US must lead if we are to avert a catastrophic loss of life

Close to 700,000 infections and more than 33,000 deaths in the United States. As many as 22 million Americans thrown out of work. Unimaginable heartbreak and hardship, with worse to come. Given this still-developing emergency, and the fatal inadequacy of the US government’s response so far, it is very hard to focus on the devastation that is about to strike the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

But if President Trump doesn’t overcome his go-it-alone mindset and take immediate steps to mobilise a global coalition to combat the Covid19 pandemic, its spread will cause a catastrophic loss of life.

Covid-19 is poised to tear through poor, displaced and conflict-affected communities around the world. Three billion people are unable to wash their hands at home, making it impossible to follow sanitation protocols. Because clinics in these communities have few or no gloves, masks, coronavirus tests, ventilators (the entire country of South Sudan has four) or ability to isolate infected patients, the contagion will be exponentially more lethal than in developed countries.

In Africa, where 1.3 billion people live and the virus has arrived, countries average fewer than three doctors per 10,000. From favelas in Brazil to refugee camps in Jordan, millions spend their lives in densely packed areas where the distancing saving lives in the United States is essentially out of the question.

President Trump is unlikely to be moved by the human cost of what awaits the world’s most vulnerable communities. But the weakest links in the chain will impede our own ability to stem the contagion and begin the recovery process. That’s because the US is intricately tied to the rest of the world, thanks to a global supply network that reaches into remote corners of the globe, American family ties to dozens of at-risk nations and trade ties with dozens more.

In 2014, while serving as ambassador to the United Nations, I supported President Barack Obama’s efforts to build a 50-nation coalition to combat the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Ours was an all-hands-on-deck public health, logistic and diplomatic campaign to get countries to pool resources to prevent hundreds of thousands of infections in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the spread of Ebola around the world.

Ebola and Covid-19 present very different challenges. Ebola’s advance was limited by the heroic front-line efforts of West Africans, but also by the fact the disease could not be transmitted through the air and that it first took hold in remote areas with no direct flights to major international cities. Still, the relative success of the Ebola response taught us three urgently relevant lessons.

First, the United States leads no matter what it does. While President Trump’s retreat from international organisations, agreements and alliances has substantially weakened US influence, the country remains the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power, and nations still look to us in times of crisis.

During the early days of the Ebola outbreak, when professionals from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Agency for International Development took steps to battle the virus, other countries assumed the crisis was one specialists and humanitarians could handle. When President Obama saw this was not enough and put forward a decisive blueprint for action, announcing his decision to deploy 3000 troops and health workers to West Africa and convening fellow heads of state at the UN to press them to make contributions of their own, other countries followed.

In today’s crisis, by contrast, when President Trump downplayed the Covid-19 threat, ridiculing epidemiological projections, other leaders took their cues, assuming the US government knew something they didn’t and deferring the tough restrictions needed to stem the spread until it was too late. Today, instead of spearheading the development of a global plan to manufacture and allocate resources, Trump’s zero-sum response is infuriating allies and generating a ruthless scrum in which the US must outbid other countries for scarce protective equipment. When

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted on including “Wuhan virus” in a recent G-7 statement instead of generating constructive action from major powers, the United States was leading — signalling to others that this emergency was yet another vehicle for competition rather than coordination.

Second, the United Nations and its agencies can be important tools in the fight, but they will be only as effective as their powerful members allow them to be. In September 2014, I helped secure the passage of a UN Security Council Resolution that declared the Ebola crisis a “threat to international peace and security”.

This measure didn’t make Ebola any less deadly. But it shook up world leaders and offered a vital show of solidarity with the governments and peoples of West Africa.

Despite Trump’s disdain for international organisations like the World Health Organisation and despite Washington’s own bungled domestic response, we nonetheless must immediately begin to build a broad and determined global antiCovid coalition.

Such a coalition must create hubs for sharing scientific data on the virus, testing and vaccine efforts, taking advantage of the staggered movement of the disease and every country’s ability to learn from infection cycles that have peaked earlier.

It must regularise frequent highlevel political contacts to enable speedy decision-making, and the procuring and distribution of resources beyond the home front. It must apply pressure on those countries failing to come clean on case numbers. And it must assemble a mechanism that gathers volunteers, funds and in-kind contributions from UN member states, businesses and philanthropists to provide tailored support for particular vulnerable communities. Neither the UN secretary general nor the director general of the WHO has the convening power or the leverage to perform this role unless the United States gets behind the effort.

Third, while the day may come when China can build and lead an effective global coalition, that day is not here. Much has been made of the fact that China is sending protective equipment to Ireland, Italy, Serbia and other nations, while the Trump administration has been forced to plead with South Korea and Russia for donations. China clearly sees both an opportunity to clean up the reputational damage done by its early mishandling of the crisis and a chance to showcase its generosity and superpower status.

There is no question that by the time this crisis is over, China will end up the largest international donor of precious medical provisions, which will hopefully help save countless lives. But sending supplies is not the same as leading the world.

The US and China urgently have to do what neither does easily, which is to put the blame game and larger competition aside, identify their comparative strengths and join forces.

It may well be Trump’s inability to recognise the extent to which US security is tied to that of others makes him incapable of reversing course and building a global coalition. But given the pressure he feels to restart the economy and normal life, this should be the wake-up call he needs that walls won’t protect us. Unless the United States exerts leadership to prevent Covid-19 from raging out of control abroad, the crisis will not end at home. New York Times

Samantha Power is a former United ●

States permanent representative to the United Nations.