Crisis Beyond Borders: What Ebola reveals about Modern Politics

By: James Hood

In today's post-COVID landscape, one would assume unified multi-national responses to the outbreaks of viruses have both the adequate infrastructure and lived experience to result in efficient protocols being in place to halt the spread of deadly diseases. The recent outbreak of Ebola in Africa, however, challenges this presumptive rationale and exposes the dire state of contemporary humanitarian intervention. 

In May 2026, concerning reports emerged of a significant outbreak of Ebola in the rural Eastern province of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As of early June, at least 344 cases have been confirmed and 60 deaths reported. Yet, due to logistical challenges of identifying cases in rural Eastern Congo, this number is likely much higher.

Ebola is already well-known in the West and, despite not being spread through air-bourne transmissions, it has a fatality rate of over 50% and thus is a salient public health challenge that the international community rapidly mobilises to contain the smallest conceivable area.

“We are catching up”, declared the director of the WHO Tedros Ghebreyesus after a visit to the DRC. This statement, however, seems to overlook the stringent politically-imposed limitations that the global response to this outbreak have had to face. Considering the context of UN-funded medical responses to the Ebola outbreak being historically largely hinged on US-facilitated resources, the scaling back of American foreign aid under the Trump administration has left UN capabilities in the Congo severely overwhelmed. 

Greg Ramm, a Congo-based volunteer, has epitomised this rising political apathy to sustaining humanitarian interests in Africa by stating that “none of us have enough funding” to cultivate the logistical necessities to respond to such a deadly outbreak. This assessment is hardly surprising when analysing the prevailing trends of political spending on humanitarian foreign aid. In just the last 18 months, the Trump administration has withdrawn from the WHO, essentially dismantled USAID and drastically reduced the aid given to the affected nations of Congo and Uganda. In a particularly morally questionable course of action, DOGE’s grandmaster Elon Musk joked he had “accidently cancelled” funding to Uganda, where citizens at the time, were battling a renewal of Ebola.

Whilst the incredibly turbulent political environment in Congo makes a safe cooperative response incredibly difficult, with the Eastern region in the midst of both Islamist insurgencies and a long-standing M23 rebellion, with just the other day an ISIS-linked grouping killing up to 30 residents of a city in the region, the hardships seen in the response in Congo can hardly be seen as a result of mere internal instability.

In an increasingly self-centred political environment, where spending is drastically shifting to defence enhancement and tackling internal economic issues, the priority of funding global humanitarian missions has fallen down the pecking order of funding allocation. This is not just an exclusively American issue either, major contributors to the global health infrastructure, such as the UK, Germany and Canada, have all decreased foreign aid since the start of 2025. This is a salient reminder of the practical consequences of increasing political indifference to sustaining their previously held responsibility to improve rural, underdeveloped health infrastructure across regions such as central Africa.

Whilst, senior US administration officials such as Marco Rubio defend their governments response and the residual effect of DOGE slash cuts to funding to nations like Congo, by pointing to the $23 million in bilateral foreign aid that has been made available to Congo and Uganda, the fact remains that there is a concerning lack of proactive engagement from major nations to tackling this public health issue that has the possibility of spreading beyond the confines of African borders. 

For instance, comparative responses between the 2014 and 2026 Ebola outbreaks in Africa display the stark moral deprivation that has been forged in the last decade towards humanitarianism. Back in 2014, the US government transported Americans affected by Ebola to American quarantine facilities which corresponded with much higher survival rates. Yet, in 2026, the Trump administration has deployed a controversial risk-avoidance strategy to externalise the threats of Ebola and place Americans in a quarantine facility in the un-affected nation of Kenya. 

Beyond its apathetic laissez-faire attitude to the ongoing crisis in the Congo, this illogical proposed solution by the Americans perfectly epitomises the disorganised ad hoc responses that governments across the world have created to respond to this new health emergency. In concurrence with rising political populism, which emphasises the defence of the homeland above all else, the residual memory of COVID has evidently not moulded a hyper-active global system of effectively containing diseases and ensuring adequate resources are available at the blink of an eye. Concerning as it is, it should not be surprising. 

The reality is that across borders, nationalist egotism is rising in governance and the humanitarian moral supremacy cultivated by Clinton and Blair in the 90s has long faded.

The biggest victims of this shift are UN-facilitated humanitarian programmes that aid underdeveloped nations such as the Congo. 

Whether this is temporary or a radical shift towards a less-connected world is still to be seen, but the paradoxical nature of this trend is stark. In the post-COVID era, where global cooperative health initiatives are of such recent memory to most, their contemporary prominence has never seemed so far gone.

Image: UNICEF