US spending on ‘reckless’ Iran war could have saved 87m lives, says UN Humanitarian Chief

By R Anil Kumar

London/ Bengaluru, April 20, 2026. The $2bn (£1.5bn) a week that Donald Trump is spending on his reckless war in Iran could have funded saving more than 87 million lives, the head of the UN’s humanitarian agency, Tom Fletcher, said on Monday, April 20.

He also warned the normalisation of violent language, such as threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone ages, was very dangerous since it encourages every “wannabe autocrat” to use similar threats and tactics, including the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Speaking at Chatham House in London, Fletcher, a former UK diplomat and adviser on foreign policy to successive prime ministers, also accused British politicians of forming a circular firing squad for more than 10 years which has left the UK in a “defensive crouch”.

The scale of the recent UK aid cuts had been so severe that people giggle at conferences where the UK claims to be thought leaders on the subject, he said, before later adding the judgment might seem harsh.

Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator and head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is wrestling with a humanitarian aid funding crisis he described as cataclysmic, amounting to a 50% cut in his budget.

This is driven not just by the US but also by international cuts to overseas aid driven by a mix of ideology and demands from defence budgets.

He said the war in Iran was having a ripple effect across the globe and predicted that, with food and fuel inflation reaching close to 20%, “we will feel the impact for years in sub-Saharan Africa and east Africa pushing way more people into poverty”.

Tom Fletcher also warned against the normalisation of violent language, such as Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iran back to the stone ages.

Fletcher said: “For every day of this conflict, $2bn is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritised plan to save 87 million lives is $23bn. We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”

Fletcher’s budget is about $10bn short of his target of $23bn.

He added: “The idea suddenly that it is OK to say, ‘We are going to blow stuff up, we are going to bomb you back to the stone ages, destroy your civilisation’ – normalising that kind of language is really dangerous.

“It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats round the world to use that sort of language and those sort of tactics, targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians in a way that completely breaches international law.”

He described UN relations with the Trump administration as “an absolute rollercoaster ride”, but said he had made some progress in convincing the US president’s team that it is “not just a bunch of woke, incompetent, useless, exhausted bureaucrats”.

“There is a difference between statecraft and ‘real-estatecraft’,” he said. “Most of the guys I am working with [in the Trump administration] are people with a real estate background. It is a different approach to the world.

“For statecraft people, the handshake comes at the end of the process after you do all of the work. Real estatecraft do the handshake first, ‘Do I trust this person?’ and then, ‘Let’s go do the agreement’ … it places much more emphasis on the personal relationships, asking, ‘Is this a person I can work with?’ They are less interested in institutions, so walking in with a UN flag does not help you.”

He added: “The statecraft people, we love certainty, stability and process – look at what we have designed in terms of protocol, maps and flags. We love that order.

“For the Trump administration, they think disorder is more effective. The unpredictability, the knocking your opponent and your friend off-guard, they think they get more results. We will see.

“If he [Trump] ends 14 wars, bring on the Nobel peace prizes, but let’s actually end them rather than talking about ending them.”

Fletcher also revealed he was being kept awake at night deciding whether to accept US aid funding if it comes with new conditions concerning issues such as abortion or transgender rights.

“The question is do we take that money under those conditions, knowing that it will save millions of lives or not?” He said he was not intending to do so.

He said the international postwar scaffolding was under sustained attack with the UN security council “completely polarised. We are in this much more transactional geopolitical moment when member states do not see the security council as a mechanism through which they should be working for global peace.”

The cuts to his budget were going to have a massive impact. “If I was the chair of a group of agencies – in which in some ways I am – and I had gone from a $50bn group to $20bn organisation if I am lucky this year, I would probably be fired by now,” he said.

“My stats are not great. My money is going down and the needs are going up and it is a pattern of failure, so we have to do something differently.”

Although he admitted the US cuts were disproportionately difficult since the country had provided 40% to 45% of the money in the past, he said cuts to aid were also happening across Europe.

Referring to the past UK commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on overseas aid, he added: “The UK for decades, for most of my working career, 0.7% was this talismanic cross-party commitment and that has all been blown away in the past couple of years.”

The cuts, he said, were tiny in terms of the UK overall budget but will have a disproportionate impact on lives lost partly because the UK decision provides cover for other countries to do the same.

He added: “The UK is in a circular firing squad moment now and has been for 10 years and that is a long time to have a circular firing squad going. At some point the UK has to get out of this very defensive crouch.”

He said he is worried that since 2016, “there has been a tendency to vandalise the crown jewels, the real assets the UK has, leadership on aid, the creative industries, the soft power, the military strengths.

“The UK tend to be over-confident where we should be humble and too modest where we should be confident. Right now quiet competence is good.”

There should also be greater protection for humanitarian workers, he said, pointing out that more than 1,000 had been killed in the past three years, many victims of drones.

He added: “We are the emergency service, the fire engines, the ambulance worker going to support survivors, yet somehow it has become acceptable that we are being killed in these numbers. There is no accountability for those that are killing us.”

He said he told a UN security council member: “Don’t just give us a generic statement, saying ‘humanitarian workers should be protected’ – make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those that are doing this.”