Jacob Kurtzer, the Interim Director and Senior Fellow, Humanitarian Agenda at the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) on the humanitarian policy of the Biden administration.
Transcript
Watching American politics over the past four years has been mesmerising. It's been hard to disengage from the latest action of the Trump administration and I think as humanitarians we have obviously worried about how will this impact our work? How will it impact the most vulnerable populations on the ground? It's equally interesting to think about what comes next. How will the Biden administration move forward and how will that change current US policy with respect to humanitarian affairs? That's the topic of today's conversation on Trumanitarian where I speak with Jake Kurtzer, who is the Interim Director of the Humanitarian Agenda at the Centre for Strategic International Studies, a Washington based think tank. I hope you enjoy Jake's very fresh perspectives on what we can expect from the Americans the next four years and that you find the conversation useful. Jake Kurtzer, welcome to Trumanitarian.
Jacob Kurtzer:Thank you for having me.
Lars Peter Nissen:No, it's great to have you here. You're the Interim Director of the Humanitarian Agenda at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. And now I suspect that that's an entity that's better known inside the beltway, rather than outside the beltway, as you say over there. So just walk us through what is CSIS, first of all.
Jacob Kurtzer:Indeed, well known in Washington, CSIS is a nonpartisan think tank, a Research and Policy Institute, that was formed in the 50s in the aftermath of World War Two, by two retired defence officials who felt that the US government needed institutions around the government apparatus that we're able to do thinking about policy, strategy, make recommendations to government without the constraints of day to day managing the government. So these two guys set up this institute, and as you mentioned, it's well known in Washington, and I think it has a pretty good reputation globally, but primarily for national security and defence issues.
Lars Peter Nissen:So Washington is literally crawling with think tanks, right? What's your brand? What's your unique selling point over there? How do people see you?
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, it's... there's a couple of us just within a one or two block radius here. I think the brand has been historically this hard national security and defence programme. Our international security programme is about 50 people with a lot of different subsets. So, you know, budget analysts, nuclear assessments, geostrategic competition. And I think the brand has a lot to do with both immediate, you know day-to-day impact analysis, what's happening in this corner of the world where we can use the various tools we have at our disposal to make snapshot analysis, and then also, longer term strategic thinking. And, again, always designed with this policy recommendation element, right? This is not research for research sake, but research to be able to hand things over and say, here's what we think is best way forward.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so that's that's really clear, right? But what's not clear, and my obvious next question is, what does a former ICRC staff do being the Interim Director of the Humanitarian Agenda in a place that seems to deal with nukes?
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, it's a good question. I think... CSIS, over the past 15 or 20 years, I think, under the direction of our current president, has broadened the scope of its, you know, soft power programmes. So there is a global health security programme, which obviously, the relevance has existed for a long time and has become increasingly prominent in the past year. We have a project on prosperity and development that looks at development issues. We had a global food security programme. And then most recently, the humanitarian agenda was formed a little over close to three years ago. And I think the idea here is that national security and foreign policy needs to be about more than just, you know, tanks and deployments and points of confrontation. But we have to, you know, from the Washington perspective, think about all the tools in the toolkit and understand better the ways in which humanitarian crises, human rights concerns, you know, failures and development gains, have a meaningful impact on the lives of those people and consequently have an impact on US foreign policy and US interests.
Lars Peter Nissen:And of course, it's such a it's such a political area, right, because as humanitarians of course we are terrified of becoming force multipliers for the... I mean, the national security agenda. I think that that's really... that that ghost is always there, right? And so how do you see your role? I mean, obviously, that's not... You're not trying to turn us into force multipliers. What what are you trying to do?
Jacob Kurtzer:You know, there's the humanitarian universe writ large and then I think there's the Washington based humanitarian organisations. And I think one of the struggles that Washington or US based NGOs have always had is finding the balance between... in their advocacy and in their policy recommendations, between humanitarian action for humanitarian purposes, while making a political case that it has a benefit for the US national interest, right. You know, as a as a centre, we don't take policy positions, right? What I write it is my view alone, it is not the view of CSIS. So finding that balance. You know, again, coming from the ICRC where, you know, we get ingrained from day one with concepts of neutrality, impartiality and independence and trying to explain that to, you know, my wonderful colleagues who are fellows here for one year from the different branches of the armed services, is complicated. But I also think it's... you know, one of our value adds as a programme is actually internally to CSIS. So, what I'm trying to do with this programme is, in some ways, you know, in every situation we look at, is make the argument that principled humanitarian action, is... has the best outcomes, you know, and second order benefits to US interests are nice to have, but that the principles approach is going to have the best outcomes for the totality of the situation.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great. But it's to hear that you still have that ICSC tattoo that I also have. I think that's good.
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, It's hard to shake.
Lars Peter Nissen:So, Jake, we decided that today, we wanted to talk about the US policy and how it will be affected by the new administration, the Biden administration come in. But before we jump into that, maybe let's take a little bit of a look back and just give us, from your perspective, a really quick overview of what was the US humanitarian policy in your book before the Trump administration? How has it been affected by these four years? And then we'll dig into what you think will come in the next four years.
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, I think having a clear-headed analysis of the past four years is very challenging for almost anyone on any side of the political spectrum. I think President Trump and the people... the senior people in his administration, so radically changed the book, so to speak, of how things were done in Washington, that being able to come up with a clear-headed analysis of just what the policies were is very challenging. So what ends up happening is we have these rose coloured glasses of how things were under Obama and these... you know, I don't even know what to call it coloured glasses for the past four years. But I think... Trying to drill down into the practical questions, right, I think the past four years challenged a lot of the ideas that we talked about in the previous question. One, the concept of principle to humanitarian action or humanitarian action separated from political agendas of an administration, right? It always happens. Every administration has challenges in terms of navigating the multiple threads they're pulling on in a policy situation. So you talked about force multipliers. We heard that term and Afghanistan, right, when, you know, Secretary Powell talked about US NGOs, you know, winning hearts and minds. But that didn't change with Obama, right. The USAID programmes in Afghanistan were funded at the same levels and in many ways with the same purposes under General Petraeus and his... and the counterinsurgency strategy. What we saw in this particular administration was explicit politicisation, right? What I... and what I'm referring to is, for example, the USAID Administrator showing up at the border between Venezuela and Colombia next to military type vehicles with food trucks and other equipment trucks saying, you know, these two things go hand in hand, right? Regime change comes.... you know, brings rewards or you will not receive us assistance if you don't make a political transformation. That I think blew people's minds as an overt politicisation of humanitarian action. We saw that in a few contexts. We saw it at in last weeks of the administration, right? Yemen is, you know, a human tragedy of a massive scale. The situation in the North of Yemen and areas under the control of Ansar Allah, the Houthis, is extremely bad from metrics of food security and civilian protection. And on the last day of the administration, they chose to apply a foreign terrorist organisation designation, which immediately impedes the ability of humanitarian actors to work. And you can have a debate on the merits of that designation, but the timing of it was so clearly designed to negatively impact policy decisions of the next administration. So those are two examples of the overt politicisation.
Lars Peter Nissen:So this very symbolic way of literally taking I think what we as humanitarians hold dearest, namely the idea that it should be principled, and that all people who are in need deserve to have a right to get assistance that, you know, taking a sledgehammer to that... What does that mean for the Biden administration and to where you think they will move into in the next four years?
Jacob Kurtzer:What... I think the challenge for the Biden administration is going to be twofold. A second... You know, when I think about the humanitarian, you know, report card for an administration or an individual, we think about more than just how much humanitarian funding there wasn't a budget, or even the decisions about how it was spent, right? We also want to think about the humanitarian impact of the other policies. So Vice President Pence, and, you know, when he was leaving office said 'this is the first administration to not start any new foreign wars', right? Well, I mean, maybe technically, but they did increase the number of drone strikes in Afghanistan by a substantial figure. So the reason I raised that is because the entire orientation of the previous administration, I mean, in their own words, was America first, right, were they prioritised US interests in a very... to me, in a very strange way and didn't think creatively and logically about the world. And so you had the politicisation of humanitarian funding explicitly, you had the political orientation and the policies of America first also explicitly, but speaking to the totality of our military apparatus overseas. And there were some interesting things that they did that I think challenged people's assumptions, right? I think they were really committed to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. They failed, but they were committed to that. And so pivoting now to the incoming administration, I think you... I would look at those same two sort of categories. One is, how do they approach humanitarian action? And what are the humanitarian impacts of their overall policy agenda and portfolio and political orientation? And so far, you know, based both on what they've said, since they... individuals have been nominated or they've appeared in testimony, and based on what we know, from the experience of many of the principles coming into government, I think we'll see real positive changes on both of those fronts. So if I could...
Lars Peter Nissen:But I mean, one obvious concern is... I mean, there's a fair-... it's a fairly packed agenda the new administration has. There's a lot on it, to put it mildly. Isn't this just going to get bottom of the list? Are they actually going to get around to doing this?
Jacob Kurtzer:It's a fair question. And I think it's a question we think about, you know, in Washington, on the second point, right? How much funding will be available, how much political capital will be dedicated to this? You know, when you think about the pyramid of our political and policy structures, you know, President Biden himself will dedicate one hour a month, you know, to thinking about explicitly humanitarian situation. But the apparatus is so large that you look at the principles, you know, beneath him in the org chart. And at various points in that pyramid, as you go down and down the chart, we're seeing people that we know, that we're comfortable with, that have reputations that that precede them from their work in the nonprofit organ-... and you know, the [inaudible] nonprofit sector, previous tenures in government... You know, every week or so, they've been announcing new hires for the administration at the, you know, at the bureaucrat levels of various degrees and every week there's this excitement of, you know, from this NGO or from that alliance or from, you know, someone who worked in the field. So we're seeing a lot of people that can do a lot of really good things at important levels. You're right that the question of say, you know, the humanitarian operations in Chad and the Central African Republic will very unlikely... are very unlikely to rise to the, you know, the resolute desk in the Oval Office. But I think people like Samantha Power at the head of USAID. You know, Secretary Blinken, who unprompted, referenced the situation in Yemen, National Security Adviser Sullivan, who wrote last year in foreign policy an article explaining his orientation towards national security challenges: all of them are bringing in that political orientation that I think a humanitarian community is much more comfortable with.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so the question I have is, how does that relate to the blatant provocation that we've seen over the past four years, right? We spoke about the force multiplier comment, which really still resonates today, because it was it was such a shocking statement. And so, you know, people are not going to forget Venezuela, they're not going to forget what was done for... in relation to Yemen in the last days of the administration. Do you think that the Biden administration will sort of do a... it's going to be Obama 2.0 so high level of path dependency? Or are they... Or do they see these past four years as Hey, we actually did some damage to the core humanitarian narrative, we need to correct that. Right? Is there going to be a shift there? Or is it simply, we took a break in four years of being principled with respect to humanitarian aid. So let's go back to what we did before.
Jacob Kurtzer:So I think the Obama 2.0 narrative exists, and I think there's there's a justification for it, because many of the people who are coming into government now, you know, were people who had previously been in government and there's a question of, are we just going back to that period. And I would argue that building back better, which is Biden's you know, catchy, allurative phrase, is not sufficient, right? Everything wasn't great up until 2O16. There were tonnes of problems in our little professional sector. There were there were massive problems. And I... you know, talking on the USG side, problems with the US bureaucracy, how we fund, even politicisation even if it was less overt. So, you know, there's... I was watching this very sappy but somehow incredible TV show called Ted Lasso about an American who goes to coach soccer or football in the UK. And he tells his players, you know, be like a goldfish, right? Goldfish doesn't remember that... whatever happened. And I was thinking about that, about the people coming back, right? You know, Samantha Power should learn the lessons from the Syria and Libya experiences but we can't dwell on them, right? Like we can't worry about things that happened in the past. The USG is too big to spend time harping on mistakes. You have to learn from them and make sure you go forward. But I also think that this would apply to partners, you know, nongovernmental organisations, multilateral partners, right? There's for sure a justification to be sceptical of the US government, right, the whiplash that we've seen from 2O16 to 2O17, and now 2O2O to 2O21, allows for people to maintain a certain level of scepticism about the direction of the government. That said, I would also, again, point to everything that's been said on the part of the principles about one, returning to multilateral organisations, right. One of Biden's first executive orders, if not the first, was returning to the table with WHO. o Dr. Fauci speaking with Dr. Tetris immediately, you know, on day one. You have Secretary Blinken saying development is going to be front and centre and human rights is going to be at the centre of American policy. Now sure, you know, people can be very sceptical of what that means. But that is an entirely different framing of the policy orientation. And then again, I think with with Ambassador Power, talking about someone who has... brings a humanitarian and human rights mindset. And so, you know, I wouldn't... if I was an investor, I would remain cautious because the the day-to-day challenges and the political realities and, you know, the intelligence assessments, you know, will start to come to these people's desks. And I think you'll see disappointment in the early days that they're not moving fast enough on priority issues. But you know, one of Secretary Lincoln's first acts was to review this terrorist designation for the Houthis in Yemen, which I just don't see having happened so quickly in a previous period. I think that is almost a reaction, you know, to the highly cynical policy decisions of the previous administration. I think you're going to see a little bit more spine and backbone to push back against those holdovers from the previous administration officials.
Lars Peter Nissen:Now, if we look at, for example, level of funding, do you think... there's been a lot of fears in, I think, in the community that the pandemic would have a negative impact on funding levels. And we've seen the UK cut... not necessarily because of this, but I mean, for a number of reasons, cut down their level of support. What you see in the USA? Are we gonna see more or less the same, a significant increase, what are we looking at?
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, it's an interesting question I was thinking about on my ride into the... into work this morning. Humanitarian assistance has historically had very strong bipartisan support, even in periods of, you know, high political dysfunction, which we are in. I mean, this would describe our current political dysfunction as extremely high, if not dangerous. On the scales of the, you know, an ACAPS metric of political instability, I think we would probably be pretty high on it. But we've seen, you know, even in periods of gridlock, that humanitarian assistance has... tends to have strong bipartisan support. So the question to me is, you know... it's an open question of will, you know, congressional Republicans in the administration be able to find common ground on some of these humanitarian or, you know, sort of softer issues, even while being highly contentious on levels of spending? Or will humanitarian funding become, you know, an unintended consequence of the very... you know, over disagreements about the levels of stimulus spending?
Lars Peter Nissen:Sort of collateral damage?
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, exactly. You know, the innocent bystander, so to speak. Last year, we were, I believe, pleasantly surprised that funding wasn't cut dramatically. And if and if anything, it was... it retained and there was a fairly high level of humanitarian funding in the, you know, COVID stimulus bills. The challenge has became some of the bureaucratic challenges of spending it, of getting it out the door and getting it out the door in a principled way. And, you know, branding issues and what you could spend it on, and all those kinds of questions. So I would say I'm a little bit sceptical that we'll be able to maintain the funding levels. But you know, the US has always lagged, even as it's the elephant in the room in terms of overall dollar spending, we've always lagged in terms of the percentage of GDP going to international assistance. Compare it to some of the peers in the UK, I mean, the EU and elsewhere. I don't think it'll get cut dramatically, right. I mean, I think the administration has made clear that humanitarian and development is a priority and I think at the end of the day, when you look at the numbers that they're talking about for the stimulus package of... you know, the Biden administration's domestic proposal is 1.9 trillion. The humanitarian piece of that functionally becomes a rounding error, right, even when it's a huge input for humanitarian funding? What I think we have to be... where I think the Washington types and their partner, you know, the, their colleagues in Geneva and in country need to be clever is, I fear we're going to start to hear expressions like 'do more with less', you know, which is not... it's not really a thing, right? You do less with less. But what... where we can actually have meaningful impact is, can the less that we do be the part that's not, you know, focused on alleviating human suffering, right? Can we can we have less bureaucracy? Can we have less paperwork? Can we have less grant writing? And... you know, and do reporting and monitoring and evaluation in a meaningful way, but not in a duplicative way, right? Can we fix the bureaucracy in such a way that even if funding is reduced, more money is coming out the door, you know, at the level of operations and is not getting captured at the level of overhead. And that's where I think we might have an opportunity in the next four years to fix some of the process challenges, even in a constrained environment.
Lars Peter Nissen:If I had to summarise what I hear you saying, it's somehow 'muddling back better', right? We sort of took a hit over the past four years and we're sort of muddling back to where we were. We... more... there's a high level of path dependency in everything you say.
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah. I think muddling back matters is about right. Look, there's like a horrible expression in US politics of 'never waste a crisis', right. And I think we're in that crisis, right? And that crisis has, you know, incredible and exceptional human consequences for victims of armed conflict, for people and living in natural disasters, for people, you know, at the bottom of the economic ladder around the world, right? You don't... the people who are suffering from the impacts of COVID. It's not just in conflict zones, right? It's people who struggle economically and they're just getting hit because shops are closed--you know, imports, exports, all of it. So... but, you know, we have these three or four things happening at the same time. Yu got COVID, you got political crises, you've got a meaningful discussion about localization and, you know, what that actually means in the sector. And so when I say, you know, don't waste this crisis, right, we saw a lot of international staff leaving and operations continuing to run, right? So what what lesson can we learn from this, right, in terms of what we're what does an effective operation require? You know, I pivot when I talk to different audiences, right. When I... sometimes when I'm International, you know, and I'm speaking to my colleagues overseas, I'm like, Look, monitoring and evaluation and reporting is essential, right, the US Congress is a... you know, USAID is responsible for the taxpayer dollars, right, and we have to be... we have to recognise that this plays an important part of the of the chain, but there's lessons to be learned from the past year that we can do things differently. And I think, you know, capturing those lessons and implementing them will be part of that muddling back better.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think that's a really interesting point. And I... because I hear people saying stuff like, 'Oh, we can continue like we have' and 'This must be a pivotal year'. And I just have this deep scepticism towards... I think gravity will sit in. I'm afraid that we will get very close to where we were in a couple of years. I don't know that this was a transformative year, and I think it should be.
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, I would retain your level of scepticism, right. You know, I think there's sort of like... that's part of the ICRC slash the humanitarian world tattoo is, right, like, you're just kind of sceptical of everything? So I would retain that scepticism. And I think, yeah, I think for the US, we will slowly go back to old ways of doing things, right. But again, given the amount of funding that the US provides, given the outstanding footprint, if we can start to fix on the margins, right, we can have real real impact. So if it means... you know, I'm not 100%, sold on country-made pool funds or pool funding in general, but that is a different model than the way that they normally do, right? If the funding in individual countries goes from 50 million to 150 million, for the United States, that's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall levels of funding. But that would actually be a meaningful change in the humanitarian operation in an individual context. And again, that's a learning opportunity. That's a testing opportunity. And so that's where I think we have opportunities to come out of this crisis. But I also think, you know, with that scepticism in mind, right, we should be thinking about a four year trajectory, if not an eight year trajectory, right? There will be short term gains and losses. But I think humanitarian, you know, policy practitioners, you know, with their colleagues around the world, should be thinking about change, now, with a longer time horizon, because the US apparatus moves very slowly.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so if we think about it sort of geographically, do you see a shift over those four years in terms of geographic focus? Is there going to be more of a focus on Latin America, Central America, Venezuela, Colombia, that stuff? Or... where... is that even going to shift? Or what's going to happen there?
Jacob Kurtzer:I wouldn't think about it as a shift in geographic focus, although, you know, there's the Rumsfeldian known knowns unknown and known unknowns and unknown unknowns and so I think there will be emergencies that we have not thought of. You know, you sort of look at the map and you think, Well, we can see them all. But no, there's going to be things that come up that we can think of, I think more in terms of that four year trajectory in terms of like policy and process, right? Obama said that that as President, you know, your job... you're on the top of a very slow and large ship moving very, you know, moving like through through molasses and the night, right, and your job is to pick a spot on the horizon that's a slightly different trajectory and slowly, you know, turn the wheel. And I think, you know... and then and then we had kind of a drunken captain for the last four years and so I think when I think about the next four years, I think, what's that spot on the horizon that people like Samantha Power and the heads of the PRM Bureau, the State Department and heads of VHA, USAAID are going to look at so that in 2O24 we're operating... the US government is operating as a humanitarian donor much better, right? And so I think you'll... you know, where we as advocates or among among policy analysts, I think our value add is to say, Where are the opportunities for change, right, so there's internal bureaucracy stuff that can be fixed? There's funding approaches that can be fixed, there's politicisation questions that can be fixed, there's engagement with international institutions that can be fixed, there's these sectoral things, right? You know, we're five years past 2O16's commitments, right? Which ones can we get to by 2O24?
Lars Peter Nissen:And I was thinking as you were talking... so what you're not saying is, the US is not going to say, Oh, man, we did some real damage to the idea of, you know, principled of humanitarian aid over the past four years and the grand bargain is sort of... we're seeing diminishing returns there. We need a new big reform initiative. You don't see that coming out being spearheaded by the US. Sort of a back to basics sort of a thing.
Jacob Kurtzer:I try to avoid making predictions because then you can be identified when you were wrong. Although I will happily admit I'm wrong, as opposed to most of our pundit class in Washington. I don't... my I would be sceptici--... sceptical of that kind of big pronouncement, at least in the early days, right? One is, I think it's, it's not a priority, right? You know, Samantha Power as the head of USAID, like that will be her priority... will be... So she may make a big speech in the next few weeks or months about USAID's direction. But I imagine part of that thinking back about the 2OOOs... or 2OO8 to 2O16 experience will be, you know, did those big things work, right? And, you know, what's the what's the lesson learned from that? And I... you know, I do think there's a little bit of getting our house in order that should happen before, you know the... the Fauci WHO example, notwithstanding, I do think approaching our international partners, you know, at the UN agencies, diplomatically, in country, when we engage with host governments and host communities, I think a little humility is in order, right? And I do think that lesson has been learned, both because some of those big ideas were have not really manifested and because of the last four years. And so I don't see that as a priority to start with, but perhaps in a year or two, if there is some success, righting the ship, you know, becoming more efficient, you know, being more consistent with good donorship principles, then maybe there will be that push to revisit some of that stuff and move it forward.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, that makes sense. So sort of an introvert meddling back better to begin with, and a careful, ask to be invited to the party again?
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, we've all gotten back to parties, like, where we weren't necessarily the best behaved the last time we were there. So you know, you walk in the door differently.
Lars Peter Nissen:Right.
Jacob Kurtzer:And, but again, like, I think, you know, to me, you look at people's words, right, you know, as they enter office, you look at their words and you look at their history, and then as they start to take actions, we'll start to judge their actions, right? And again, I think, you know, the words so far, I think, have been very encouraging. The history so far has been mostly encouraging, right? I try to be honest in my assessment of senior government figures, right, they will always disappoint because they are pulled by variables that we... we have to hold them to account, but we have to be rec-... we have to recognise that they have a lot of different things to play. But one person I didn't mention is our new incoming ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who, you know... Right? We have someone at the UN level now who is an... was an Africa expert, right, and she has spent her career understanding these issues. And unfortunately, you know, there's... there remains many primary priority humanitarian emergencies in the African continent from Nigeria to Somalia, Ethiopia right now. And you can't discount the level of importance that someone who knows those issues well, who has spent time at the AU, who has spent time at SADC, who has given... you know has emphasised multilateral diplomatic endeavours? I mean, I think it's just a whole new approach, as opposed to the previous US ambassador, who is, you know, private sector person from, you know, Kentucky. There's just the world of difference in how we approach international issues. And they will fail, right, there will be there will be moments of great disappointment for the humanitarian community, you know, because of circumstances and policies that we won't like. But I do think that starting with an approach of collaboration, cooperation, expressing value in multilateral diplomatic solutions, speaking the language of human rights, I think matters.
Lars Peter Nissen:So we've spoken a bit about how much capital, or how much money will come from the US in the next four years. And what I'm left wondering is, how much political capital is the new administration willing to spend? I mean, we focus a lot of assists-... on assistance in the humanitarian and community, but we also have have a really strong protection agenda and protection sometimes requires political capital. Is the new administration willing to spend that?
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, I think so, right? So we talked about funding, I think we'll see a status quo. We talked about fixing processes, and I think we'll see, you know, a positive trend in that direction about how the US is as a donor both internally and our own side and engaging with our partners. But you're right, I think the question... some of the questions around protection become less about funding protection activities and more about how the US approaches specifically contexts in which the US is a party to the conflict or has a meaningful impact on the behaviour of parties to the conflict. And this is another area where I think the President himself who talked about sort of a return to dignity in the White House and an approach, again, to values, human rights and humanitarian orientation, and I think subcontracts these protection questions out to his heads of agencies. So the head of the Secretary of Defence, who has responsibility for civilian casualties for US conduct in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, to the Department of State, which has the IHL, you know, is sort of the carrier of some of the IHL files, to USA ID in terms of some of their protection related work. And that's where I do think we'll see changes in policy, right? So changes in in human in US policy that will have a humanitarian impact. So I think of a couple immediately offhand, right? So we talked about the Yemen designation, right? Immediately, that's one. One of the problems are one of the challenges we face with the previous administration was a very hostile orientation towards Palestine, right? This administration, I think, will will look differently about humanitarian funding and Gaza, and will be more willing to challenge and address some of the protection concerns for the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank. I think in Afghanistan, one of the protection related activities that's been happening for a long time has been working with DOD to to more effectively track and compensate for civilian casualties. And I think, you know, the... this administration says the previous administration said they didn't get into any more new wars, but there was a substantial increase in the use of drones in Afghanistan. And I think those kinds of questions, the use of drones writ large, tracking civilian casualties specifically, compensating for them, putting in place measures to try to reduce the use of those weapons and the impact of them, will be something that does administration will take very seriously based both on their their words to date, but also the individuals that they've been... that have been brought in. To Ambassador Power's team to Linda Thomas-Greenfield's team, you've... you're bringing in people who... with expertise on civilian protection, with expertise on, you know, atrocity prevention. And that's where I think we can see faster policy changes that will have humanitarian impact.
Lars Peter Nissen:Jake, thank you so much for coming on Trumanitarian. It's been fascinating listening to you... you didn't want to call it predictions. But still, I mean, you did predict a little bit, and I am going to hold you accountable to those predictions. So thank you for doing that. And I look forward to seeing whether you were right.
Jacob Kurtzer:Yeah, thank you. Thanks very much for having me. And, you know, from the Washington perspective, I'm going to give you a shout out; the work that ACAPS is doing is essential to what we're trying to do in DC so I look forward to continuing to work.