The coronavirus pandemic gripping the globe may have its origins in China, but experts say that current trends indicate the crisis will leave it in a much stronger position geopolitically relative to the United States, reports suggest.
“The Chinese are in a much stronger position than they have been coming out of any recent global crisis,” Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group, told MarketWatch.
“They own most of the global medical supply chain. They’ve basically contained the virus through technology-powered, authoritarian surveillance, and they’ve leveraged this success by providing aid to Europe and emerging markets,” in the fight against COVID-19.
Crises such as the Coronavirus’ pandemic “pose particular challenges to the effective exercise and protection of human rights, and put the functioning of our democracies to the test,” said the EU High Representative Josep Borrell. “This is an opportunity for Europe to stand up for its values and interests,” he added, speaking at the launch of the European Commission’s new Action Plan on human rights and democracy.
But while the voices of authoritarian states are strong; the voices of democratic leaders are weak and cacophonous, says analyst Paul Mason.
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If China’s containment policy – which could only have been enacted by an authoritarian state – actually works, while … a million Americans die for the sake of a stock market valuation, millions of people across the world will draw political conclusions, he writes for The New Statesman. They will see that “the West” as a concept is disintegrating, and that highly commercialised and atomised democratic societies cannot even protect themselves against a bat virus, let alone benignly administrate the global order.
The world has never before confronted a crisis quite like COVID-19, one that has simultaneously tested both the limits of public health systems everywhere and the ability of countries to work together on a shared challenge, says the Harvard Kennedy School’s Nicholas Burns, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008 and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2001 to 2005.
But it is in just such moments of crisis that, under all prior U.S. presidents since World War II, the institutions of U.S. foreign policy mobilize for leadership. They call nations to action. They set the agenda for what needs to be done. They chart a path beyond the point of crisis, he writes for Foreign Affairs, suggesting the formation of a G-20 leaders steering group to focus on the health and economic challenges ahead:
It is also not too early for leaders to assign a group of eminent global public health experts to determine what has gone right so far, what needs to be urgently fixed, which international institutions are failing, and what (if any) new ones may need to be created. Leaders need to demand that governments be better prepared, individually and collectively, for the next crisis.
As with humanitarian crises driven by active conflict, governments and international agencies responding to the pandemic should aim to alleviate human suffering and help people rebuild their lives, adds Paul M. Bisca. a Conflict & Security Consultant for the World Bank.
Inevitably, the success or failure of their efforts will feed into the ongoing public debates about which societal models are better suited to the 21st century: Western liberal democracies or authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia? he writes for Brookings:
As draconian quarantine measures and rigorous testing drastically reduced the severity of the epidemic in Wuhan, China was quick to lend a helping hand to Italy. As the EU struggled to mobilize assistance, Beijing dispatched medical experts and 31 tons of emergency medical supplies to Rome. This gesture is both an expression of solidarity and a projection of soft power. It mirrors the strategy at the heart of the Belt and Road Initiative, which fills a gap in global infrastructure financing, but also asserts China’s growing clout on the world stage.
Some foreign policy experts have embraced the idea that the United States is in a “clash of systems” competition against autocracies, in which patterns of amity and enmity break along regime type, notes Dr. Mira Rapp-Hooper, Schwarzman Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Shields of the Republic: Triumph and Peril in America’s Alliances. But COVID-19 is a threat that knows no ideology, she writes for War On The Rocks:
In highly varied country-level responses, the pandemic has revealed the fundamental importance of good governance no matter the regime type. Democratic Italy has floundered, while democratic South Korea, Taiwan, and mixed-regime Singapore have displayed some of the most capable responses. The United States will need to prepare for the next such threat with these models in mind, and ought to make the promotion of good international governance a central objective of its foreign policy. In so doing, it should be willing to work with non-democracies — including China — to promote it for the sake of international security and prosperity.
But other observers will question how realistic it is to collaborate with China when……
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Beijing is aggressively engaged in a propaganda campaign to characterize its response to COVID-19 as decisive and representative of a superior system, while calling the response of Western democracies like the United States “sloppy,” as John Lee, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute observes.
Propaganda should not be dismissed as mere mischief-making or an annoyance. Beijing is highly adept at controlling narratives to advance its strategic objectives and will use the pandemic to advance the narrative that its authoritarian institutions and practices are superior and lead to better moral and practical outcomes, he writes in a Policy Memo on Combating China’s COVID-Propaganda Offensive to Undermine the United States on the Global Stage:
The CCP will prevail in this propaganda campaign only if the United States refuses to recognize that there is a competition over the narrative accompanying COVID-19 and its impacts or that competing might offend or provoke its opponent. The CCP will also prevail if the United States
continues to downplay its strengths while ignoring its rival’s weaknesses or if a growing number of Americans lose confidence and nerve.
We can’t retreat into a facile “bothsidesism”, says analyst TerryGlavin. Treating China like a normal country was reckless in peacetime, and that world is gone. It would be fatal in a time of plague, which is very much like war, he tweeted.
The failure of the Chinese Communist Party to protect the world from COVID-19 is likely to reverse China’s recent gains in power and prestige, argues Michael Mandelbaum, Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
In 1977 the distinguished historian William McNeill published a book entitled Plagues and Peoples, which charted the large historical effects of major epidemics such as the Black Death in 14th-century Europe and the smallpox that the Spanish brought to the New World in the 16th century, he writes in The American Interest:
The coronavirus pandemic, there is every reason to hope and good reason to believe, will not cause devastation on the scale of those two horrific events; both occurred, after all, long before the development of modern medicine. But if it serves, as seems entirely possible, to reverse the major geopolitical trend of the last decade, it will deserve its own place in future such chronicles.
The Arab world, unlike Iran, has so far recorded relatively few COVID-19 infections. Yet, it is not safe to conclude that Arab countries will escape the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. In a new article, Andrew Miller, deputy policy director at the Project on Middle East Democracy explains the pandemic’s potential economic and political repercussions for the region.
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“Simply put, the potential size of the coming economic crisis in the Middle East is likely to outstrip the resources even of [the] wealthy petrol states,” he writes. “The Gulf economic backstop that has shored up several regional states could disappear, and countries like Egypt could go from too big to fail to too costly to save.”
This outbreak is just one dimension of the threat China poses to the world, and it is not the greatest one. The greatest threat is China’s ascension to global hegemony and ruling the world the way they rule China. This pandemic is just a preview of what that world might look like, argues analyst Shay Khatiri. Once this episode is past us, American policymakers need to have a serious discussion with the U.S. private sector about the threat that the CCP by nature poses to the entire world through corruption, incompetence, and malice, he writes for The Bulwark.
Three months after the first reports of coronavirus cases were posted on Chinese social media and began circulating within civil society, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) looks back at the way the Chinese state, in its obsession with complete control over information, has cracked down relentlessly on all independent information outlets.
With everything tidied up both at home and abroad, Beijing is deploying its massive propaganda and disinformation apparatus with the aim of making everyone forget that it was in the centre of China that the virus first got out of control and that three deadly weeks went by before Beijing listened to the whistleblowers, RSF adds. RTWT
The world will believe that the Wuhan Virus is under control when Chinese leaders officially reset a date for the annual Party Congress, analyst Kyle Bass @Jkylebass tweeted. It should be held in Wuhan with no masks to show the world it’s gone. Most members are “at-risk” men in their 70s.
#Iran: Graffiti (above) shows a cleric, whose head is the #coronavirus holding a moneybag. Labeled: “Corona <<Islamic Republic>> Virus”, following trending hashtags pointing to the regime itself as the real killer of the people. Moneybag refers to corruption & lies about the need for sanctions relief. HT: Mariam Memarsadeghi @memarsadeghi
