Oct. 10, 2026Updated 10:19 a.m. ET
Are we already in the middle of a new world war without realizing it? That’s the provocative question I wanted to explore when I sat down with someone in the rare position to know: Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The I.C.R.C. is a secretive organization that is not well known outside war zones. Unlike the American Red Cross, which deals with blood drives and American disaster relief, the I.C.R.C. is the independent and neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements created in the wake of World War II that laid out the rules of war. In her role, Spoljaric travels to all sides of active war zones — Gaza, Ukraine, Iran — meeting with the heads of governments and armed groups alike. She rarely gives interviews because of the politically fraught and confidential nature of her work, but she sat down with me just after the most recent U.N. General Assembly because she is deeply worried about not only the growing number of conflicts in the world but also how complex they have become.
She is also speaking out because she believes that her entreaties to global leaders when it comes to the rules of war are increasingly falling on deaf ears. (We spoke before Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the government would be live-streaming a public execution — another sign that the old rules and norms are eroding.) Many world leaders “simply don’t care anymore,” she told me. “And this lack of empathy, this lack of anger, is what I find most dangerous at the moment.”
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She’s Been to Gaza. She Met With the Iranians. Now She Has a Warning.
Are we in the middle of a new world war without realizing it? Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, is deeply worried about the growing number of conflicts in the world and thinks many world leaders “simply don’t care anymore.”
**I covered wars for a big part of my career as a journalist, and the world feels more dangerous and volatile than I can ever remember. How do you see things?** I see it the same way, because the statistics prove it. We now count twice as many conflicts as 15 years ago. We are at 130 international and noninternational armed conflicts that we classify in our system. That’s the highest number since the Second World War. So I think it’s time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this.
**In my own newspaper, there was a** **recent headline** **asking if World War III had already begun, and I want to speak more deeply about why those fears about a global conflict are taking root. But first, you rarely give interviews. Why are you sitting down with me now?** Because I want more people to understand that we live in a decade of war. And because we live in a decade of war, we have to understand the significance and importance of the rules of war and why they need to be respected. These treaties were created precisely for times like the ones we live in. People need to understand the importance of this.
**Why do you think they don’t?** We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don’t apply anymore, and that there can’t be rules because of the pursuit of total victory. But that is not possible. In history, there has never been total victory; there has only been death and destruction, over and above what was necessary.
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Mirjana Spoljaric and a delegation at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip on Jan. 14, 2025.Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
**Is there such a thing as a necessary war?** As far as I’m concerned, no. But philosophers and politicians have argued for thousands of years that war is necessary. The point is that war has always been considered as something in the pursuit of a _political_ objective. It’s a means to an end. Today you get the feeling that war becomes the means to an end itself, and wars continue because people want to stay in power. They have created an environment where war becomes the condition under which they can continue ruling, and that’s very dangerous. You ask me whether we are approaching a third world war. Honestly, history will judge that. History books will tell us whether today we were already in the beginning, or maybe already in the middle of such a situation. The I.C.R.C. didn’t know that we were in the Second World War when it was happening.
**You are one of the few people in the world who regularly travels to both sides of armed conflicts. Can you tell me where you’ve been since you took over as the head of the I.C.R.C. in 2022?** I’ve been to Gaza more than once during military operations. My organization facilitated the release and return of the hostages from Gaza and the Palestinian detainees back to Gaza. I was in Ukraine. I was in Myanmar. I was recently in Iran, in Iraq. I travel to the Middle East often, but I also travel to Africa. I was in Sudan, I was in Mali. I have to go see for myself what it looks like. I need to understand what civilians endure in conflict because I’m speaking to the holders of power. I wouldn’t be credible if I didn’t know what it means to be subject to this level of violence.
**Your organization is one of the few that has been allowed inside and continues to work in Gaza. International journalists, most other international organizations haven’t been given access by the Israeli government. Can you describe what you have seen?** I never go to any place of conflict without people telling me that they want to stop, without people telling me that they don’t understand why this is happening. I see children without parents. I see children without arms and legs. How senseless does the world feel to you when you’re confronting these things? When you then go to the power holders and they tell you that there’s nothing that they can do, you just don’t understand. I often don’t understand what I see in connection to what I hear.
**Millions of Palestinians in Gaza are now forced to live on only around 30 percent of the territory. Over 80 percent of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. In a 2025 interview with the BBC, you called Gaza worse than hell on earth, and you described people stripped of their human dignity. Have the rules of war been followed there?** What I said about Gaza is still valid today. What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard. There are so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen. The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity. The perception created that if there’s enough food, that’s good enough — for some people it’s good enough to just barely survive in rubble, and for other people it is only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school. It’s applying two standards. And this will backfire. We cannot assume that for certain people certain things are sufficient when that doesn’t apply to everybody else. You can see that by how we measure humanitarian needs in Europe in comparison to South Sudan or Somalia. Intuitively and because we can’t prevent it, we continue applying two standards.
**That some human lives are more valuable than others?** Yeah. I always fear that if you allow double standards, it can happen to you. You never know when you’ll find yourself all of a sudden on the other side of the line. It happened in the Second World War to the Jewish people, but it’s happened to a lot more people than we nowadays keep in mind.
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**I want to stay with Gaza for one more moment before we broaden out. Did the I.C.R.C. have access to the Israeli hostages while they were in captivity? Because there were horrific stories of their conditions, and one of your main roles is to make sure that detainees and prisoners are treated well.** \[_Shakes head no_\] Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back. And in my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of Day 1. But that’s not the reality in which we operate, and so we have to work with the tools that we have. You know, there’s nothing more complex, and to a certain extent also more brutal, than hostage taking. We know that also because our own colleagues find themselves more often than they should in such situations, and we know how important it is to negotiate them out as quickly as possible. So the objective always has to be to bring the hostages back. And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes. I personally think that pressure should have come earlier in the negotiations. We could have saved more lives. And this was the subject of our conversations. I traveled twice to Qatar to meet with the leadership of Hamas, to sit with Ismail Haniyeh at the time. I sat with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself. These were tough discussions, and trust me, we are _very_ frank in these meetings. This is why these meetings have to always remain confidential.
**Israel has also not allowed you access to detainees inside of Israel. How have they explained that to you, and how do you then respond?** Prior to Oct. 7, the I.C.R.C. has had access for decades to detainees held by Israel, and we’ve organized tens of thousands, if not more, family visits, and that’s important. Access to prisons in situations of war is extremely challenging and complicated to achieve. And at a certain point in the conflict, parties decide that for security reasons they don’t want to give us access. That’s the most common argument. But it doesn’t matter what the reason is. According to the Geneva Conventions, which all these states have ratified, they have a legal obligation to give us access, and in my opinion also a _moral_ obligation, because we need to inform the families about the whereabouts of or the fate of their relatives. You capture a soldier, this person is detained, but a soldier is not, per se, a criminal. And no matter how you classify these situations, torture is never allowed. Never. That is clear, and this is what we discuss with those who don’t give us access.
But there’s a different reason for me to be able to go, irrespective of my legal mandate. Detention is the place where you lose your identity. When there’s no possibility to notify the families and to receive information about them, detention becomes the place of utmost deprivation of yourself. And we’ve seen more often than not that people detained under horrible conditions over extended periods of time forget who they are. When I recently visited a detention facility in Iraq, the detainees told me their biggest challenge is information. What is always most important for everyone is to have information about what month it is, what day it is, where their families are, where their children are, whether the children are safe. You’re talking to human beings.
**This is a bit of a basic question, but why does it matter how you treat your enemy?** Of course it matters! Because you’re dehumanizing yourself if you torture. If you tell your soldiers, “Go and kill women and children, go rape them, looting is allowed, it’s our strategy,” these people dehumanize themselves. They will never be able to return to a normal life. I listen to so many interviews of former soldiers. All of them say that what haunts them is this child that was left in the street because they weren’t allowed to turn around and collect it. That they saw it bleeding to death. It remains with you. You debase yourself. This is why soldiers have all these problems when they return. I refuse to believe that the core human essence is bad. We are good people, we want to live with people we love, we want to have children that thrive, we want to be able to build a house and know that our grandchildren will be better off than us. This is a very normal human motivation. Our motivation is not to live in rubble. How could it be?
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Spoljaric with the president of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Dr. Pirhossein Hossein Kolivand (right), on a visit to Tehran in April.Credit...Majid Panahijoo/ICRC
**I want to learn a little bit more about you. You are Swiss Croatian, you studied philosophy and you worked primarily in international development and peacemaking for most of your career. Why did you want to take on a job about war? Do you have memories of the war in Croatia?** My first memory of war was everybody telling me about the Second World War and how they endured it. My father was born in the middle, and when he was 5 years old he had to work in the field for 12 hours in the sun for a glass of milk. He said his whole childhood was marked by the memory of being hungry. And my mother was equally traumatized. She said that every time a child died of a disease in her neighborhood, she thought that the parents were lucky, and probably happy, because there was one less child to feed. Can you imagine thinking as a little girl that somebody’s happy about losing a child because you don’t have enough food for everyone? These are the stories that marked me probably more profoundly than anything else. And then came the Yugoslavia wars and my direct exposure to the impact of conflict. I cannot imagine how anybody could say we _need_ this war. I’m not naïve. I’m surrounded by harsh interlocutors in a harsh environment. But I still think that if you keep the people in mind, if you at all times remember that it could happen to you, it could happen to your children, you will think twice before you start the war.
**You are the first woman to be president of the I.C.R.C. Do you think gender matters in how you’re dealing with conflict?** When I came into office, everybody was asking, “How is it being the first woman president of the I.C.R.C. after 160 years of male dominance?” And it’s not only at the top; it’s across the institution, because it’s an organization that was created in war, for wars. Then I went to northern Mali, and for the first time an I.C.R.C. president could sit with the women in a tent, because social norms prevented my predecessors from doing the same. I felt so shaken throughout the night when I realized what is happening to women in conflict and how brutal it is, because you have an overlap of many things affecting women and depriving them of even the minimum protection that any human being should have. And that night I realized it _is_ different when it’s a woman. If there would never be a woman at the head of these organizations, we wouldn’t be as conscious of what it means for 50 percent of the world’s population.
**You’ve seen many horrible things as part of your job. You deal, as you said, in a very harsh environment. How do you protect yourself from the relentlessness and awfulness? I mean, I’ve seen you get a little emotional thinking about it.** In German, we say, “I was built close to water.” I’m very emotional. I try to be hard, but it doesn’t work. Maybe it’s good that I’m emotional, maybe it’s good that I get angry when I see bad things or unjust things, because it keeps me going, it keeps that feeling alive that you have to _do_ something.
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**I was thinking about the I.C.R.C. and the difficulty of staying neutral in this era — this idea of having to speak to both sides and not taking sides. There have been many accusations that the I.C.R.C. hides behind its neutrality to mask inaction. The Holocaust is a moment where the I.C.R.C. failed catastrophically to prevent or to even acknowledge the extermination of the Jews. I know your background is in philosophy. What does it mean to be neutral in the face of extreme suffering? Is there an inherent tension in that?** When I started my studies, I had my thoughts. I could get impatient with the stubborn insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. I very, very quickly changed my mind when I became president myself. Having accepted this unique opportunity, I had to learn quickly and acknowledge that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without this strict insistence on neutrality, not in the context of prisoners of war in Russia and in Ukraine, and definitely we wouldn’t have been able to bring back the hostages from Gaza. You’ve seen the pictures of our colleagues unarmed among thousands, if not tens of thousands, of armed men, surrounded by rubble from which there was no escape. We had to negotiate the terms with everyone. Nobody would have trusted us to be able to do this highly complex operation if we hadn’t defended our neutrality over 160 years. You tweak it once, you become political, and that’s it. I know it makes so many people angry, but that’s the essence of our mission.
### Listen to the Conversation With Mirjana Spoljaric
The president of the I.C.R.C. is worried that our warring world is spiraling out of control.
**In that context, I want to ask you about Iran. You’ve spoken with the Iranians about the negotiations \[with the United States\]. I understand that you cannot divulge the nature of those discussions, but I am wondering how much you can say about how this conflict may or may not be resolved.** I followed the nuclear talks between 2013 and 2015 under President Obama. It became clear to me at the time how complex these negotiations were. It’s much more complicated today in comparison. The first challenge is to establish trust. We have created a world where war is not a means of last resort. It happens at any moment in a process, which leads to a situation where parties always keep that possibility in mind and always keep a high readiness and preparedness to return to conflict. That in itself is not helpful, because these negotiations will take a long time and will require a lot of compromise. But on top of this, we have created a situation that is much more complex because of the overlapping of conflicts. Today’s conflicts are not limited to a given situation. They are turning into systems.
**Explain what you mean exactly.** You have countries aligning over continents. You have shifts in military cooperation. You have shifts in interests and economic goals.
**So Iran’s relationship with Russia, Russia’s relationship with China, the conflict spreading to Saudi Arabia and Yemen with the Houthis ——** And then you have the nonstate armed groups that are connected with other nonstate armed groups — ideological groups, or radicalized groups, however you want to name them, they share ideologies, they share common objectives, they align, they realign, they trade their arms, they ensure the availability of technology and cheap weapons across many countries and thousands of kilometers. So if the situation escalates in Yemen, you can be sure that it won’t remain contained to that territory for long. You already have two very important sea straits affected. So you have a lack of trust. You have asymmetric warfare that allows these conflicts to continue for an extended period of time. And on top of this, there’s a total absence of economic growth and a fast loss of development gains that have been essential for the welfare of the people in many countries of the world. Take Iraq: Over the last 10 years, the country has been recovering from very large conflicts that have had a heavy impact on society and the economy. These gains are being undone. Countries don’t have the fiscal space anymore to cope with the fallout created by continued warfare. The convergence of these trends is extremely dangerous. And now, what do we need? We need political will. We need negotiations. We need powerful politicians to have the power to negotiate.
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Spoljaric and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in Moscow in July.Credit...Shamil Zhumatov/POOL/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
**In his recent speech at the U.N. General Assembly, President Trump threatened the annihilation of Iran by U.S. forces, speaking of this idea of trust and using war as a method of negotiation. He’s used language like that quite a bit, but it was notable to me because he made that statement at a body explicitly created to stop wars, which is the United Nations. What do you think that kind of language says about America’s understanding and commitment to these very complex, in-depth negotiations that you say are needed?** You know, I started my career as a diplomat about 25 years ago in New York. And ever since, I’ve been observing eroding language. Certain things said back then would have triggered points of order. People would have left the room. There would have been outrage. I remember when Hugo Chavez spoke at the General Assembly and what reactions this triggered.
**When he talked about President Bush and the smell of sulfur, implying that he was the devil.** Exactly. This is a gradual erosion. But there are things being said that in certain situations could even lead to war crimes, because depending on who you are and what the situation looks like, it could entice people to do things that would actually amount to war crimes. This is why hate speech and this brutal language is so dangerous. But I’m not accusing a specific person today, because this erosion has been happening for far too long, and I’ve been alert for many years now. Every politician that uses any term that points at there being no rules and no red lines sends this signal to any person in the world that bears a weapon. You have to be conscious that as a holder of power, you have far bigger reach. Many more people hear: _Oh, there are no red lines. I have weapons. I can use them._
**One of the things that struck me about why we’re in such a period of global conflict is that it’s relatively easy to get into wars but increasingly hard to get out of them. So they drag on and accumulate. Are we losing our capacity to resolve conflicts?** Definitely. If you don’t negotiate over 10 years, you lose the practice. It’s like being a heart surgeon. You don’t stop operating and then come back and they give you the instruments and you resume. I spoke once with a senior representative of the A.N.C. \[African National Congress\] in South Africa who told me: “Our adversaries never had to negotiate anything. They didn’t know how to do it, so we had to train them first before we could sit at the negotiation table.”
**Undergirding this whole discussion and your call for leaders to pick up the phone is the breakdown of many democracies and the institutions that hold them together. The weakness that we’re seeing in upholding liberal democracy means that international organizations are also weak. Are you worried about the complete breakdown of the post-World War II order?** Of course I am. Because that order made it possible for Europe to stay out of a third world war, to stay out of the levels of destruction that we have seen. Europe is also the _leader_ of bad wars. I feel very bad saying that, but we have to acknowledge that European or Western history is not one of peace and security. But coming out of that rubble, there were a few people who had the foresight and courage to establish an international system that is in no way perfect but for a long time prevented the worst. I mean, everything that is written in the Geneva Conventions today is still as valid. If you had to rewrite them, you would come back with the same principles because they’re so intuitive and logical. In any society, religion, culture, nobody will tell you it’s correct to torture a child.
**To come back to this idea that perhaps we might already be in this third global war without us knowing: What can we do?** Let’s go back to that time when we believed in peace. Why is it so wrong to start a global movement around the notion of world peace? It’s possible. When I talk to my children, peace is not something completely away and absent for them. This is how they imagine their future. I think we have to listen to them. We have to start retreating from an overfocus on weapons, weapons systems, defense technologies. But we also have to recreate a positive narrative about humanity, about peace, about coming together and working together and living together. We have to come back to recognizing that humanity is what holds us together and is something we need to protect as a priority today, because we are debasing almost everything.
_This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on_ _Apple Podcasts__,_ _Spotify__,_ _YouTube__,_ _iHeartRadio_ _or_ _Amazon Music__. Follow us on_ _Instagram_ _and_ _TikTok__._
Director of photography (video): Cal Christie
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