COVID-19 and World Order Brands, Hal, Gavin, Francis J. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Brands, Hal and Francis J. Gavin. COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.77593. For additional information about this book [ Access provided at 4 Nov 2020 19:13 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a https://muse.jhu.edu/book/77593 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. COVID-19 and WORLD ORDER ABOUT THE EDITORS Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a scholar at the American Enter- prise Institute. A columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, he is also the author or editor of several books, including American Grand Strat- egy in the Age of Trump , Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post–Cold War Order , and What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush . His newest book, The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order , was coauthored by Charles Edel. Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Gavin is also the chairman of the Board of Editors of Texas National Security Review . He is the au- thor of Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Mon- etary Relations, 1958–1971 and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strat- egy in America’s Atomic Age . His latest book, Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy , was published in 2020. COVID-19 A N D WORLD ORDER T H E F U T U R E OF C ON F L IC T, C OM PE T I T ION, A N D C O OPE R AT ION edited by Hal Brands | Francis J. Gavin Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore In collaboration with and appreciation of the book’s coeditors, Professors Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Johns Hopkins University Press is pleased to donate funds to the Maryland Food Bank, in support of the university’s food distribution efforts in East Baltimore during this period of food insecurity because of COVID-19 pandemic hardships. © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press Chapter 23 © Niall Ferguson 2020 All rights reserved. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942747 A cata log record for this book is available from the British Library. The Open Access edition of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-4075-0 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-4073-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-4074-3 (electronic) Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at specialsales@press.jhu.edu. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. Contents Foreword, by Ronald J. Daniels ix Acknowledgments xiii COVID-19 and World Order 1 Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin part i: Applied History and Future Scenarios 1 Ends of Epidemics 23 Jeremy A. Greene and Dora Vargha 2 The World after COVID: A Perspective from History 40 Margaret MacMillan 3 Future Scenarios: “We are all failed states, now” 56 Philip Bobbitt part ii: Global Public Health and Mitigation Strategies 4 Make Pandemics Lose Their Power 75 Tom Inglesby 5 Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Path Forward: A Global Public Health Policy Perspective 93 Lainie Rutkow 6 Bioethics in a Post-COVID World: Time for Future-Facing Global Health Ethics 114 Jeffrey P. Kahn, Anna C. Mastroianni, and Sridhar Venkatapuram vi Contents part iii: Transnational Issues: Technology, Climate, and Food 7 Global Climate and Energy Policy after the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Tug-of-War between Markets and Politics 135 Johannes Urpelainen 8 No Food Security, No World Order 148 Jessica Fanzo 9 Flat No Longer: Technology in the Post-COVID World 169 Christine Fox and Thayer Scott part iv: The Future of the Global Economy 10 Models for a Post-COVID US Foreign Economic Policy 191 Benn Steil 11 Prospects for the United States’ Post-COVID-19 Policies: Strengthening the G20 Leaders Process 204 John Lipsky part v: Global Politics and Governance 12 When the World Stumbled: COVID-19 and the Failure of the International System 223 Anne Applebaum 13 Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19 238 Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han 14 Take It Off-Site: World Order and International Institutions after COVID-19 259 Janice Gross Stein 15 A “Good Enough” World Order: A Gardener’s Manual 277 James B. Steinberg Contents vii part vi: Grand Strategy and American Statecraft 16 Maybe It Won’t Be So Bad: A Modestly Optimistic Take on COVID and World Order 297 Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden 17 COVID-19’s Impact on Great-Power Competition 316 Thomas Wright 18 Building a More Globalized Order 331 Kori Schake 19 Could the Pandemic Reshape World Order, American Security, and National Defense? 348 Kathleen H. Hicks part vii: Sino-American Rivalry 20 The United States, China, and the Great Values Game 369 Elizabeth Economy 21 The US-China Relationship after Coronavirus: Clues from History 388 Graham Allison 22 Building a New Technological Relationship and Rivalry: US-China Relations in the Aftermath of COVID 406 Eric Schmidt 23 From COVID War to Cold War: The New Three-Body Problem 419 Niall Ferguson Index 439 This page intentionally left blank Foreword In the heart of Frankfurt, Germany, stands the IG Farben building. Completed in 1930, this massive and seemingly indestructible triumph of modernist design was named for its first owners, the IG Farben Company, at the time Germany’s larg- est chemical conglomerate. Within the decade, IG Farben became deeply entan- gled with the Nazis and was eventually complicit in many of the worst atrocities of Hitler’s Germany, including the manufacture of the notorious Zyklon B gas used in concentration camps. Following the Allied invasion of Frankfurt in March 1945, the building was evacuated and the corporation’s executives arrested. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower touched ground and saw that the IG Farben headquarters was one of the few structures in the city to have survived the assault, he decided to make it the center for Allied operations. From his office on the first floor, he not only oversaw the end of the war but also began the meticulous task of rebuilding democracy in Germany out of the ashes of violent dictatorship—an endeavor that, in turn, seeded the ground for a new liberal world order to emerge. Today, the Farben building exemplifies the very best of that world. A part of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, it serves as the entry point to the university’s sprawling, modern campus. No longer merely a monument to human evil, it is a portal to free inquiry, vigorous debate, and the exchange of ideas that allow global society to thrive, and—in times like ours—to survive. The story of the Farben building serves as a metaphor for the trajectory of our world over the past century, embodying the victory over brutal fascism and geno- cide; the construction of an international system committed to creating a more just, peaceful, and prosperous world; and the difficult, ongoing work of sustain- ing that project through institutions that forge partnerships and lay the founda- tion to address global society’s most daunting problems. Yet, as observers and scholars have carefully documented, that order is frac- turing. Soaring economic inequality and rapid demographic change have fueled populist resentment, ethno-nationalism, and a sweeping distrust in national and x Foreword international institutions alike. In parallel, massive shifts in technology and com- munication have heightened the avenues for surveillance and enabled the prolif- eration of disinformation. And with the increasing prominence of China on the world stage, along with new waves of authoritarianism cresting across the globe, it is clear that we inhabit a multipolar world whose aims and values no longer nec- essarily align with those of liberal democracy. At this moment, 54% of the world’s population now lives under some form of authoritarian rule. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated these trend lines. The United States’ failures to control effectively and mitigate the virus are reflective of its diminished role as a geopolitical leader, while China’s admittedly flawed but far more deliberate response has only affirmed its centrality in the 21st-century world order. Meanwhile, the European Union can no longer claim to be a body composed of democratic states. In the early days of the pandemic, Prime Minister Viktor Or- bán of Hungary used the virus as a pretext for seizing emergency powers that all but extinguished what little remained of Hungary’s once promising democracy, consolidating Hungary’s position as the first authoritarian state to be an EU mem- ber nation—something virtually inconceivable a generation ago. COVID-19 marks a moment of reckoning for our era. While this disease, thank- fully, is not likely to claim as many lives as the period from 1939 to 1945 did, its impacts on the global economy, on democracy, on public health, on food security, and on governance will reverberate for years to come. It is a multidimensional emergency that requires the efforts of all disciplines: a public health crisis that de- mands new tools to prevent the spread of this devastating disease and to conduct effective testing and tracing; a medical crisis that necessitates new modalities of treatment to heal those who are afflicted; and, in the recent words of an open let- ter whose signatories include former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a “political crisis that threatens the future of liberal democracy.”* As the past has shown us, a moment of upheaval like this one—when so much upon which we have come to rely seems ruptured—is not the time to resign our- selves to despair nor to abandon the norms, institutions, and alliances that have upheld the modern world order for nearly eighty years. There is the possibility for renewal. But, like the Farben building in Frankfurt, these foundational structures must be reimagined and infused with new ideas for a new era. * National Endowment for Democracy, “A Call to Defend Democracy,” June 25, 2020, https://www.ned.org/covid-19-crisis-threatens-democracy-leading-world-figures-warn-joint -statement-press-release/. Foreword xi Higher education will be integral to that endeavor. Time and again across the past century, the world’s great universities have been vital partners in making, sus- taining, and revitalizing the world order. One need not look far for an example. In 1943, just two years before General Eisenhower arrived in Frankfurt, two gov- ernment officials named Paul Nitze and Christian Herter in Washington, DC— one a Republican, the other a Democrat—recognized the need for a graduate school that would combine the rigor and analytic power of the academy with the burgeoning field of international affairs. They called it the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and it graduated its first class in June 1945, a mere month after the fall of Nazi Germany. In short order, the new school’s faculty, stu- dents, and alumni—alongside experts from across government, military, and industry—proved instrumental in designing the treaties, the frameworks, and the organizations (the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization among them) that defined and sustained the international order that emerged in the wake of World War II. Now, with the publication of this volume, SAIS is once more helping to take up the core questions confronting our global community at a critical juncture in our history. This book is the product of a two-day virtual forum hosted by Johns Hopkins SAIS in June 2020 that gathered a multidisciplinary group of exceptional scholars, thinkers, and leaders to consider collectively the future of our world order after COVID-19. The proceedings were viewed by thousands of people around the globe, from interested citizens to renowned scholars to national security experts to elected officials. Anyone who has ever organized an academic conference knows that attracting such an audience is no easy feat. To do so virtually and in the middle of a pandemic is even more astonishing. Its success speaks to the truly Herculean efforts of editors and SAIS faculty Hal Brands and Frank Gavin, alongside their able teams and the extraordinary roster of contributors to this volume. But it also indicates the genuine hunger of a wide international audience for a sophisticated, meaningful, and collaborative conver- sation about the future of the geopolitical landscape, one that faces head-on the vital questions of this era: How are we going to confront the massive challenges posed by new centers of global power? How are we going to adapt and reimagine our institutions to ensure that they will continue to promote human flourishing and be responsive to the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized among us? And how can we ensure that we do not stray from the essential democratic values that have defined the modern order since its origins? xii Foreword The contributors to this book offer an array of bracing answers that will cer- tainly be of great interest and use to policy makers who are implementing new measures to confront this crisis, to the students who are returning to classrooms or attending seminars virtually, and to faculty who are teaching the next genera- tion about and in the midst of COVID-19. This global pandemic is, in so many ways, unprece dented in our lifetimes, and it will require unprecedented solutions that will profoundly reshape our world. Yet the tools for arriving at these solutions are the same as they have ever been: free inquiry, critical thought, and the pas- sionate contestation of ideas tempered always by reason. It is my sincere hope that this robust and timely collection will inspire more of all three as we advance— steadily and slowly—into a post-COVID world. Ronald J. Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University Adapted from opening remarks given at the World Order after COVID-19 Forum, a Johns Hopkins University Virtual Event, held by the School of Advanced International Studies and the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, June 30, 2020 Acknowledgments This book is a reflection of the institution that produced it. The project was ini- tially conceived by the president of Johns Hopkins University, Ronald J. Daniels, a visionary academic leader who has long excelled at bringing academic knowledge to bear on policy challenges. It grew out of a global, online conference that brought together participants from many of the disciplines and schools that make up the university. We are extraordinarily grateful for the efforts of our friends from around cam- pus in orchestrating an outstanding event on such a short timeline, including Christopher Austin, Cybele Bjorklund, Rachel Dawson, Sean McComas, Jodi Miller, Stephen Ruckman, and Grant Shreve from the President’s office; Kristin Blanch- field, Allison Crean, Susan deMuth, Gwen Harley, Stephanie Muller, and Laura Savettiere from Development and Alumni Relations; and Andrew Green, Karen Lancaster, Marianne von Nordeck, and Jill Rosen from University Communica- tions. A special thanks goes to Hiro Amano of Open Range Video and Gus Sente- mentes, the Director of Social Media and Analytics. Working nights and week- ends, Hiro and Gus pulled off what we thought impossible in the age of Zoom exhaustion: a high-end, engaging, technically flawless production. And they did it with warmth and good cheer. Not least, we are grateful to Larry Summers, Angus Burgin, James Miller, Alina Polyakova, Gary Roughead, Jake Sullivan, and Alexan- dre White, who played key intellectual roles in the conference as presenters or chairs of panels. They may not have written chapters for this book, but their insights are nonetheless reflected in its pages. We also owe thanks to our particular part of JHU: The School of Advanced In- ternational Studies headed by Dean Eliot Cohen. We are grateful to the whole SAIS family for their remarkable support, and especially the amazing work of the communications and events teams, including Debbie Aguilar, Miji Bell, Moe Elahi, Sonya Holmes, Jacquelyn Kasuya, Pedro Matias, Brittani Menina, Christo- pher Peña, Kensei Tsubata, and Lindsey Waldrop. xiv Acknowledgments This book has been produced in record time: a little over four months from conception to production. This could not have been accomplished without the extraordinary efforts of Johns Hopkins University Press, in particular Barbara Kline Pope, Heidi M. Vincent, Kathryn Marguy, and especially Kelley Squazzo. The Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs is actually a very small opera- tion. Our remarkable colleagues, however, punch well above their weight. Lynd- say Howard, who runs our America and the Future of World Order Project, dropped everything to take command of the daunting logistics. Lyndsay, aided by the excellent Travis Zahnow, was our Count Carnot, the “orga nizer of victory.” Diane Bernabei, Megan Ophel, and Zachary Wheeler were, as they always are, indispensable. There is one person for whom we are especially grateful: Kissinger Center As- sociate Director Christopher Crosbie. As anyone who has dealt with him knows, no one works more tirelessly, with greater intelligence, integrity, and, given the incredible stress of working with us, great warmth and humor, than Chris. None of this would have happened without him. Hal Brands Francis J. Gavin COVID-19 and WORLD ORDER This page intentionally left blank T he coronavirus crisis was a shock, but should not have been a surprise. Public health experts had been warning about the dangers of viral pandemics for years. SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and MERS had highlighted the risks of diseases that raced across borders and the need for effective national and global responses. Not long before the first reported cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, both the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs Senior Fellow Dr. Kathleen Hicks had organized separate exercises that highlighted how profoundly a fast-moving virus could endanger the international system and US national security. 1 Yet these warnings went largely unheeded and the world was not prepared to react effectively when the crisis began. COVID-19 overwhelmed national and in- ternational efforts to contain the pandemic while exposing deep flaws in the global public health infrastructure. The institutions most responsible for public health—the World Health Organization (WHO) for the world, the Centers for Dis- ease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the United States—have not performed well. As we write, the world has seen more than 18 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and rising. The United States has been especially hard hit, with over COVID-19 and World Order Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS. 2 Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin 5 million confirmed cases and the spread still not under control. 2 The science and epidemiological knowledge surrounding the virus is evolving, new therapies are being developed, and intensive efforts to create an effective vaccine all provide some hope. Until then, COVID-19 will dominate the international landscape. Even after the virus is contained, the consequences will be with us for some time. This is because the pandemic arrived at an especially troubling moment for the world. In the past few years, many have commented on the fraying of inter- national arrangements to provide for a stable, peaceful, and prosperous world order. 3 What had been feared for some time was now seen as a stark reality: many of the norms, institutions, and practices that upheld the liberal international order and marked American leadership since the end of the Cold War and, in some cases, the end of the Second World War, were under enormous stress. The causes are many and interconnected: the reemergence of great-power political rivalry, marked by the worsening and increasingly toxic relationship between the two larg- est powers, the United States and China; the increase in populism and national- ism, as well as a seeming loss of faith in democracy as authoritarianism increases its grip on many parts of the world; the dizzying and disorienting effects of new technology; and numerous other causes. These challenges have manifested as a polarized United States grows increasingly uncertain about its role in the world, as many around the world lose faith in the benefits of globalization and inter- dependence, and as a raft of new transnational concerns, ranging from climate change to disinformation, reveal the shortcomings of existing international institutions. The crisis does provide an opportunity, however. This volume is a multidisci- plinary effort to assess the current state of world order, analyze the effects of the COVID crisis, and offer insights and ideas for the future. The crisis has made clear that much work needs to be done to improve our national and global public health capabilities and institutions and to elevate the threat of disease and pandemic to a higher priority in our national and international security frameworks. This book, however, is premised on something more: the idea that the crisis highlights a num- ber of other pressing national and global challenges, in areas ranging from cli- mate change to relations with China. We believe this crisis is potentially a crucial pivot point, providing an opportunity to rethink—and perhaps revitalize—our current international system. This book begins a much-needed conversation about how to shape international relations in a post-COVID world.