Dr Rajkumar Singh
WITH respect to Trump’s decision to withhold WHO funding, any disruption may impede the WHO’s operational support for developing countries, not just for COVID-19 but also for other programmes the United States contributes to, such as the polio eradication effort mentioned earlier although the Administration did announce on April 24th that it would in fact allow funding to flow to WHO to fight polio in seven countries.. Even before the hold, the United States had only contributed $30 million to WHO’s underfunded emergency $675 million emergency appeal. Contrast this with the $1 billion the Obama administration announced it would spend after a PHEIC was declared for the West African Ebola outbreak. It is unclear if the Trump Administration might reverse course and support the emergency appeal and the newer, larger multi-billion dollar access programme.
Decreasing value of G-7 and G-20: Money is not the only area where leadership is required, though. Policy coordination on fiscal stimulus is needed. Mechanisms to secure developing country access to medical supplies and pharmaceuticals are urgently needed. Rules for diminishing inter-state competition and poaching of medical supplies from each other are required, as is cooperation on food security. Collaboration for the development of new therapeutics and a vaccine is needed. The timing of lifting travel restrictions is another area where international cooperation is needed. Here, the absence of US leadership has been striking. France convened the G-7 and Saudi Arabia convened the G-20. With the US striking a petulant tone over the nomenclature of the virus at the G-7, that meeting did not generate consensus, though the rest of the G-7 later united to protest the Trump Administration’s hold on its WHO contributions. The G-20 seemingly wrought some progress on the size of fiscal stimulus, some $5 trillion, but this was more of an affirmation of what countries are doing domestically. Less clear is how stickier issues like competition over medical supplies will be ironed out. Observers saw this as a missed opportunity for the United States.
Covid-19 in relative perspective: Because the Ebola crisis emanated from regions that were trivial to the global economy, the effects on global commerce were limited. Ebola’s lack of transmissibility made it easier to contain and ensure the travel restrictions were temporary and limited. Other viruses like H1N1 were far more transmissible but less deadly. With H1N1, the strategy of surveillance and contact tracing quickly became impossible because the disease spread too widely. Where Ebola was deadly but not especially transmissible and H1N1 was transmissible but not especially deadly, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is more transmissible than Ebola and more deadly than H1N1. This has made the current outbreak much more challenging for the international community to contain.
The current outbreak is more like the 1918 flu pandemic in terms of ease of transmission and relative lethality (though there are important differences) so we have to revisit that era to learn lessons. That outbreak was facilitated by World War I, which brought people from all over the world in close proximity with considerable mixing between soldiers and civilians. The absence of international institutions and the dislocation caused by WWI combined to produce a weak international response. As many as 20 to 50 million people died, possibly more. While one key lesson from that period is the risk of opening economies too early, another insight is the need for policy coordination across the globe. We see some of the fallout from the 1918 flu pandemic as feeding into the instability of the interwar period, which set the stage for later conflict. They worry that the health, economic, and social impacts of COVID-19 could have destabilizing consequences at a time when other ills like conflict and climate change have already stressed a number of countries around the world.
Clash of ego between the US and China: In this context, it is helpful to unpack why countries have not coordinated their policies better than they have. While rising geostrategic competition between the U.S. and China (and different political systems) creates barriers to cooperation, they do not appear to be insurmountable, whereas the outsized role played by U.S. President Donald Trump looms large. The WHO faces problems of a limited mandate, funding, and authority, which is partially a function of states not wanting to cede sovereignty but also wider challenges United Nations agencies face in a more variegated landscape of new partners and competitors. A Trump re-election loss will not remove structural barriers to collaboration at the international and domestic levels or repair the damage to institutions and relationships. However, his departure from the scene might delegitimate some of the zero-sum thinking that proliferated during his time in office and give his successor an opportunity for a system re-set and redesign. To understand the behaviour of individual states, we needed to bring in other factors. As the global response to the Coronavirus demonstrates, no single image or levels of analysis provides a complete explanation but drawing on all three, we have a better appreciation for why global cooperation, particularly between the two most important countries, has been wanting.
— The writer is Professor and Head, P G Department of Political Science, Bihar, India.
