Saira Khan
Coronavirus, which started in December 2019 and originated in Wuhan, China, has not resided in China alone. In less than three months, it became a pandemic that crossed the oceans and became one of the most serious and deadliest health issues the world has ever witnessed. The United States, the most preponderant country in the unilateral world, alone has more than 210,000 infected cases. Currently, there are more than 921,000 infected cases in the world and close to 46,300 deaths worldwide. Global and regional states are relentlessly trying to conduct diagnostic tests, treat the infected people, care for the thousands of patients in the limited medical facilities of their countries, and come up with strategies to keep the unaffected ones safe. From world leaders to commoners, this virus has not spared anyone. Humans contracted it from humans, although the original virus was transferred from an animal to a human. Today, the world grapples with how to combat this serious pandemic and tries to determine whether or not the termination of this global and invisible threat will be seen anytime soon. This grave crisis begs several salient questions: Why are the world’s biggest powers not prepared to fight this threat effectively? Why have they not been able to save thousands of lives in the past few months? Why did they not see something like this coming? The answers are connected to the dynamics of world politics.
International Relations started as a discipline to understand big wars, such as World War I and II, and prevent such wars from happening. While this remained the primary goal, the prescribed process of attaining that goal of peace and security was through military security. States, individually and through alliance systems, have maintained power maximization or balance of military power to avoid wars. Concepts like deterrence—conventional and nuclear, bandwagoning, balance of power and balance of terror, security dilemma, and strategic alliance, among others, were studied as parts of traditional security studies, interchangeably used to understand International Relations. Avoiding wars between states became the game of world politics. The study of crisis, conflict, and war took centre-stage. States also entertained the idea of cooperation between states to attain peace through understanding and a cooperative economic win-win situation. After both wars, supranational institutions—the League of Nations and the United Nations—were created for maintaining peace and security in the world. The latter survived the Cold War and still exists as the only universal organization for the stated purposes. There were regional inter-state and intra-state wars during the Cold War and the post-Cold War witnessed one of the worst terrorist attacks, the 9/11 attacks, the world has seen from a non-state actor. While the attacks were primarily meant for the US, they shattered the hope of a peaceful world envisioned by the new world order of the 1990s. The Terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for the attacks was Al Qaeda. Its roots were hunted down by the US and its allies and the leader was eventually killed. More recently, the Islamic State (IS) became a threatening actor and strategies have been devised by the powerful states of the world to fight it. From the world wars to the attacks of the IS, the primary goal of the states in world politics has been to fight actors—state and non-state—to attain and maintain peace in this anarchic international system. The units or actors that have had the propensity and inclination to destroy world’s peace and security had to be stopped. Problems were state-centric and strategies to address these problems were also actor-based. Crises entailed interstate or intra-state. States have, thus, only known how to fight an enemy that is an actor. Cooperation and noncooperation among states were meant to fight non-peaceful actors.
An actor-less enemy that crosses borders and becomes a serious threat to states in such a massive way has not been witnessed by states in this manner. It is one of the greatest invisible threats an entire generation has seen. Big states with power preponderance are not able to fight this agent with much success. No leverage can be used against an actor-less threat that is not intentionally targeting any state. While the world has faced Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, originated in China too, the intensity of that threat was minimal compared to the present Coronavirus. About 8000 people from 26 countries were infected by SARS, causing close to 800 deaths. So, why are states not prepared to fight an agent like this? The answer lies in the focus of International Relations on traditional security—military power. Although in the 1990s, the critical security studies scholars brought the issue of human security—such as poverty, hunger, food security, HIV/AIDS, and drug trafficking, among others—to the forefront of the study of International Relations and a comprehensive study of international security entailed these non-traditional security issues, a departure from the orthodox security studies was not possible. The structure of the discipline could not be changed and actors of the international system continued to conceptualize and operationalize threats that involved actors with the intention to harm other actors. Additionally, the dominance of traditional military security issues could not be avoided due to global and regional conflicts—protracted or not. The world knew how to win a war with an actor or inside of a state. The ultimate objective was to win a war with an actor. The game of zero-sum mentality does not teach anything better than that. Waging a war to win tangible resources was always the rule of the game. Capitulation from a position of military strength was the focus. Exhausting enemy’s resources, armed forces and military/industrial capacity in a war has been the intention of a state. Wars against an unknown and actor-less enemy that does not have superior military power, industrial capacity, powerful army, strong economy, hawkish leadership, does not understand the concept of strategic deterrence, and is not tired of infecting and killing humans were never studied. The world was so obsessed with power and preponderance of the Cold War years and rogue and pariah states of the post-Cold War period, it was so invested in imposing sanctions on states that were apparently anti-western and didn’t follow the codes of conduct of the new world order, and it was so confident that non-democracies were the problem states that would kill peace and security of the world with their nuclear weapons and missiles that it forgot about killer agents or diseases like the Coronavirus that could kill more than 200,000 people only in the US.
But, why did the world not think about unique crisis situations? Did the world forget that even in a state-centric world where the acquisition of nuclear weapons for strategic deterrence was the name of the game, the US had a hard time in managing the unique Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962? US did not understand even then that every crisis cannot be managed by focusing on standard operating procedures. A new challenge cannot be resolved by a standard crisis-management mechanism. A unique threat cannot be addressed by following the operational codes. The aspect of rationality needs to be mentioned here. The world was saved from a nuclear devastation then because rational decision-makers made choices. No matter how irrational sometimes leaders are, there is always a little window of hope that leaders will make rational decisions during acute crisis situations. Unfortunately, a virus like Coronavirus has no rationality. It does not understand positivism. It cannot make cost-benefit calculation, like rational states. It does not understand zero-sum mentality and the concept of capitulation if it progresses aggressively and attacks the strongest power of the world. It only knows how to infect thousands of people without the fear of facing retaliation from the ones infected.
Shouldn’t leaders have been better prepared for a unique crisis after 9/11? Should leaders not have thought about new and unknown threats? Didn’t 9/11 already teach a big lesson: that no amount of military power helps when the enemy has the “willingness to suffer?” Wasn’t that a wake-up call for the big powers that believed military power and missile defense systems will keep their countries safe? Didn’t 9/11 prove that terrorists can be home-grown and that they look like any other ordinary citizens? Didn’t it demonstrate how this interconnected world facilitates the threatening agents in pursuing their terrorist missions? Then why was the world not better prepared to face a new and unique crisis that cannot be contained or fought with military superiority? Unfortunately, world leaders are responsible for glorifying military security. The change of the American administration in 2016 glorified power politics again and the emergence of the ultranationalist governments in Europe, Asia, and America made the situation worse. Lesser states in the international system follow in the footsteps of the bigger states that act as role models. Power in the form of military power could not be put to the back burner, even for the shortest period. Rather, the importance of military power in world politics, systemic and sub-systemic, became institutionalized again. Consequently, human security issues had to take a back seat in the study of world politics and today’s inability to combat the Coronavirus effectively is partly a function of that.
This virus undermines the value of power preponderance and military power. It also demonstrates the limited value of the United Nations in combating such a threat. Interestingly, the United Nations Security Council has been silent on this. After all, the organization was created by states to maintain state security, not global human security. The virus brings to the forefront the salience of nontraditional security issues in world politics. Although scholars have written on these forms of security issues, there is no scholarship on actor-less threats. Food security, poverty, hunger, and drug-trafficking are all nontraditional security issues, but they are still connected to actors. The current non-traditional human security challenge is actor-less, which does not target any country. The world cannot even follow the chains of transmission. There is also a void of information. The virus entered into a human body and proliferated to other human bodies. It has created a war zone. However, instead of a state’s armed forces defending a state, in this case, a human being’s antibody is his or her army and the immune system is his/her greatest defense. Personal and social behaviors are human beings’ protection mechanisms and isolation is the primary strategy to stay healthy. In this war zone, the world strongest military power has lost against an actor-less agent that is killing indiscriminately, not with nuclear weapons, but with its biological potential to kill humans, How do states combat a threat like this that is so unique? There is no satisfying answer to this question, but scenarios of new threats pertaining to human security should have been thought about, at least since SARS.
If power politics was not the focus of the actors in the international system and more attention was paid to human security, could this virus of an unprecedented nature and scale have been avoided? Perhaps not. But, if more cooperation between states was there, soft power could be used to address problems faced by states. That way, perhaps, even a country like China would have realized that irresponsible behavior is unacceptable and given importance to the accountability factor in world politics. Probably, China would disclose information about the virus immediately when people were infected there without thinking about the negative ramifications and its possible alienation from the world. It would probably have felt responsible for such a big pandemic instead of transferring the blame on others and showing anti-foreigner sentiments in the country. It would have tried harder to prevent the virus from crossing its border and felt guilty about it instead of seeing a strategic window of opportunity by helping the Europeans and Iranians in their fight against the virus. Probably resources from the world would pour into China to help it in keeping this virus from spreading at the initial stage. It would be impossible to predict an unprecedented human security crisis of this nature even if the world powers tried, but the shift of focus from hard power to soft power and more attention to non-traditional security issues would help in fashioning a coordinated world, which, in turn, would have kept this virus at bay.
Health issues or human security issues do not revolve around the politics of power. They do not understand caste, creed, religion, or power. Washington Consensus and Beijing Consensus become unimportant topics when the world is faced with an uncontrollable health pandemic like the Coronavirus. Who pivots where and who controls which part of the world are not salient anymore. How much China is investing in Africa to keep the continent under its grips or how strong a triangular relationship China, Russia, and Iran are maintaining is not important anymore. Rather, world powers should have thought about the negative effects of globalization and the interconnectedness of the world. The financial difficulties of Iran today are not Iran’s alone. The Coronavirus has hit Iran badly. Due to its financial difficulties, a function of sanctions, it has not been able to combat the virus effectively. That does not mean that the threat will remain within the borders of Iran. The interconnectedness of the world brings the problems of the Iranians to the west as well. When Canada asked all Canadians in the post-virus period to come back to Canada, Iranian-Canadians may have brought with them the virus that they contracted in Tehran. Self quarantine may not always be easy, as is known by now. How does one avoid this? These problems of interconnectedness are unavoidable. Power politics cannot solve them. Coordinated efforts of the world can solve these seemingly unresolvable problems.
SARS was not supposed to be a one time threat. Have the Canadians thought about the emergence of such virus more compared to the US because SARS hit Canada badly? Alternatively, are Canadians better prepared to face the virus because Ottawa is less interested in power politics and more focused on humanitarian and human security issues? Currently, Canada has done more diagnostic tests and has more ventilators and necessary medical equipments than the US, which are helping the Canadians in these difficult times. Canada is a peace-loving country that focuses on human rights, human security, and, related to that, climate change and environmental degradation, among others. It has surely done better so far than its southern neighbor in dealing with this virus. As for the US, the current Administration’s obsession with power politics and military/economic preponderance have entertained the usage of a strategy of denial and deception at the dawn of the outbreak of this virus. For a long time President Trump called it a Chinese virus that was similar to a typical flu. He undermined the deadly aspect of the virus for his interest to be re-elected again. Little did he know that it would hit the country in such a grave manner! Instead of thinking about adopting new strategies and being prepared with medical equipments to address this unknown health issue, the leader of the most powerful country of the world discussed economic issues at the time. Has the world’s strongest power failed to invest adequately in pandemic protection measures due to its obsession with power politics? Has it become the epicentre of this virus because of that? If the eventual death toll from this virus in the US equals the number of Americans killed in the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined, then where is the value of military power? How can the country justify its huge investments in defense as opposed to the human security/health domain?
Interestingly, as the world leaders are having a hard time in stopping the virus from proliferating, they are also engaged in a new game of world politics. The pandemic will most likely mark the beginning of a new era of International Relations. The virus, that knows no bounds, is being fought by the world in ways that entail cooperation, but also emphasize the importance of self-centred or state-centric policies. The physical distancing and isolation of human beings have also led to state-to-state distancing and isolation. Like many of its European allies, Canada is turning inwards as the virus cases continue to multiply worldwide, at home, and, especially, in the US. Canada had indicated tightening its borders with the US as the latter becomes the epicentre of the Coronavirus. The US, on the other hand, is contemplating moving its military to the Canada-US border. This 5,500 mile border is the longest undefended and un-militarized border of the world. The unprotected border was a matter of pride for both countries. The impact of this decision, if implemented even as a temporary arrangement, will be serious. The two countries have acted as one, especially in the realm of security, for decades and this will change that image the peoples on both sides of the border have of each other. Canadian Administration has already indicated that there is no justification for stationing troops along the border. There is already a bitter feeling in Canada about this as Ottawa states that this is not the right way to treat a trusted friend and a military ally. In Europe, intrastate health security has become more important than the concept of the borderless European Union (EU). EU has introduced strict border controls. Italy, Spain, and France have all closed their borders. Australia, and New Zealand have also closed their borders. Interestingly, China is closing its border for the fear of a second wave of the virus. Is the Westphalian state system taking a front seat in the midst of this human security crisis? If that is the case, would human security be considered to be an important aspect of world politics even after the crisis is terminated?
What will be the relationship between China and the world in general and more specifically the US? President Trump has always referred to this virus as a Chinese virus. Anti-Asian racism is on the rise in the US and China-US relationship is said to be on life support. China has expelled American journalists and there is tremendous anti-foreigner sentiment in the country. China strategically ventures to brand itself as Europe’s savior and aims to improve its standing on the global stage. For some time now, China and the U.S. have continued a wider fight for global influence. China getting closer to Europe is making the US nervous. Unfortunately, President Trump also angered Europe by barring all travel from the continent without consulting its European allies. China’s mass deployment of medical aid to Europe is an effort to further a “Health Silk Road,” stretching its Belt and Road Trade-and-infrastructure Initiative. Additionally, China is sending plane loads of medical supplies and experts to Iran. Even European countries such as Britain, France, and Germany have stepped up in giving millions of dollars to Iran in this crisis. Iran’s neighbors, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE, are also helping it. Will the US be a lonely superpower after the crisis ends?
The world may come back strong from this, but the Coronavirus will surely change interstate politics in general and write a new chapter on world politics in particular. We may bounce back strongly from this, but it will leave a stronger residue pertaining to the consequences of globalization and interstate relations. It will teach us to look for powerful agents that have no visible faces and territories and that which can pose unprecedented threats to the world. We will perhaps no longer look for evilness in states, but evil agents that might threaten us in evil ways that are not predictable or seen. Just as the Coronavirus does not respect geographical borders, the other great challenges of the present day international system, such as climate change and environmental degradation, also do not. These challenges and human security threats will eventually demand effective global communication and dialogue. New mechanisms to face such crises in the future need to be developed. Time has come to think and restructure world politics along the lines of non-traditional security or at least incorporate it seriously. Time has also come to lift sanctions on a country like Iran that is facing the virus in unprecedented ways. It is inhuman to continue to maintain these sanctions that are not allowing the Iranian government to address the virus with much effectiveness due to its financial constraints. If this virus does not teach a lesson about the very little value that military capabilities—such as nuclear weapons—have in keeping an actor safe, then what will?
Dr. Saira Khan is an International Security Expert, who lives in Canada. She is also the member of Advisory Board at the Centre for Governance Studies (CGS).
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessary reflect CGS policy.
