“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge
number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we
forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when
reality is torn down around us”.
J.G.
Ballard, “High Rise”
Headline: COVID-19 is a
human tragedy, not the prelude to war. The enemy is a pathogen, not a state and
policy and strategy should be shaped accordingly. Expert assessments suggests
that as many as one in fifty under the age of seventy of those infected could
die, and up to one in six of those over 70 with underlying health conditions. Protection
of vulnerable groups is the marked of a civilised society. However, historians
of the future will wonder how a relatively mild virus could bring the global
economy to its knees so quickly. They will possibly conclude that the
twenty-first century world, far from being a globalised economy was, in fact, a
hybrid interdependent anarchy to which shock was endemic and routinely magnified.
Consequently, some have predicted the end of globalisation. China is the epicentre of the pandemic and
will need to change. It is particularly inappropriate that Beijing has,
instead, begun hectoring others, most notably the US. An effective strategy
will require collective action across the epidemiology, politics and
communications. Whilst there are doubtless lessons to be learnt about how to
build more resiliency and redundancy into the globalised system, it is only
through a global effort that the threat will be contained and then reduced. The
blame game should stop and the action game begin.
The Silk Road Pandemic
It is a bolt from the blue! The early spread
of COVID 19 seems eerily to follow the old Silk Road that from China to Europe
via Iran. COVID 19 has some similarities
to the Black Death of the fourteenth century in that is a trade route pandemic,
albeit a very twenty-first century variant and as such a disease of globalisation.
Like trade, the pandemic is now spreading far beyond that corridor and rapidly,
replacing much of the trade that sustains the globalised economic system. In
such circumstances, humanity, or rather those that govern it, have a choice to
make: act irresponsibly by blaming others or find a way to work together to
confront and deal with a threat common to all.
Contemporary Globalism is part of the
problem. Far from being the community
its more ideological adherents claim it is more a form of interdependent
anarchy. Consequently, a relatively small event or group can create enormous shock.
Such shock is not confined to the spreading of disease. 911 and Al Qaeda spawned
the Global War on Terror, a small group of bankers triggered the 2008 financial
crash and the precipitant decline of Europe and the accelerated rise of China
as power shifted from West to East. All the serious evidence suggests COVID 19
began in Wuhan in November as a pathogen leapt from one species to another and
within four months much of the world economy is shutting down.
At the time of the 2003 SARS outbreak
China represented 3% of the world economy, whereas today it represents
17%. In the past, most such contagions
tended to be localised. Travel was far more restricted, lockdowns at times of
plague were far more common, and people died far more quickly limiting the
ability of any contagion to spread. There were, of course, exceptions. The
Black Death which swept through Asia, Africa and Europe in the fourteenth
century also spread along the old Silk Road and sea-borne trade routes.
Why China and why now?
The demand for fresh meat slaughtered in
the traditional Chinese manner now poses a clear and present danger to the
well-being of humanity. Why? For
all the growth in China’s power and wealth since 1989, the Middle Kingdom is a huge
populous country full of very poor people.
There is a profound friction between the twenty-first century state
Beijing likes to project to the world, and the reality of rural poverty and the
rapid growth of an urban poor still wedded to traditional practices such as
‘wet [blood] markets’. The average GDP
per capita in China is still only around $10,000 per annum (with millions
living on incomes far below that) compared with US GDP per capita at $65,000
per annum. Living conditions are often
appalling with huge numbers of Chinese families crammed together in high-rise
poverty. Chinese cities have become
natural breeding ground for pathogens able to leap from one species to another.
Beijing has tried to limit such practices.
However, state action has simply pushed the business into the unregulated back
alleys of Chinese cities. Given the reputational and actual damage to China that
will be caused by COVID-19 Beijing is now taking stringent action to deal with
the threat. Equally, containment of
COVID-19 is also likely to see a lurch towards an even more control-obsessed,
autocratic Chinese state.
Strategic consequences and implications
The COVID-19 pandemic will also have
profound strategic consequences, of which the health crisis is simply the
first. Over time the crisis will spread to all other areas of statecraft from
the economic to the military. The world’s two power autocracies, China and
Russia, are particularly vulnerable. The signs are already ominous with Russia already
suffering. The price of benchmark Brent crude oil has collapsed from $55 per
barrel in December to $29 today. Russia needs to export its oil at around $70
per barrel for the Russian economy to be sustained. In the first quarter of
2020 Chinese manufacturing production dropped by 13%, the fastest and largest
fall for fifty years.
Autocracies tend to share certain
characteristics when under pressure.
First, the primacy of the state over the individual is reinforced, with
elites seeing themselves as the very embodiment of the nation and indispensable
to it. Both Beijing and Moscow are
already moving to exert even more control.
President Xi is already the president-for-life of China. If, as seems
likely, President Putin succeeds in his efforts to remain president at least
until 2036, Russia too will become more autocratic. Second, such elites also
fear their own people. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre the Chinese
Communist Party offered a new ‘deal’ to its burgeoning middle classes: sustained
growth in their prosperity in return for their continued unquestioning of power
of the Party. That deal could fail.
History also plays an important role. Both
Xi and Putin were shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and fear
the consequences of a sustained period of economic decline on their ability to
hold onto power. President Putin is already suffering from falling popularity. In such circumstances, Russia could retreat
even more into a reflexive nationalistic and militaristic posture with the West,
the source of most of Russia’s foreign-generated income, routinely cited as a
threat. In such circumstances, China too
would likely become far more aggressive, with Taiwan particularly vulnerable. Therefore, the possibility of both power
autocracies embarking on more military adventurism must not be discounted as a
downstream consequence of COVID-19.
As China cracks down on internal dissent
the legal frameworks that enable Western multinational corporations to operate
therein will also likely become even more onerous. Many Western companies could
well seek to ‘re-shore’ their operations back to the US and Europe,
exacerbating the economic crisis in China. At the very least, many such
corporations will (and should) move to end their over-reliance on Chinese supply
chains vulnerable to catastrophic failure or political disruption.
Europeans and the EU are once again major
victims of crises made elsewhere, with Europe now the epicentre of the pandemic
according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). There is also a profound danger is that over
the coming months the COVID-19 crisis will merge with a renewed
refugee/migration crisis. Such a complex crisis will not only test European
solidarity but also place all systems of government in Europe under the utmost
strain, with economic consequences for at least a decade. Indeed, the whole idea of ‘Europe’, with its
focus on free movement of goods, services and people will likely need to be
reconsidered. Europe, and indeed the wider West, could well suffer from another
profound political shock. The scale and complexity of the crisis will doubtless
reinforce the attractiveness of extremist political parties.
Strategic choices
Faced with the strategic and political
choices inherent in the COVID-19 crisis there are essentially two options for
all the states involved: cohesion or fragmentation. It is cohesion that should be the aim. Any other approach would simply
guarantee a lose-lose outcome for all. However,
any such strategy will require all the responsible powers to craft a complex
new strategic agenda that pre-supposes a level of mutual trust that is in short
supply. Any such agenda would require
(at the very least) the following elements over the short and medium terms,
across a range of sustained actions from the epidemiological strategy to the
grand strategic with effective strategic communications vital. It will also
require a marked change in both the tone and nature of state behaviour.
China is already seeking to shift the
blame for COVID-19. Moreover, not for the first time Beijing’s obsession with
secrecy has helped turn an outbreak into global contagion. The re-emergence of Zhao
Lijian, a particularly feisty Chinese nationalist as Foreign Ministry Spokesman
is also not a good sign that China is willing to act collectively. His claim
this past week that the virus had been brought to Wuhan by the US military is
simply preposterous and US Secretary-of-State Mike Pompeo has rightly
complained. If Beijing adopts such a posture and refuses to acknowledge that two
months of Chinese mismanagement during the early stages exacerbated the crisis,
then it will be hard to treat China as a responsible strategic actor.
Equally, states must avoid appearing to
condone conspiracy theories. There is an apochryphal story that in 2003 the SARS
epidemic began when it escaped from the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. Given the proximity of the laboratory to the
contemporary outbreak concerns continue to be expressed about the safety of the
facility. However, the US, in particular, must be careful not to begin a
tit-for-tat blame game that would draw it into an equivalency trap. At present,
there is no evidence the Chinese designed
the pathogen and then lost control of it.
In any case, COVID-19 would be a strange offensive weapon as it only
really affects people beyond the productive/warfighter age and only, normally,
very mildly. One might argue that because the virus places Western healthcare
systems under intense strain it could be a form of attack. However, China has so
many other means to attack Western critical infrastructure if it so chose. The
pandemic will have a serious impact on China's foreign income, with profound
implications for its future economic performance and Beijing’s emergence as a
military superpower.
The COVID-19 strategic agenda
Shorter-term epidemiological strategy can
draw lessons from the response to the 2003 SARS contagion. Brian Doberstyn, who
in 2003 was director of the WHO Western Pacific Region’s Division for
Combatting Communicable Disease, identified three main lessons: transparency
and a willingness of states to admit the scale and pace of early infection; the
utility of proven past practices in harness with twenty-first century science;
and the rapid and effective global scientific collaboration to enable the early
mapping of the genome of the virus. He also identified a critical causal
faction, “animal husbandry and marketing practices seriously affect human
health.
Rebuild strategic public private partnerships: One consequence of globalisation has been the progressive
decoupling of Western states from Western corporations. The very idea of the multinational corporation
is the antithesis of the nation-state. A
strong partnership between the public and private sectors IN states will now be
crucial, and not just to limit the economic damage. In the immediate future, vaccines must be
developed and ventilators made to treat the severely ill.
Begin
a forensic audit:
WHO is a flawed institution, primarily because it reflects the tensions between
the states that pay for it. However, as
part of confidence-building the WHO should be charged with conducting a proper
strategic audit into the crisis with the enquiry ring-fenced against any
external political interference. This
will not be easy. Many years ago I was seconded to the UN in both Geneva and
New York and saw the gap between reality and UN reality. If such an audit is
not possible, then the US and its European allies should conduct such an audit independently
to ensure lessons are identified, best practice disseminated, and new
structures identified.
Treat
pandemics as a threat to the state order: Better intelligence and early
warning indicators will need to be established, first response needs to be
faster, more assured and better co-ordinated, healthcare systems (both public
and private) need to be better prepared, critical infrastructures need to be
made more resilient, with redundancy built into information networks and
redundancy built into state structures. Critically, better early understanding
about the scope of any threat will need to be established. Over-reaction is as
dangerous and under-reaction. Ultimately, it is the robust state that must be
at the centre of any crisis response.
The death of globalisation?
COVID-19
happened because of a failure of policy in China and an absence of structure
elsewhere, particularly in Europe. It
was made worse by ideological globalism and the abandonment of common sense by
leaders. Critically, Western
democracies have become over-reliant on one autocratic source for many of the
supply chains which sustain their respective societies. However, those who believe time can be rolled back
and globalisation abandoned have to ask themselves with what? Contending, hermetically-sealed and
confrontational blocs? Yes, Western
states need to better protect themselves from crises made elsewhere, but what
has been missing for far too long is the considered practice of statecraft in
globalisation. Indeed, globalism has
been seen by the naively ideological as an antidote to statecraft. The dark side of globalisation, of which
COVID 19 is a consequence, must therefore be gripped and structure built to
mitigate its dangers. However, it is not a time to abandon globalisation for to
do so would be to cut the very connectedness that mitigates the nationalism and
militarism that would doubtless come to dominate both Beijing and Moscow if
they were completely denied access to Western markets.
At home, Western
democracies must again reconsider the balance to be struck between liberty and
security, between secrecy and trust. In short, the state will need to better
know where people are and shape how they behave. Critically, European
democracies must stop treating their citizens like children and recognise (as some
now seem to be doing) that true security can only come from a genuine
partnership between responsible citizens and an effective state. Above all,
governments must act. Too often in the past promises of necessary corrective
action have been eroded by special interests groups with access to power once a
crisis no longer grips the news cycle.
COVID-19:
the echo of history
The test of any system is how it copes
with shock. COVID-19 has shown that globalisation, as a structure of power is
profoundly fragile. The globalised international system is, at best, a virtual
interdependent anarchy in which state sovereignty has very little influence,
particularly European state sovereignty. Contemporary globalisation is also
dependent on two competing poles of power for stability – the US and China. As
such, the globalised world looks ever more like the contentious dependencies in
Europe prior to World War One, as the in-between states were forced to choose
one side or another.
In that
light COVID-19 is as much a warning as a crisis. Indeed, unless collective action
is taken a truly mass extinction humanity-culling pandemic could one day come
down the same old Silk Road as COVID-19. Conversely, collective action against a common
enemy might just help promote a more stable world order. If not, then the 2020 COVID-19 crisis will do
much to shape international relations in the twenty-first century, and not for
the better.
Julian Lindley-French
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