“Never before has a single event upended everyone’s lives simultaneously and so suddenly. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more the world will change.”
This is how Thomas Wright, an influential and insightful Irish geopolitical analyst at the Brookings Institute in Washington, concludes an article just published by Atlantic magazine. He warns against any expectations the crisis will be over in three or four months, arguing its immediate management will take at least five times longer.
He recalls how previous such global shocks were at the time “grossly underestimated” for their longer-term effects – the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall for the United States’ unipolar moment; the 2001 9/11 attacks for the 20-year US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East; and the financial collapses of 2007-2008 for the later populist revolts with Trump and Brexit.
Trump is absent from international co-operation, disinclined to work with economic competitors, including China
So how will the coronavirus crisis affect the international order? A veteran geopolitical perspective is offered by Henry Kissinger in the Wall Street Journal: “When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant. The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus. To argue now about the past only makes it harder to do what has to be done.”
Three major international tasks face the US government, he argues: shore up resilience to infectious disease with international partners; heal wounds in the global economy brought on by unprecedented contraction and impending chaos on the most vulnerable populations; and safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.
He concludes: “The historic challenge for leaders is to manage the crisis while building the future. Failure could set the world on fire.”
Ill-equipped US
This is a portentous warning. Unfortunately these tasks find the current US leadership singularly ill-equipped to take on the challenge because the world “has lost whatever confidence remained in the ability of Trump’s America to take charge”, according to Wright, who echoes many other international actors and analysts.
That would change if Joe Biden wins the November election, Wright believes. He told an Institute of International and European Affairs webinar in Dublin this week Trump is absent from international co-operation, disinclined to work together with economic competitors, including China, and through his nationalism disregards the task of helping the world’s weakest states and peoples.
Wright is a sceptic too about the liberal international order, having argued that the last few years have seen those values eroded by US, Russian and Chinese leaderships and growing competition between them. Disenchantment with US leadership also informs the greater geopolitical role recently adopted by the European Union and its national leaders.
Nor were such values ever that popular with US voters, who respond more to arguments about national interests. That should now be framed as a genuine battle between more free and open societies and neo-authoritarian ones like China’s and Russia’s rather than depicting the whole world system as a liberal order.
Liberal internationalism
Wright’s cautionary approach chimes with other accounts of the international system from different analytical and geographical perspectives.
The Indian international relations theorist Amitav Acharya examines the end of the American world order in his book with that title. Recent global power shifts have put paid to the hegemonic and hypocritically western vision dominated in fact by the US and Europe.
Recent global power shifts have put paid to the hegemonic and hypocritically western vision dominated by the US and Europe
While liberal internationalism will not disappear, it has to compete with alternative visions and models in what he describes as a multiplex rather than a multipolar world. Emerging powers like China, India, eastern and southeastern Asian, African and Latin-American states adopt a reformist and not a hostile approach to globalisation in the interests of international stability.
Acharya stresses the actual and potential power of their regional powers and organisations, exemplified by Indonesia’s role in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
This world is fundamentally challenged by the coronavirus crisis, whose speed of spread is completely new. Tackling its effects on international order overlaps with how it disrupts or reverses private capitalist globalisation by pushing it in a more public and statist direction.
Most important of all is how the promise of an alternative world contained in this epic pause of that globalisation provides lessons that must be applied to climate breakdown.
As another veteran observer of our world, Michael Viney, observed in his Irish Times column last week: “The social and economic turmoil of Covid-19 and its aftermath may well see a resurgence of individual and communal withdrawal from outworn and growth-driven forms of capitalism.”