Western countries flailing as Asia leads the way
April 03, 2020Coronavirus crisis illuminates shifting world power
By : James Crabtree
Covid-19 has killed almost 25,000 people around the globe in just three brutal months. But beyond even its human cost, the pandemic is cruelly revealing the state of our international system — leaving on life support the idea of a world led by the West, or indeed a world that can be led at all.
This is alarming. The West’s prestige and reputation for competence have been badly damaged by its pandemic performance, perhaps irreparably so. Countries in Asia that performed better — from Japan and South Korea to Singapore and Taiwan — are ever-less likely to defer to the old powers of Europe and North America.
Vital global institutions such as the World Health Organisation are struggling to cope. But this is largely because those nations that traditionally forged their agendas are missing in action, most notably the United States.
This was clear from an embarrassing G7 meeting last week, where foreign ministers from Britain, the US and other western nations tried to tackle the pandemic’s twin health and economic crises. Rather than a new plan, however, they broke up without a statement, on the faintly ridiculous grounds that the US wanted to use the term “Wuhan virus”.
The G20, which also includes China and India, went only slightly better. Leaders from these largest economies met virtually on Thursday and pledged $5 trillion in spending. This reflected welcome emergency measures already announced by national governments, including a £350bn rescue package from UK chancellor Rishi Sunak. But beyond this there was little except vague promises and carefully worded caveats.
This level of dysfunction is unusual. During 2008’s financial crisis, a similar crunch meeting in London, led by Gordon Brown as British prime minister, unveiled sweeping action to fend off a 1930s-style downturn. This time, with a greater risk of a global depression, the response has stumbled for reasons bound up in the tempestuous relationship between China and the US.
On the US side, President Donald Trump’s weak response at home has been mirrored by his inability to lead abroad. As recently as 2014, President Barack Obama headed an international response to contain an ebola outbreak in Africa. Today, a global system built on assumptions of American and western leadership finds itself adrift.
Leaders in traditionally powerful nations such as Germany, Japan and the UK have been distracted by their worsening domestic crises. America is also preoccupied by its fight at home, the magnitude of which was clear when more than 3 million people signed up for unemployment benefits last week. But at least one job was there for the taking, that of leader of the free world, a role in which Trump seems persistently uninterested.
This might seem like an open goal for China to step in and push for an international response while signalling its intent eventually to supplant the US as the world’s premier power. Many in the west are rightly fearful of this scenario. In the long run it looks likely the coronavirus will bolster China’s global standing, given the competent way President Xi Jinping has handled the pandemic fall-out.
Yet even those who welcome Chinese leadership must be disappointed. Xi has tried to win friends abroad, for instance sending masks and ventilators to Europe (although some of those sent to Spain turned out not to work). But China’s pandemic remains severe, as moves to close its borders last week make clear. It has shown scant interest in co-ordinating a global response either, limiting itself to piecemeal bilateral acts.
On Friday, Trump and Xi held talks, in what the US President described as “a very good conversation”. But the prospects for deeper US/China co-operation still look bleak. And if the world’s superpowers cannot put differences aside during a moment of this magnitude, it is far from clear if they will be able to co-operate on anything at all.
More pressingly, the crisis is now set to worsen. The coronavirus is spreading into more countries, in particular those such as India that have huge populations and weak governments. Lockdowns now affect well over 2bn people, creating a rolling series of economic shocks that threaten to infect the global financial system.
It is not too late for action, however. There is much that can be done. Bodies such as the WHO need support and money to develop a vaccine. Major economics should pledge to avoid new protectionism, especially in medical equipment. State spending and monetary action can be co-ordinated, and help provided to poorer nations only now beginning to be hit by the crisis.
In the absence of the US, mid-sized powers such as Germany and the UK have a potentially important role to play, especially as they bring their domestic pandemics under control. Indeed, there is no greater test of Boris Johnson’s claims for “Global Britain” than whether he can work with others in Europe and beyond to craft a more coherent international response.
But we should not be naive. Back in 1999, Time magazine ran a story on US efforts to stave off an economic crisis — far more trivial than our own — that had spread from Asia to Wall St. Their cover featured US technocrats, including economist Lawrence Summers and then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, under the headline: “The Committee to Save the World”.
Today such a committee is badly required but nowhere to be found. The pandemic’s spread has created a recession not only in the world economy but in geopolitical co-operation too. We live in a leaderless world, just as we need leadership most.
James Crabtree is an associate professor in practice at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is author of The Billionaire Raj
Courtesy : The Sunday Times