian and wanting to work in these organisations.
Speaker 2:And try and get us out of the mess we're in. Yeah, the hope of youth. You look sceptical, Nick. You're shaking your head.
Speaker 6:The hope of youth. It's going to get worse, okay.
Speaker 2:That brings us to the end. Thank you, gunilla, thank you, nick. That's the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. Thanks all for listening. We hope you enjoyed it. Write to us if you have any comments at insidegeneva, at swissinfoch a reminder you've been listening to inside geneva, a swiss info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the international red cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening.
