David Miliband on Global Disorder, Labour’s ‘Mistakes’ and Deploying $1 Billion on Crises

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2:11I think the elephant in the room in this conversation is the United States. What comes to my mind is that the US was the anchor of the global system. didn't mean that it played a role in every part of it, didn't mean that it got everything right, but it was the anchor, and the anchor's been pulled up avowedly. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:37I'm sure there's never been an easy time to run an aid agency, but this moment feels particularly charged. There are millions of people around the world in desperate need, And at the same time, powerful governments are cutting back on their giving. That's the world that David Miliband has to navigate every day. He's been running the International Rescue Committee for more than a decade now. It's a New York-based organization. It works in the US and around the world. And he came to the job as a politician. He'd been Britain's foreign secretary, the top diplomat, seen as a future prime minister.

3:17And then he had a shock in 2010 when, in a Labour leadership election, his party chose his brother over him. That's a long time ago now, and he has built a new career with energy and passion. But his old friends in Labour are now in power in the UK, and that government, like others, is cutting back on foreign aid. So obviously, when he came into the studio in London, I wanted to know how he feels about that. There is, as you might expect, British political chat in this conversation. And David Miliband also talks about his old boss, Tony Blair. I'd also been thinking, though, about his background and its link to his work now, how his parents, both Jewish, had narrow escapes from Nazi-occupied Europe as children.

4:07And that's where this conversation begins. my dad's family story involved a lot of trauma and tragedy but he came to the uk in 1940s 16 year old became a student he thought it was ridiculous to be studying in cambridge instead of fighting fascism so he joined the royal navy and despite the trauma there and he was not a sort of he didn't see himself as a heroic figure in in the war effort there was a lot of talk about it. There was a lot of talk about how his mother and sister survived a call to report to Brussels railway station, where many of their relatives did and were never seen again. And he had just got out literally in the last chance to leave Belgium with his father.

4:50He got out in the last chance. His mother and sister were saved effectively by a Catholic family south of Brussels. So on his side, there was more discussion, including of 43 family members that he lost in the Holocaust. On my mother's side, she found it much more difficult to talk about it. In fact, she didn't talk about it. Didn't she spend much of the war in hiding as a child? She did. She lived through Nazi occupation. She was younger. So she was born in 1934. My dad was born in 1924. And so for her, hidden in a convent, first of all, hidden then by a family that they knew in Warsaw. And then she lost her father in a concentration camp and her mother sent her just as a 12-year-old to the UK in 1946 on her own.

5:36To stay with who? To stay as part of a group of Jewish kids who were sent, actually orphan kids. Start a new life. Yeah, and I think that for her it was just too, the trauma was too great. So she didn't talk about it. So I think I once wrote the first refugees I ever met were my parents. And that's the truth. And they did want to give us the security that they didn't have. But there was this slightly bifurcated, one part of the story filled in, another part of the story less filled in. Ironically, when I went to apply to be the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, they said, why do you want this job?

6:13You're in politics at the moment. I was a backbench MP. I said, well, one, I like really difficult problems and how you deliver humanitarian aid in Syria between the Assad government, the Russians, branches of Al Qaeda is a really difficult problem. We want to work on that. I'd like to work on difficult problems. Secondly, I said, an organization founded by Albert Einstein in the 1930s, you don't get better shoulders to stand on than that. founded by Albert Einstein, who'd written letters to Eleanor Roosevelt pleading with her to persuade her husband, the president, to let Jews and others from Europe come into America and failed in that and so set up the International Rescue Committee really as a response to that.

6:54But then thirdly, I said, my parents were both refugees. And so some of the clients of the International Rescue Committee are people who fled across borders, others are still stuck in war zones. And so I felt in some way, I guess I was closing a bit of a circle, helping people of different generation, different religion probably, but whose circumstances I could at least relate to through the experience of my parents. And it's absolutely understandable that that trauma that your mother experienced, that it was very difficult for her to talk about it. Did you just understand that and navigate around it?

7:26Or do you remember asking her and trying to find out? I think we must have picked up the vibes, I think. I don't remember doing the equivalent of a Bloomberg or Today programme interview trying to pump her for the answers. Her mother was still alive. I remember my grandmother. But obviously, different people take it in different ways and come through learning different lessons, I guess. She named you, didn't she, after her father? Your grandfather, your murdered grandfather was David. Yes, he was David Kozak. And actually, there was a certain element of closure, including for her in 2016, out of the blue, I got an email from a German voluntary historical society saying, we think we've now concluded our work about the Heilfingen concentration camp.

8:14And we're convinced that we've now located the records that show that your grandfather was brought here from Auschwitz in November 1944, and he was killed in January 1945. And we've done that for many of those who lost their lives here. And we're going to have a ceremony to mark this place. And so I was able to go with Brother Ed and with my mother and her sister to finally, 60 years later, 70 years later, mark the loss of her father. How did you feel standing there? I felt the weight of terrible trauma, really. I looked at my mother, who was 10 years old when she lost her father. She hadn't seen him for four years.

8:56And you just think, there but for the grace of God really. I mean it's a feeling of the emptiness on one side and the fortune on the other. And also January 1945 when camps are being liberated elsewhere. Almost, yeah. Nearly at the end. Yeah, and it's obviously far from the only story of this kind so one doesn't want to absorb it as a personal story. But I wonder, do you think about this heritage when you come face to face with people in desperate situations, which you do? You don't need family heritage for your head and your heart to just bond with that person in a really, I think, profound way.

9:44And so I think that I wouldn't want to overplay that. There is one element, though, which maybe relates to something we'll talk about later. Whenever any of us grew up, we think what we're experiencing is normal. And I grew up in a relatively middle-class family in the 1970s and 1980s in London and Leeds. And that seemed like the norm. We lived in a democratic country. We live in the country of liberties. With all that's going on in the world today, suddenly the period 1945 to 2026 in Western Europe, and certainly the period of the Cold War and the immediate post-Cold War doesn't look like the norm.

10:26It looks like the exception. And so these questions that are being raised by all sorts of people about remembering that it's a narrow corridor, the one between a state that's too strong and is dictatorial and a state that's too weak and you've got anarchy. I was lucky enough to grow up in this narrow corridor. Well, as it happens, speaking of how the world has changed, I found myself reading back a speech you gave in 2007 when you were British Foreign Secretary. and it's well it's fascinating to read it now and i'm not doing it in a kind of hindsight is a wonderful thing kind of way i hope i had a bit of foresight in there today well you certainly there is much to celebrate you say there are fewer countries at war than ever before more trade more travel more connections around the globe aspiration unleashed do you remember standing there on that stage and feeling like there was so much that britain could do on the world stage?

11:16Well, I remember standing there. I don't remember what I said in anything like the detail that you... I remember it was the first time I think I'd spoken to Labour Party conferences as Foreign Minister. It was still an optimistic time. It was before the financial crisis. It was after the really difficult problems in Iraq. Afghanistan was very difficult, but there was still a feeling. It was after Vladimir Putin's Munich Security Conference speech in February 2007 when he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. So there were some, the drums were beating.

11:56But I think that there was still a sense of a tide of history. Remember, you'd got the enormous wave of democratization of the 1990s, never mind the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. and the global system had just united behind the idea of the responsibility to protect, which was the idea if states were oppressing their own citizens, it wasn't just their business and that state sovereignty was a foundation of the international system. The age of humanitarian intervention. So were human rights. Yeah, of course it wouldn't have been that great. If you were listening to that speech and you were an Iraqi or Afghan civilian at that time.

12:32I wonder though, even as you look back and even as we make this contrast, whether you think Mark Carney was right when he at Davos talked about the idea of the rules-based international order being partially false. You were at Davos yourself. There were always exceptions to this. There was a version of might is right then as well. It was a very significant and very important speech. And I think not just that we should recognise that he was correct to call out that the rules-based order operated with more than... You used the word exceptions. I think that's probably generous. I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs two and a half years ago, which said that the Ukraine war had united the West, but divided us from the rest.

13:15And I asked, why did it divide us from the rest? And the reason was that for the rest, which are democratic countries like India and South Africa, and also undemocratic countries, they saw the emphasis on territorial integrity, on sovereignty as being given to and honored in the Ukraine case, but not honoured in enough other cases. And there's a range of other ways in which the rules-based order. Including Iraq, I have to say, because I was in South Asia when the all-out invasion of Ukraine took place. And I heard exactly this. Your country was part of an invasion. And of course, two wrongs don't make a right.

13:49But still, it's right to say that it was honoured in the breach as well as in the observance, the idea of a rules-based order. Now, the question then is, do you want to correct the breaches or do you want to dispense with the honouring? And I still think that the idea that alongside the rights of states, there are rights of individuals, which was the essential lesson that the post-war pioneers took from the interwar period and from the rest of history, that's still an important lesson. I think the elephant in the room in this conversation is something directly about the United States. That is the big change, isn't it, in the last year?

14:25Well, it's not the only change. It's the biggest change yet. It's the biggest change in the last year. In the national security strategy that the Trump administration had put out, they talk about themselves as America will no longer be Atlas, quote-unquote, propping up the global system. That's not what came to my mind. What comes to my mind is that the US was the anchor of the global system. It didn't mean that it played a role in every part of it. It didn't mean that it got everything right. But it was the anchor, and the anchor's been pulled up avowedly. The Trump administration are very consistent.

14:55They said in the campaign, we don't believe in this role for America. But I'm afraid it's not only the US. We've got to recognize that the recession of democracy is a phenomenon such that now there are more autocracies than democracies in the world today. That's significant. And then the international rule of law is in retreat as well. And so the rights that were given to individuals in the UN Charter and in associated conventions are in retreat. And so I think this dual process, both of the international system and domestically, is worth calling out. And you live in the US, you live in New York, you've made it your home since you began leading the IRC...

15:4012 years ago. 12 years ago. What are the conversations you have behind the scenes? Do you have anyone in the Trump administration that you speak to? Well, we talk to people in and around the administration. I mean, you yourself. Yeah. You've got that kind of access, I imagine. Yeah, but I don't want to exaggerate it. We've had a partnership with the US government for a very long time. I think that there's a very strong feeling that they've got a mandate for what they self-describe as a revolution in America's role in the world, where they want to think globally in economics, but they're not going to think globally in politics.

16:17They're going to think about the Western hemisphere in politics. And that's a very big change. and their message is get used to it. This is the new dispensation that's been established. And what can you say in response? What's the way that you can make the case? I make the case that it's in the strategic interest as well as the moral interest. If you say to people there are 45 million children under the age of five who are acutely malnourished in the world today, there's no one in the Trump administration who says, oh, that's a good thing. That's not the response that you get. They say we're going to have to find better ways of reaching those people, more efficient ways of reaching those people, more effective ways, more impactful, more innovative ways of reaching those people.

16:59And so we try and find that landing zone for the conversation we have with them. And I do want to talk about those ideas because they're obviously very pressing. And I also want to talk about the countries that are on your latest emergency watch list, the crises of 2026. But you mentioned the work that you have done with previous administrations as the International Rescue Committee. A lot of that was around people coming across the southern border and arrangements for them, provision for them. What do you think of the way that ICE has been behaving lately, the way that immigration rules, controls are being enforced?

17:36Well, just to be clear, we've been a major partner of the US government on refugee resettlement, which is the organized transfer after very extensive vetting of people from around the world to the US over the last, well, since the 1980 Refugee Act. And actually, it was Ronald Reagan who admitted more refugees to America on that route than any other president. And that's been stopped. So that partnership is over. That program has been wound up. We do also serve asylum seekers and migrants who've crossed the border. We also have our own staff who have got legal status and then are allowed to work.

18:15We don't work in Minnesota, just to be clear, we're in 17 states but not in the state of Minnesota. So I can't speak to the details of that. What's clearly going on there is that all of the tensions in America are exploding around this issue today. and what I know from the people that we serve and the people that we employ is that they've fled real danger. That's how they've got their asylum claim processed and been given the right to work and they also are living with a question mark about their own status and whether or not their own story is going to be believed. Yeah. And that creates a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety.

19:02I also want to acknowledge that in the most recent Minnesotan cases, we've been talking about American citizens. The issues in respect of ICE are about American citizens, not just asylum seekers and refugees.

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22:20Let's talk then about the countries that you've put on your emergency watch list, like going into this new year, the 10 crises that you think the world should... 20. Okay, I was looking at the list of the top 10, but clearly they're not the only ones. The two crises you put right at the top, Sudan and the occupied Palestinian territory, I was looking at the complexity of these. One, Sudan being a conflict in which more than 10 other countries are involved. The other one involving the Palestinians being generational. These appear so intractable. Is the only thing you can do to deal with the immediate need rather than have any role in finding the ways to end these?

23:01Yes. I mean, in short, remediation of desperate suffering is our business. Health, water and sanitation, nutrition, livelihoods, protection of women from sexual violence, recovery of women from sexual violence, that's our business. We plead guilty to treating the symptoms. By treating the symptoms, I would add, you can sometimes prevent further destabilization down the road, because the one thing you can guarantee, if you don't tend to humanitarian crisis, it reinforces itself and produces further instability. But you personally, when you go to these places and you sit with people and you hear their stories, it's such an important part of your work.

23:40It gives you that firsthand experience. You then go into places where powerful people are and you can say, I've seen this with my own eyes. But be honest about how it feels to walk away from that. Do you also feel relieved sometimes to be able to walk away? I mean, actually, my team will tell you, I want to spend more time talking to the clients because... The clients being those in need. The clients being the people in need, yeah. And more time talking to our staff who are often also in need. Because you're employing people in that group. Exactly. I mean, we've got 500 people working for us in Sudan.

24:14485 of them are Sudanese. We've got people who used to work for the Bank of Khartoum who are now working for us as humanitarian aid workers. I don't want to sound cheesy about it, but the courage, the tenacity, the ability to laugh sometimes as well as to cry. I mean, that's the most inspiring thing. Someone once said, if you look at the statistics, you get depressed. If you talk to the people, you have hope. I agree with you. I've seen it as a journalist. But I also know that there is that privilege of being able to walk away. And there are these moments which just make you think, I can't explain why my life is so fundamentally different.

24:51It's the luck of the draw. Of course, so you can explain it. I mean, that's the sense. Or I can't deal with it, maybe. That's what I mean. Like, do you grapple with that? Or is it so much a part of your work that this is what you have to do? I think that you remember the stories, you feel the sense of tragedy. But I'll never forget the first trip I did with the International Rescue Committee was to go and meet Syrian refugees in Jordan. And I went to talk to a group of women, and I couldn't believe it. You know, there was literally, first of all, I was a man going into an all-women's group. They wanted to talk to me.

25:26They wanted to cry in front of me. They wanted to tell each of their stories. And I thought, my God, this is, you know, what these people are going for. And then I said to them, do any of you think you'll ever go back to Syria? And suddenly, these beaming smiles came through the tears, the sense that they'd not given up. So what conceivable grounds did I have to? Do you have any idea where that group are now? Some have gone back to Syria. A million people have gone back to Syria. The ones in Jordan, I don't know those specific ones. There have been returns to Syria from Jordan. Of course, that doesn't mean you overcome the loss or you don't then go and find terrible further loss.

26:09Because I've struggled with that part too, keeping up and following the stories of people who you've covered as a journalist. Yeah, that's a good point. Their story is, their story you want it in that moment. And then, again, you move on. Yeah, that's a powerful point. And you do ask yourself, you know, what happened to Abdullahi Muhammad, the man I met in Ethiopia, who was working on a water project with us? I mean, you do ask yourself that, and of course you don't know. Do you know one foreign correspondent at the BBC once said to me that they had put a child in Afghanistan at the centre of their peace on the then nine o 'clock news.