The multi-polar status quo
You may have heard that the world will look very different after the pandemic is over – that a new world order will emerge because of the effects of Covid-19. That is doubtful. If the crisis is over by 2022, what will emerge is something which will look similar to early January 2020.
That is not to say there will not be serious consequences. However, this crisis will not change most of the existing trends, though it may quicken them.
A brief look at the past indicates the probable future. The ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic, which began in the spring of 1918, gathered pace as WWI was coming to end. Over 36 months it is estimated to have killed 50 million people. It was a catastrophic, tragic, loss of life – but it didn’t change the direction of history.
With or without the pandemic, the collapse of the Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian Empires would have had the same repercussions, communism would still have grown, and the balance of power between the nation states would still have occurred along with ‘advances’ in military technology as we headed towards the next conflict.
So it is with Covid-19. The China/US relationship was already deteriorating, the blame game over the virus has only exacerbated it. China seeks to push the Americans out of what Beijing regards as its backyard, and the US aims to keep sea lanes open and reassure its allies. April saw an interesting game of signalling. The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning and five warships sailed close to the Japanese island of Okinawa, then turned south to pass east of Taiwan. The Liaoning was the only aircraft carrier in the western Pacific because the USS Roosevelt was confined to port in Guam after hundreds of its crew tested positive for Covid-19. Beijing may have been signalling ‘business as usual’ and ‘We’re on top of this even if you aren’t’. The Americans were left to sail a single guided missile destroyer twice through the Taiwan Strait.
On the economic front the US was already moving towards ‘decoupling’ its economy from China due to concerns about over-reliance on Chinese products and trying to bring more manufacturing home. In the EU ‘ever closer union’ was already faltering. The crisis has rammed home some of the reasons why. Almost all member states have responded at the national level, not via the EU. It hasn’t been pretty. As the pandemic raged in northern
Italy, EU partners were painfully slow to help. Rome pleaded for the European Union Mechanism of Civil Protection scheme to be activated for the supply of PPE. When this failed to happen, stinging criticism triggered Germany and others to help, but by then China had stepped in. Beijing is getting good at the soft power game.