My grandmother used to say you can tell what a man truly values by watching where he spends his money when things get tight. The same logic applies to empires.
Since February 28, the United States has spent somewhere between $12 billion and $29 billion on Operation Epic Fury-- its joint military campaign with Israel against Iran. Congress is bracing for a Pentagon supplemental request that once floated as high as $200 billion. A billion dollars a day, Rep. Jill Tokuda said on the House floor. "Disgusting," she called it.
Meanwhile, in Port-au-Prince, a factory worker named Alexandre Joseph now walks four hours a day to and from work because he can no longer afford the tap-tap fare. Fuel prices doubled after the Iran war sent oil markets into chaos. His two children eat less than they did three months ago.
This is not a coincidence. This is policy.
"When Washington spends a billion dollars a day on bombs in Tehran, Haiti doesn't just slip off the agenda. It gets actively made worse."
The Mission That Was Never Given a Chance
Before the bombs fell on Iran, Haiti's security crisis was already a slow-motion disaster. Gangs control roughly 90 percent of Port-au-Prince. Nearly 1.3 million people are internally displaced. More than 5,600 were killed in 2024 alone. Children make up 30 to 50 percent of gang membership -- a statistic that should be a global emergency on its own.
The Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission, authorised by the UN in October 2023, was supposed to help. It never stood a chance. At its peak, it deployed fewer than 1,000 officers against a mandated ceiling of 2,500, chronically short of funds, short of personnel, short of political will. It ended in April 2026, widely assessed as a failure, its final contingent leaving the tarmac of Toussaint Louverture International Airport to little fanfare.
A new Gang Suppression Force is now deploying. It has a mandate. What it does not yet have is guaranteed money. The UN Trust Fund that was supposed to back the MSS had just $110.9 million in it as of May 2025 -- most of it from Canada, not the United States. The GSF is projected to reach 5,500 members by October 2026. Whether it gets there depends on donor commitments that history suggests will not materialise.
The Double Hit
Here is what doesn't get said clearly enough: the Iran war isn't just diverting America's attention from Haiti. It's making Haiti's crisis materially worse.
Disruption to Gulf shipping and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent global oil prices surging past $100 a barrel. For a country as import-dependent as Haiti, that's catastrophic. The World Food Programme reported that 200,000 additional Haitians entered acute food emergency status directly as a result of the Iran conflict's commodity shock. Transportation costs doubled. Kerosene, used for cooking, became unaffordable. Families that were surviving on reduced meals are now skipping days.
At the same time, the Trump administration moved to terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitians living and working legally in the United States. TPS recipients send money home. Haitian remittances totalled $3.9 billion in 2024 -- roughly 15.5 percent of Haiti's entire GDP. A Supreme Court ruling allowing TPS termination would sever that lifeline at the worst possible moment.
So: oil prices up, food prices up, displacement up, and the diaspora's ability to send money home under legal threat. All at once. All traceable, at least in part, to decisions made in Washington.
What the Diaspora Can Do
I want to be careful here, because "call your congressman" can feel like a cruel joke when the scale of the problem is this large. But the Haitian-American community is not politically powerless. It is politically underutilised.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
