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No, the Coronavirus Will Not Change the Global Order
How will the coronavirus pandemic reshape geopolitics? Many
commentators predict the end of an era of globalization that has
prospered under U.S. leadership since 1945. Some see a turning point at
which China surpasses the United States as a global power. Certainly,
there will be changes, but one should be wary of assuming that big
causes have big effects.
For example, the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed more people than World
War I, yet the lasting global changes that unfolded over the next two
decades were a consequence of the war, not the disease.
Globalization—or interdependence across continents—is the result of changes in transportation and communication technology, and these are unlikely to cease. Some aspects of economic globalization such as trade will be curtailed but financial flows less so. And while economic globalization is influenced by the laws of governments, other aspects of globalization such as pandemics and climate change are determined more by the laws of biology and physics. Walls, weapons, and tariffs do not stop their transnational effects, though deep and persistent economic stagnation would slow them down.
This century has seen three crises in two decades. The 9/11 terrorist attacks did not kill very many people—but like jujitsu, terrorism is a game in which a smaller player can use the shock of horror to create a disproportionate impact on the opponent’s agenda. U.S. foreign policy was profoundly distorted by choices made in a state of panic that led to long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The second shock, the 2008 financial crisis, brought on the Great Recession, gave rise to populism in Western democracies, and strengthened autocratic movements in many countries. China’s fast, massive, and successful stimulus package contrasted with the West’s lagged response, leading many to predict that China was on course to become the world’s economic leader.
Initial responses to the century’s third crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, also went down the wrong path. Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump started off with denial and misinformation. Delays and obfuscation wasted crucial time for testing and containment, and the opportunity for international cooperation was squandered. Instead, after imposing costly lockdowns, the world’s two largest economies engaged in propaganda battles. China has blamed the U.S. military for the presence of the virus in Wuhan, and Trump has spoken about the “Chinese virus.” The European Union, with an economy roughly the size of the United States’, dithered in the face of disunity. Yet a virus could not care less about borders or about the nationality of its victims.
The incompetence of its response has hurt the United States’ reputational (or soft) power. China has provided aid, manipulated statistics for political reasons, and engaged in vigorous propaganda—all in an attempt to turn the narrative of its early failure into one of a benign response to the pandemic. However, much of Beijing’s effort to restore its soft power has been treated with skepticism in Europe and elsewhere. That is because soft power rests on attraction. The best propaganda is not propaganda.
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In soft power, China starts from a weak position. Despite major efforts since former President Hu Jintao announced the objective of increasing the country’s soft power at the 17th National Congress in 2007, Beijing has created its own obstacles by exacerbating territorial disputes with neighboring countries and by its insistence on repressive party control, which prevents the full talents of society from being unleashed in the way that happens in democracies. It is not surprising that global public opinion polls and rankings such as the Soft Power 30 rank China low in soft power.It is not surprising that global public opinion polls and rankings such as the Soft Power 30 show China weak in soft power. The top 20 spots in the index are held by democracies.
In hard power, too, the balance favoring the United States will not be changed by the pandemic. Both the U.S. and Chinese economies have been hit hard, as have those of the United States’ European and East Asian allies. Before the crisis, China’s economy had grown to two-thirds the size of the United States’ (measured at exchange rates), but China entered the crisis with a slowing growth rate and declining exports. Beijing has also been investing heavily in military power, but remains far behind the United States and may slow down its military investments in a more adverse budgetary climate. Among other things that the crisis has exposed is China’s need for major expenditures on its inadequate health care system.
Moreover, the United States has geopolitical advantages that will persist despite the pandemic. The first is geography: It is bordered by oceans and friendly neighbors, while China has territorial disputes with Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. A second advantage is energy: The shale oil and gas revolution has transformed the United States from an energy importer to a net exporter. China, on the other hand, is highly dependent on energy imports passing through the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, where the United States has naval supremacy. The United States also has a demographic advantages: Over the next decade and a half, according to research by Stanford University’s Adele Hayutin, the U.S. workforce is likely to grow by 5 percent, while China’s will shrink by 9 percent, mainly a result of its former one-child policy. China’s working-age population peaked in 2015, and India will soon pass China as the world’s most populous nation. And it barely needs repeating that U.S. power also results from its place at the forefront of the development of key technologies including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology. U.S. and other Western research universities dominate higher education.
Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of Naval Operations, rebuffed pointed interrogations by GOP lawmakers who grilled him over his decision to recommend sailors read a book deemed by some conservatives as anti-American.
The U.S. Navy’s top admiral also defended moves to address and root out racism and extremism in the forces as well as its efforts to bolster inclusion and diversity, which have prompted criticism from some conservatives and Republican lawmakers.
“Do you personally consider advocating for the destruction of American capitalism to be extremist?” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., asked Gilday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, referring to a passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” which argues capitalism and racism are interlinked.
Banks continued to interrogate the admiral over specific quotes from Kendi’s book, which was a No. 1 New York Times best seller in 2020, and statements he had made elsewhere in the past.
Visibly distraught, Gilday fired back:
“I am not going to sit here and defend cherry-picked quotes from somebody’s book,” he said. “This is a bigger issue than Kendi’s book. What this is really about is trying to paint the United States military, and the United States Navy, as weak, as woke.”
He added that sailors had spent 341 days at sea last year with minimal port visits — the longest deployments the Navy has done, he said.
“We are not weak. We are strong,” Gilday said.
Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., also challenged the admiral by citing specific quotes from the book and asked him how those ideas laid out by Kendi would further advance or improve the Navy’s power.
Gilday responded by arguing the importance of transparency and open dialogue about racism.
“There is racism in the Navy just as there is racism in our country, and the way we are going to get out of it is by being honest and not to sweep it under the rug,” he expounded, adding that he does not agree with everything the author says in the book.
The key point however, he said, is for sailors “to be able to think critically.”
The exchange was the latest in vociferous complaints from some conservative leaders and lawmakers who suggest the armed forces are becoming a pawn for the country’s culture wars and “wokeness” ideology, as the military takes steps to address issues of racial inclusion, extremism, racism and white supremacy.
And only last week, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., accosted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about Kendi’s book, which Cotton said promoted “critical race theories” at a different Senate Armed Services Committee hearing where Austin was testifying.
Days earlier, Cotton and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas — two combat veterans — launched a “whistleblowers” online platform to report examples of “woke ideology” in the military.
“Enough is enough. We won’t let our military fall to woke ideology,” Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, said in a tweet.
Also in February, Austin instructed a one-day stand-down across the Defense Department pausing regular activities to address extremism and white nationalism in the ranks — an issue Austin declared as a priority after a number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol in January were found to have military backgrounds.
The stand down completed in April was an effort to better understand the scope of the problem of extremism in the ranks, Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said in a briefing then.
Earlier, Austin had revoked a ban on diversity training for the military.
More recently, in May, a U.S. Army animated ad focused on soldier diversity — featuring the real story of a soldier who enlisted after being raised by two mothers in California — drew criticism and political backlash from some conservative lawmakers.
“Holy crap,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a tweet. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea. . . .”
Cruz was referring to a TikTok video that compared the U.S. Army ad with a Russia campaign that showed buff soldiers doing push-ups and leaping out of airplanes, adding that the contrast made the American soldiers “into pansies.”
The confrontation Tuesday is also the latest in reproaches by Rep. Banks, who is a Naval Reserve officer, and other GOP members over Gilday’s recommendation to include Kendi’s book in the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program.
In February, Banks sent a letter to Gilday arguing that the views promoted in the book are “explicitly anti-American” and demanded Gilday explain the Navy’s decision to include it on the reading list or remove it.
Gilday responded to Banks in a letter obtained by Fox News saying that the book was included on the list because “it evokes the author’s own personal journey in understanding barriers to true inclusion, the deep nuances of racism and racial inequalities.”
Lamborn and Rep. Vicky Hartzler, D-Mo., also wrote a letter to the admiral to convey their concern about the inclusion of Kendi’s book as well as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Jason Pierceson’s “Sexual Minorities and Politics.”
The GOP lawmakers argued the books “reinforce a view that America is a confederation of identity categories of the oppressed and their oppressors rather than a common homeland of individual citizens who are united by common purposes,“ Lamborn and Hartzler wrote, according to Fox News.
Our understanding of events refines with time. New developments reframe the issues, and prompt reassessment of the solutions applied, their design and outcomes. What does looking back on the 1991 reforms in 2021 tell us?
For three decades, India celebrated and criticised the 1991 reforms. The reformers of 1991 say that the idea wasn’t only to tide over a Balance of Payments (BOP) crisis; the changes they brought in went beyond the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditionalities for the bailout. The reforms, they insist, were ‘home-grown’. In the years leading up to 1991, technocrats in government had been thinking and writing about how India’s economic policies had been blocking the country’s rise to potential and the structural changes needed. If the broad range of reforms—including tearing down the industrial license permit raj, an exchange rate correction, and liberalising foreign direct investment and trade policies—could be launched within a matter of days of a new government joining office, they argue, it is because the blueprints were ready, waiting for the go-ahead from the political leadership.
The reformers of 1991 say that the idea wasn’t only to tide over a Balance of Payments (BOP) crisis; the changes they brought in went beyond the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditionalities for the bailout.
At least two well-regarded technocrats that were important in the 1991 reforms disagree—publicly and in off-the-record conversations. In a media interview last month, one of them, the economic adviser in the reforms team, Dr Ashok Desai, suggested that if there were any reformers in government before the IMF “forced” India to liberalise in 1991, “they hid themselves very well”. According to him, after the BOP crisis was resolved, finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh turned “dead against reforms”.
The multiple versions of the reforms story make it difficult to separate fact from romance. It cannot be disputed, though, that the 1991 BOP crisis was a turning point for the economy. India had tided over BOP crises earlier with loans from the IMF, repaid them prematurely, and avoided going through with the bailout’s conditionalities. 1991 was singularly different because India was on the brink of default, which is likely to have forced politicians to set politics aside and listen to technocrats. Any default on external obligations would have meant hurting India’s credibility grievously and an inescapable sense of national shame. The government probably took the view that there was no choice other than to take corrective steps. Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao named Dr Manmohan Singh, who had been a technocrat in government and was well regarded in global policy circles, as his finance minister. Dr Singh clearly had the Prime Minister’s, his party’s and the IMF’s trust. Records irrefutably show that the Congress party’s acceptance of the reversals in the interventionist economic policies of the first four post-Independence decades was not secured by the Prime Minister. He had delegated the task of tackling doubts and resistance within the party to his ministers, in particular, the finance minister and the commerce minister, and an aide in his office. The finance minister defended the reforms on the floor of the house in Parliament.
National Public Radio (NPR) ignited a social media firestorm Thursday night over a tweet that appears to mock capitalism, despite taxpayer dollars accounting for much of the organization’s annual budget.
The outlet posted a story titled “And Now, Crocs With Stiletto Heels” that explores a curious new collaboration between luxury fashion brand Balenciaga and Crocs, the rubber slipper company responsible for fashion faux pas among the millions of comfort-clinging owners nationwide.
The caption accompanying the article, which was written in both uppercase and lowercase letters, appears to mock the collaboration: “CaPitAliSm bReEds InNovAtiOn,” it reads.
The tweet’s language sparked outrage on social media, with figures like conservative Tim Young calling out the irony in NPR’s three-word post.
“You wouldn’t exist without capitalism, clown who is tweeting on behalf of NPR,” he wrote.
“Job at public news station wouldn’t exist wo capitalism,” another user echoed. “Are you guys ok?”
“Our tax money shouldn’t pay for this,” one person expressed.
“It’s still a hell of a lot better than communism at breeding innovation, even if some of the products are silly,” one woman fired back.
