Policy Alert #208 | May 11, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, debate over the pandemic’s effects on the world order have started to take shape. Will the spread of the pandemic deal a deathblow to the liberal world order by undermining support for globalization? How is the virus affecting states’ sources of material power? Does the states’ ability to respond and contain the virus complicate our understandings of state capacity? Are donations of aid a successful strategy for a soft power blitz?

In this Special Series of RPI Policy Alerts, we provide digests of the debates over how the pandemic is calling to question our existing conceptions of power and whether or not the pandemic is providing an opportunity for aspiring powers to rise. This first Policy Alert in the Series starts with an overview of scholars’ and analysts’ reactions to the pandemic in this light. Our subsequent Policy Alerts will spotlight these debates as they are playing out more specifically in China, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. 

A note to our readers: Many of the pieces below have been published by journals that maintain paywalls for full access to their content. We would like to remind our student readers that they may have full access to these journals through their universities’ digital collections or by logging on to their universities’ virtual private networks (VPNs). 

 

Collapse of the Liberal Order and Globalization

The outbreak of the pandemic comes against a backdrop of a rise in right-wing populism across most of the states that make up the liberal order and has strengthened domestic calls for states to pull themselves away from the globalized economy. The authors below weigh in on what, if anything, the pandemic means for the liberal order. 

• In an op-ed for the center-right Wall Street Journal, former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger warned that the pandemic is stoking domestic calls to withdraw from the liberal order: “The founding legend of modern government is a walled city protected by powerful rulers, sometimes despotic, other times benevolent, yet always strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. […] The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.”
• In an op-ed responding to Kissinger in the centrist The Hill, Bradley A. Thayer, professor of political science at the University of Texas – San Antonio, and Lianchao Han, vice president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China, asserted that the pandemic is only widening openings policymakers in liberal states themselves opened: “An element of this defense must include calling to account those in the West who caused us to be in our current situation, especially those who proclaimed themselves to be ‘strategists’ who advanced and supported China’s ambitions.” 
• In an article for Foreign Affairs, Kurt M. Campbell, Chair and CEO of the Asia Group and former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Rush Doshi, Director of the Brookings Institution’s China Strategy Initiative and a Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, warned that the US is faltering in its role as the leader of the liberal order: “The status of the United States as a global leader over the past seven decades has been built not just on wealth and power but also, and just as important, on the legitimacy that flows from the United States’ domestic governance, provision of global public goods, and ability and willingness to muster and coordinate a global response to crises.”
• Alexander Cooley, Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, and Daniel Nexon, associate professor of political science at Georgetown University, explained in an article for Foreign Policy that while the pandemic adds fuel to populist movements to withdraw from the liberal order and to view aid from China and Russia that comes without regard for democracy or human rights more favorably, the long-term effects might be quite different: “It’s one thing to use exit options to reduce external liberalizing pressure, but it’s another when new patrons start calling in favors.” 
• Salbatore Babones, associate professor at the University of Sydney, asserted in a piece for Foreign Policy that because the real theater of interest for changes in the world order is the Indo-Pacific, there is little cause for concern: “Political pundits tend to prefer the good feelings of NATO’s Article 5 commitment to collective defense, but it’s the East Asian allies who most consistently support American global leadership.”

 

State Capacity

Chinese media outlets like the state-directed China Daily and nationalist Global Times published editorials hailing China’s “institutional advantages” and its “astonishing mobilization ability and solidarity” as key to its apparent success in containing the outbreak. On the other hand, op-eds like Atlantic staff writer George Packer’s have characterized the US’s response as a “failure.” The articles below assess what’s missing from our conception of state capacity and if regime type is relevant.

• In an op-ed for the center-left Atlantic, Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, countered assertions that state capacity to handle the pandemic is a function of regime type: “What matters in the end is not regime type, but whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state.”
• In an article for Foreign Policy, Mark Lawrence Schrad, associate professor at Villanova University, pointed out that states that have managed the pandemic well share high levels of public trust in government: “If anything, China’s competent—if heavy-handed—response seems to have both benefited from and bolstered Chinese trust in government.” 
• Rachel Kleinfeld, Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, similarly pointed out in a commentary that the success of state responses has less to do with regime type and more to do with the adoption of scientifically-sound strategies: “The laws of science have a logic that belies ideology.”

 

Sources of Power

While the pandemic may have provided an opening for a shift in the world order, has it disrupted states’ sources of power enough to enable them to seize the opportunity? 

• Joseph S. Nye, Jr., argued in a commentary in Foreign Policy that the pandemic will ultimately not produce “seismic shifts” in the world order given that the US will maintain its preponderance of financial capital, energy sources, and military forces over China. Nye also dismissed concerns of China’s aid to foreign countries undermining US soft power abroad: “[M]uch of Beijing’s effort to restore its soft power has been treated with skepticism in Europe and elsewhere. […] The best propaganda is not propaganda.”   
• Barry R. Posen, in an article for Foreign Affairs that weighed the possibility of a “Pax Epidemica,” pointed out that the pandemic has been affecting great and middle powers “more or less equally” in terms of economic damage and weakening of military forces: “For the duration of the pandemic, at least, and probably for years afterward, the odds of a war between major powers will go down, not up.”

RPI acknowledges support from the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for its activities.