Numbers in Motion, Children in Motion

400,000 children per year are born as refugees.

“Oh, the world has always had refugees.” That’s what people often say when I raise the subject of human displacement. While it’s true that the world has always had refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), today’s displacement crisis is different.

It’s different in terms of how rapidly it’s growing. In 2013, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated that 51.2 million people were displaced around the world. When I took the helm at the US Agency for International Development in 2017, that number was 68.5 million. When I left the agency three years later, it was up to roughly 80 million. Late in 2023, it reached 114 million: well more than double the number just ten years earlier. And those figures don’t even include the effects of the Israel-Hamas war.

Trade? What’s That?

Excluding brief periods of recession, last year saw the smallest rate of growth in international trade in a half century.

The growth of international trade has been one of the most important economic developments in modern times. In Europe and America, it has improved the standard of living for countless people and brought products and technologies previously affordable for only the most affluent within reach of everyday consumers. In many developing countries, simply put, the rise of trade has helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty.

NATO, Article 5, and 9/11

NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked once… in support of the US shortly after September 11, 2001.

Donald Trump wasn’t the first president to complain about NATO. Nor was he the first to call out NATO members who fall short of their commitment to spend 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on national defense. George W. Bush often used NATO summits to demand that member nations meet their obligations. Barack Obama once referred to those who didn’t as “free riders.”

When US presidents (and others) criticize nations that fall short of the 2% commitment, they aren’t being petty or shrill. Taken together, the defense budgets of NATO members go to the heart of the alliance’s ability to deter attacks, which, after all, is the very reason for NATO’s existence.