by Ethan Lou
U.S. president Donald Trump’s trade adviser had used the breakdown of supply chains to argue for more pullback from international commerce, saying his country needed to “bring home its manufacturing capabilities and supply chains for essential medicines.” That is an attitude likely to be replicated throughout the world, a lasting residue of the widespread pandemic self-interestedness of countries in obtaining supplies. Foreign Policy magazine polled twelve experts from a wide range of fields, eight of whom predicted many countries will turn further inward in some way after the crisis.
That inward-turning will not be just the dispassionate decision of business, nor solely the begrudging, cold cost of saving lives. It will be driven also by feelings, by hatred and fear and by anguish. It will be driven by the wave of anti-Asian COVID-19 racism in the West. It will be driven by the hogwash theories that call the coronavirus a conspiracy by the Jewish or Chinese, or that blame immigrants for overwhelming American healthcare. It will be driven by the rising discrimination in China against foreigners as well. Above all, it will be driven by a certain never-again determination born out of vulnerability. When Germany intercepted face masks bound for Switzerland; when a French firm had to call the British health service to say it could not deliver protective equipment because it had been barred by its government; when an American company said the same to the Canadian government; or when President Trump reportedly tried to lure away the German vaccine-maker CureVac — these events confirmed that while we may not long remember the friendships of summer, we will never forget the frustrations forged in this pandemic winter. Both ethnic and — especially — national lines will only be more starkly drawn, driven by factors both primal and pragmatic. And with globalization so intrinsically and inextricably tied to the international order, so, too, will the drifting apart of nations further strain the way of the world.
Reports of the death of everything, however, are greatly exaggerated. Globalization and the world order are more than the sum of their parts. It’s greater than the lust for wander and the curiosity for what lies beyond the river or cliff — and the river or cliff beyond that. It’s the ability to satiate those desires under well-defined rules, which ensure that how much players can participate and gain isn’t solely determined by their power. We have never perfected, and probably will never perfect, any such system. But this bending toward international engagement and stability is universal and, as such, will not just go away that quickly. More links and deeper ties to the rest of the world have been the way of every international order, from the Mongol Empire to the Pax Romana to the United Kingdom’s imperialist expansion in a dominion where the proverbial sun never set. With the pandemic, we will surely see decline, but not necessarily destruction — or replacement.
As the U.S. general Douglas MacArthur said about soldiers, so, too, it might be said about international orders: they never die; they just fade away. They take a long time to get replaced. The Roman Empire declined for centuries before it fell. It was not until nearly four hundred years later, under Charles the Great’s Holy Roman Empire, that these fragments were melded together again in a way that even slightly resembled the previous whole. In imperial China, the lines of regimes that controlled the whole country were separated by long periods with telling names such as the Three Kingdoms, the Sixteen Kingdoms, and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. It’s nearly impossible to predict such things, but with the weight of the pandemic upon the chaos of Europe, the shrinking international presence of the United States, the inward-turning of nations, and the opportunism of China and Russia, the world order feels like it’s in a period of sustained decline and disintegration until some new era begins, however long it may take for that to happen. Before the Qin Dynasty, the first to unite all of China, the historical period was called the Warring States. That is, of course, not a predestined path. Yet, as the financier George Soros said about the potential breakup of the European Union post-pandemic, it is more than a “theoretical possibility; it may be the tragic reality.”
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I hauled Risako’s two white suitcases for her, up steps that were too small and through a door that was too narrow, onto the train to Frankfurt, from where she would fly back to her home in Japan. With physical distancing measures very much in mind, I didn’t know whether to go for a small hug. Would the other passengers call us out for such intimacy? Or would they just silently judge Risako for the rest of her trip? At the same time, such trains are timed precisely. Risako’s might stop at the station for only three or five minutes, and we had already been late in boarding. I had to act on instinct. I said a brief “bye” and left Risako on the train, the white suitcases between us, and I did not look back.
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Risako texted me upon her arrival in Japan. Her country had been testing most incoming travellers for COVID-19, she said. “Still waiting for the result in the airport now. (Someone said it will take more than 8 hours!)”
“Is it painful?” I asked. One testing method was the swabbing of the inside of the mouth, but it wasn’t as widely used as the swabbing of the sinus, which isn’t pleasant. “I hear they push the stick all the way up your nose.” (Actually, the swab goes through the nose, almost bisecting the head. Either way, it sounded stinging.)
“Yes, it was a bit painful,” Risako twice used an emoji of a face with a single tear. “I thought I gave a small groan.”
I gave a small groan myself just reading the message.
Risako eventually tested negative, but she wasn’t allowed to leave the airport until that was determined. “I was kept waiting for the result for more than 13 hours!!”
A few days earlier, what had been a recommendation from the Canadian government for people to self-isolate for two weeks upon landing in the country had become mandatory. It was another blow for travel, in the near-term, at least. I didn’t think anyone would want to go somewhere if they had to be quarantined for fourteen days when they got there. Japan, though, really upped the ante. I would decidedly not want to go somewhere if, upon arrival, I had a stick shoved through my nose and then had to wait around for half a day to get the result.
That is not to diminish the necessity of testing, of course. Personal comfort is nothing when weighed against collective health. Japan had deployed tests only strategically, for travellers and severe cases, and that seemed to be working. But widespread testing was viewed by experts as an important measure for overcoming the virus. Many countries lacked the equipment. The United States, for example, was at one point testing on a per-capita basis roughly seven hundred times lower than South Korea, even though the two had announced their first cases on the same day. By June of 2020, in terms of per-capita deaths, the United States had outstripped South Korea seventy-to-one. When countries do not test widely, they cannot properly contain COVID-19 because they do not know who has it and thus cannot track how it transmits.
That day, while I texted with Risako, around the globe, coronavirus cases crossed the one-million mark, and they showed no signs of stopping.
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To the north of me in Germany, a Bolivian flute orchestra, stuck in the country due to travel restrictions, holed up in Rheinsberg Palace (said to be haunted by the ghost of Frederick the Great), surrounded by twenty-three packs of wolves. To the south, Thailand’s sixty-seven-year-old king Maha Vajiralongkorn had allegedly holed up with twenty concubines in the Bavarian mountains in a four-star hotel.
The Thais, of course, weren’t particularly happy. As their king hid in the mountains, they lived under a state of emergency. When news of the monarch’s latest antics reached home, the phrase, “Why do we need a king?” appeared in Thai 1.2 million times on Twitter within twenty-four hours.
Perhaps he felt it was a small price to pay for what must have been a fantastic alpine adventure. Me, I lived considerably more humbly, my surroundings a little less lavish.
More and more, I sp
ent my time running, with my fifteen-euro supermarket shoes. Around the world, no doubt by default, running had become a popular pandemic activity amid gym closures and the necessary decline of team and contact sports. The fitness-conscious people who normally pursued other activities — like me — all started to make do with running, a solitary and socially distanced sport if ever there was one. On Strava, an app that tracks your run and connects you with other runners, I kept getting alerts about new friends joining. I looked it up to see if Strava was publicly listed and was disappointed I couldn’t buy shares.
A former colleague of mine at the Toronto Star, Wendy Gillis, an avid runner, wrote about the activity and its relation to the pandemic. “Our worlds have shrunk, and we cannot move as freely through our own city,” she wrote. Zipping around on foot, faster than just walking but slower than driving, does enable detailed, intimate observations of your environment while still covering serious ground. “I have never been more grateful for running.”
Me too, I came to find. I appreciated my long runs and the sport in general. The weather began to warm, and it allowed me to connect with Bayreuth in the absence of being able to shop, eat, and meet the people there. I didn’t enjoy walking the central district, but running outside was different; there was an earthly warmth to it. The empty downtown felt like every empty downtown these days — forbidding and ghost-like, the few inhabitants on the streets and sidewalks all trying to avoid each other as much as possible. Outside the core, though, the concrete and sandstone faded quickly into the wild, into a place that seemed far away from the sick world. I got to know the branches and shrubs of the Studentenwald and the damp mud beneath my feet; the careless cows behind their electric fences; the thickly coated llamas and alpacas, in need of a shave, in the outdoor zoo that had no doors to shut; the gravel crunching under the soles and the sight of horses and the sound of trees. I ran three times a week, ten kilometres at a time. Like my former colleague Wendy did when she trained for a marathon in 2016, I gauged my run only by my watch, turning back when time was up. I didn’t have a plan, running wherever I liked, with no direction except forward. It felt good, liberating. Wendy had used escapism-laced language to describe her pandemic exercise. She “fled,” she wrote. She “tried to run away from it all.” I felt that was most apt.
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As the number of those infected piled up and the lockdowns intensified, the stock market, after recording historic crashes at the beginning of the pandemic, actually picked up considerably, riding the waves of government stimulus packages around the world. But it was looking more and more like a hollow rebound. The coming recession was still on track to be worse than that of the 2008 financial crisis, according to multiple investment banks. Morgan Stanley said U.S. growth would slow to a “74-year low.”
Government stimulus was largely how the world climbed out of the slump caused in 2008, which at its heart was a storm caused by those in the world of finance, the collapse of complicated investment instruments, losses of ones and zeros and money on paper that rippled outward. Thus, in 2008, we saw government bailouts, interest-rate cuts, and quantitative easing measures rolled out — financial means to solve a financial problem. For a crisis like this, with more tangible factors, the trillions in stimulus that governments have already injected and the likely trillions more to come only treats the symptoms. “The best that economic and financial policymakers can do…is limit the damage,” the German insurer Allianz’s top economist said in the media. “They cannot turn the economy around because this is a health issue, not an economic or financial issue.” And you cannot print more hospitals like money or cut the spread rate of a virus through a parliamentary vote.
That same logic, unfortunately, can be applied to everything that has stemmed from the spread of the virus, such as the shake-up of the world order or the divisions it has caused — when we tackle those problems, we do not address the core issue. That applies even to the virus itself. We can develop coronavirus resistance, the so-called herd immunity, if enough people get infected and enough die. We can develop vaccines and overcome the months, if not years, of trials and the logistical nightmare of distribution. And in the meantime, we can isolate the infected, prevent mass interactions, wash our hands, and hide our faces. But for all that, most of the infected, those whose symptoms are not life-threatening, are just told to stay home and take painkillers. Using ventilators or drugs on those writhing and clawing for breath can only treat their symptoms, not help to find a lasting cure. And all we can do as a society is the same thing that any one of those patients can do: prolong the fight and wait and pray for the immune system to conjure up its magic to kill the enemy. Just as economic measures do not address the public health issue at the heart of the crisis, our public health measures themselves do little to combat the underlying pathological threat.
In that same vein, even conquering the pathological threat, as will only occur when we find a vaccine, will not address the deeper underlying issue: the world has been caught unprepared by an epic crisis that has made grand spectacle of our inherent blind spots and narrow vision, our helplessness against the vast spectre of the unknown, and our repeated cycles of ill-preparedness and blame-laying when faced with calamity. The pandemic has revealed faults and fault lines far older than itself. It is demonstrating, uncomfortably, that ill-preparedness may be inevitable. The pandemic is a warning, its message distilled in the fact that, for COVID-19, just like during the Black Death, like the clergy with their healing ceremonies and the so-called doctors with their funny beak-shaped masks, we too had no cure.
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The United Kingdom performed a pandemic simulation in 2016 that, among other findings, revealed the country’s incapacity to deal with an outbreak should one arise. Naturally, the government later came under fire for not following up on its own recommendations from that exercise. In 2018, U.S. president Donald Trump’s administration dismantled a unit in the White House responsible for preparing for pandemics. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Health ran a months-long simulation of a respiratory virus that spread from China and, in so doing, predicted inadequate physical distancing but plenty of in-fighting among both federal departments and states. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency had warned of pandemic vulnerability months before the pandemic. U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson boasted about shaking hands “with everybody” at a hospital before he himself got diagnosed with COVID-19 and spent forty-eight hours in intensive care, where “things could have gone either way.” Examples such as these are more plentiful than not. In the lead-up to the current crisis, it seemed the world, and its leaders especially, had done everything that wasn’t supposed to be done.
Such obstinance in the face of fact and warning does not, obviously, just apply to pandemics. There was an entire commission established to find out how U.S. intelligence and security forces got blindsided on September 11, 2001. George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had heard whispers of a potential attack, had stormed into National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s office with news of an imminent extremist threat. Rice later wrote she did not recall that direct warning from the CIA chief “because we were discussing the threat every day.” Not a specific threat, but the general, spectral idea of an attack on American soil, someday soon. With increasing complexity, our world has become one of a multitude of looming disasters and impending catastrophes, each coming with the direst warnings from the most wizened of experts, arguing passionately for their cause. Yet each prediction also remains unpredictable in its precise timing or how exactly it might escalate. And to be fair, conjuring up a scenario whereby two commercial airplanes are commandeered by box-cutting suicidal hijackers and flown into the World Trade Center, or of a virus originating from a bat in a Chinese wet market that would force a lockdown of the entire world, is not necessarily a skill most of us possess, especially our leaders, unfortunately. It’s more in the realm of Quenti
n Tarantino and fanciful screenwriters like Scott Z. Burns, who wrote the 2011 thriller Contagion, which rather presciently chronicles a virus originating from a bat.
We are fundamentally bad at gauging threats. Research shows we view danger not with our calculated, higher-order thinking, but with the base and instinctual hunches formed through eons. Brain scans even show that we subconsciously think of our future selves as different people. We expect our leaders to be more disciplined — Condoleezza Rice is hardly a slouch in the brains department — but it’s easy to say in hindsight what could have been done. Five years ago, what politician would have prioritized stocking up on ventilators over tackling climate change or proposing gun regulations or addressing any of the other problems of the day that could just as easily have escalated? Taken individually, just about every crisis could have been averted, yet these unexpected blows will keep coming, for we are simply incapable of complete prevention. We were designed for threats up-close and carnivorous, the short-faced bear in the tall grass and the sabre-toothed Smilodon stalking the plains, not the abstract dooms hovering above, compounding and waiting for a spark.
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The late U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher said Europe had averted wars for decades because of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. That brings to mind the joke about elephant repellant, a purple powder sprayed all around by a man who says the absence of those big mammals is evidence of the dust’s effectiveness. Maybe in a world without nuclear weapons, Europe would have headed toward apocalypse and annihilation. But we can never truly prove that as a fact. There is no way to definitively know which catastrophe has been averted and which has not through whatever we have done. Imagine the countless crises that have been avoided all the times our leaders have had the necessary foresight and done the right thing. We do not know about and cannot point to any such examples because the very essence of their being is in being unknown. None of us ever experienced them.