The Future Global Order—A Fork in the Road

Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, has written an important article in the April 7th issue of Foreign Affairs.  The headline of the article summarizes Haas's conclusion: "The Pandemic Will Accelerate History Rather Than  Reshape It". 

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Haas  is a realist. He is deeply informed. I respect him. But in this judgement, I hope he is wrong. 

No doubt, , the future following Covid-19 which he predicts— an acceleration of  the populist, nationally-centric policies which we are increasingly  seeing today-- would rightly be deemed the "most likely"one  based on the evidence in hand. 

It is, however, for me, a very dangerous one. It would certainly spell a lost major opportunity--for if there is one thing Covid-19 is doing more than any other in my adult life time is giving teeth to the well-worn mantra that we really are all in this together and that we will not resolve the major challenges we face in the world successfully without strong International  coordination. 

We are seeing that the response to Covid-19 is requiring complete unity and coordination—public, private, government at every level, nationally and globally, hospitals, healthcare workers, and every one of us no matter who we are. 

Covid-19 presents two driving dynamics: 1) those forces which underscore how connected we are in this world (e.g.witness how the disease travels) and the opportunities this offers and demands (e.g. sharing medical discoveries, learning, organized immigration policy, border control etc.); and 2) other competing forces which accelerate the drive for national separation (e.g restricting immigration; securing national not imported supplies).

It is a fact  that prior to Covid-19, leadership in much of the world, including the United States, has been moving increasingly toward a more exclusive national focus and away from multi-national agreements.. There have been many forces driving this, including increased pressure of  immigration, futile and costly involvement by the U.S. in the Middle East, weakness in European common market and U.N. leadership, adversarial U.S. relations with China and Russia ( powers which must work together if we are to achieve global effort against the existential threats of climate change and nuclear proliferation) and the U.S.'s abandonment of the Paris accord and TPP, and other multi-national agreements. 

I had hoped, and I still hope, that  the Covid-19 crisis will compel us to see the need to work together, to strengthen institutions like WHO and the U.N .and the EEC. To date, there is no sign of that happening. I see very little chance of its happening  under under a Trump administration.  As Richard Haas points out, it will also be extremely difficult for Biden, assuming his election.

Nevertheless, several things keep my hope alive.

The first is that we are and will remain a global economy for good economic reasons, quite beyond any ideological motivation.

Second, beyond the threat of a future pandemic, we face two undeniable existential threats to the very existence of  life on this planet as we know it today: 1) environmental deterioration and 2) nuclear disaster and war. Neither of these threats can be overcome without effective global organization and agreements. The question in my mind has always been: how much pain we will have to suffer (akin if you like to the devastation wrought by WWII and WWI before it) before we finally recognize and act on this need for global agreements and policies on these undeniable existential threats.   

I hope that Covid-19 will begin to tip the scales. It is presenting powerful evidence of the need to work globally on key issues including sharing knowledge and expertise and resources among the medical and scientific community. As just one example,  on a recent conference call with the Heads of the Schools of Public Health and Nursing at Yale, we learned that the Nursing Association in China is sharing protocols on their learning in combating the virus in China and having them translated into English.  Sharing like this will come naturally for the scientific community provided it is supported by the leadership of  the principal nations and a strengthened WHO. 

I believe that if Joe Biden is elected President, the United States will take practical steps in the right direction, rejoining the Paris accord and helping lead effective global action on climate control. He can also bring back the Iran treaty  on nuclear capability  I believe it should be possible even if difficult to update the START treaty and reach agreement with China and Russia on nuclear proliferation. Remember, we reached agreement with Russia on nuclear weapons controls when it was still part of the Soviet Union. 

Development of immigration polices which reflect a collective multi-national and not solely individual country perspective is critically important—and will be extremely challenging. However, we and other countries must try. Failure to do so up until now is a big reason explaining the rise of populist national leaders like Hungary's Orban and our own President and it is influencing the political dynamics in almost every country. Beyond that and most painfully,  it is resulting in the greatest refugee crisis in modern history.

Practically, at this moment,  we must  look to new Presidential  leadership in the United States to take concrete steps toward achieving collective action, both domestically (for example,  Covid-19 reveals deep racial inequities in health care)  and globally, against our key existential threats of epidemics like Covid-19, climate change and nuclear proliferation 

 It will be vital to identify Congressional leaders from both parties that see these imperatives and are prepared to guide and  support the President on these policies. We will also need media to shape public opinion to see the realty of the need to work together across the globe on specific key issues and trumpet the benefits of doing so. 

This will be very difficult. It will not be the task of a single administration. It will take many years. We stand at a crossroads, as Yaroslav Trofimov writes is an essay in the "Wall Street Journal". Will the route we take to tackle the pandemic and its economic fallout follow the route of national grievances and finger pointing  and protectionism which country after country embraced after WWI with its disastrous outcome? Or will the pandemic, with it lessons, spur a renewed commitment for cooperation and shared solutions as happened after WWII—though this time, unlike post-WWII, on a global basis?  

History offers hope. As Winston Churchill once remarked, "the future is unknowable but the past should give us hope"—the hope, as Jon Meacham brilliantly offers, that human ingenuity, reason and character can combine to save us from the abyss and keep us on a path, in another phrase of Churchill's, to a broad sunlit road.  

We must hold to our vision, mindful of the current realities and challenges, but not flinching from them. Richard Haas is right in saying that Covid-19, in and of itself, is not going to lead to a dramatic shift in the recent populist direction of global and national polices. In fact, as we have seen,  it will reinforce some of them. Crises like Covid-19 expose problems, often painfully,  but they do not supply alternatives, let alone the political will to make the changes happen. 

The change we need  will require fresh ideas and strong leadership. I believe that providing these ideas and the leadership to make them happen is the overriding responsibility of our generation. May those who look back a century from now be able to say that our generation seized the lessons coming from the Covid-19 epidemic as well as they could. They chose the right path. They mustered the fresh ideas and the political will to reengage strong international coordination on the most important challenges the world faced. I hope and pray that is what they will be able to say, for the very future of our country and our planet  depends on it.