Global response seen as lacking

Countries’ go-it-alone stance on virus highlights fractures

UNITED NATIONS — When financial markets collapsed and the world faced its last great crisis in 2008, major powers worked together to restore the global economy, but the covid-19 pandemic has been striking for the opposite response: no leader, no united action to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, which has killed almost 250,000 people.

The financial crisis gave birth to the leaders’ summit of the Group of 20, the world’s richest countries responsible for 80% of the global economy. But when U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres proposed ahead of their summit in late March that G-20 leaders adopt a “wartime” plan and cooperate on the global response to suppress the virus, there was no response.

In an April 6 letter to the G-20 after the summit, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and 164 other current and former presidents, prime ministers, scientists and global figures urged the group’s leaders to coordinate action “within the next few days” and agree on measures to address the deepening global health and economic crises from covid-19. Again, no response.

A clearly frustrated Guterres told reporters Thursday that instead of “solid leadership” to fight the pandemic, each country went ahead with a different strategy, increasing the risk that the virus would not disappear, but rather spread and then return.

“It is obvious that there is a lack of leadership,” he said. “It is obvious the international community is divided in a moment where it would be more important than ever to be united.”

Guterres said what is key is leadership combined with power.

“We see remarkable examples of leadership, but they are usually not associated with power,” he said. “And where we see power, we sometimes do not see the necessary leadership. I hope this will be overcome sooner rather than later.”

But the 21st century has seen increasing fractures in global unity and cooperation.

In his state of the world speech last September, Guterres warned of the risk of the world dividing between the United States and China at a time of rising populism, increasing xenophobia, spreading terrorism, “exploding” inequality and a lingering climate crisis. He said there is a severe erosion in multilateralism — the foundation on which the United Nations was founded 75 years ago after the devastation of World War II.

The pandemic has put that warning into sharp focus, both in the world’s inability to come together in tackling the coronavirus and in the difference in health care, treatment and testing in G-20 nations compared with what exists in developing countries.

The failure has been playing out in the U.N. Security Council, the U.N.’s most powerful body, which has been impotent in addressing the pandemic — a crisis that Germany’s U.N. ambassador, Christoph Heusgen, calls “the biggest challenge that civilization has faced since the Second World War.”

The council has been unable to adopt a resolution that would endorse the secretary-general’s call for pandemic cease-fires in conflicts including Syria, Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan because of a dispute between the United States and China over including a reference to the World Health Organization.

After weeks of praising Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the initial outbreak of the coronavirus, President Donald Trump is now accusing China of not acting quickly to inform the world of what was happening. He has also suspended U.S. funding to the WHO, accusing the U.N. health agency of parroting Beijing.

Robert Malley, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group think tank, said at a recent briefing, “It’s clear that we’re facing a crisis of international leadership,” and it’s unclear who can take over. That’s because the powers are all looking inward, and are less interested in being generous when their own citizens are facing crises, he said.

Malley said there shouldn’t be nostalgia for the past “when there was virtually a unilateral or Western or U.S. domination” of global power which many countries resented.

“But,” he warned, “it’s one thing to have a different kind of leadership, it’s another thing to have no leadership at all.”