How coronavirus has changed the world order
On a proportionate basis, Victoria is doing more than a third as badly as the US for daily new infections. It’s time to face what that actually means.
COVID-19 is not only spreading like wildfire around the world, with new energy and increased infections; it is not only killing people across continents, destroying national economies and creating a deep global recession; it is transforming geo-strategic equations.
It has intensified US-China tensions to the point where they themselves are now spreading like a wildfire, with new issues of disagreement and acrimony between the two giants arising almost every day.
For Australia, the fallout from the virus has led to serious trouble with Beijing, and on the flip side an intensification of Canberra’s strategic embrace of the US.
In terms of security architecture, perhaps the most important development for us is the intensification and expansion of the Five Eyes alliance involving Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
The Weekend Australian can confirm that the Trump administration has invited Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds to visit the US on July 29 for an AUSMIN meeting. Given the travel restrictions, this meeting involves all manner of logistical complexity, but Washington is keen to do it in part because of the alliance’s growing centrality.
Before considering the likely strategic shape of a post-COVID world, we should recognise that we are a long way from seeing the other side of this virus. The US and Victoria shared a distinction this week. They both recorded their greatest single-day infection numbers. Of course the scale is somewhat different. For the US, it was more than 70,000 infections in a single day, for Victoria 428.
On a proportionate basis, that means Victoria is doing more than a third as badly as the US for daily new infections. But consider what that means. The US is in full COVID crisis, whereas five weeks ago Victoria had days where it didn’t record a single new infection. This virus can strike like lightning and Victoria is in a lot of trouble.
The longer the virus rages, the more severe will its strategic consequences become. Anthony Fauci, formerly Donald Trump’s chief virus adviser, has said he thinks the virus’s dominant strain in America is now more contagious and no less deadly. Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, confirmed a similar judgment here.
One of the weirdest things in Western politics is that maddening sliver, somewhat encouraged by Trump, who still think the virus is not real, or just like the flu, or not a massive health challenge.
That view is nuts. Brazil has now passed two million cases and is closing on 80,000 deaths. India has a million cases and 25,000 deaths. The global death rate, though not back to its peak, is rising. Hospitals in Florida, Arizona and other southern US states report being full to overflowing.
All of this is important to establish that we have a long way to go with the virus and, while the strategic change it has brought about is already severe, we don’t know how or when it might end.
Payne outlined to The Weekend Australian the new importance of the Five Eyes alliance in the COVID environment: “COVID-19 has impacted our strategic environment, placed pressure on international stability, exacerbated the strains on multilateral institutions and forced nations to focus on domestic crises.
“Five Eyes is Australia’s pre-eminent international security and intelligence partnership and co-operation among our closest partners is more important than ever.”
Payne then explained how COVID had changed this alliance: “Our Five Eyes discussions have broadened to include economic and fiscal responses to the COVID crisis, including security of supply chains. We will continue to work together to protect and advance our interests in the face of threats to our liberal democratic values.
“Our communication and collaboration has increased during COVID-19, with a focus on addressing both the short-term challenges we are all experiencing as well as longer-term sovereignty, security and economic prosperity.”
Payne emphasises that none of this is at the expense of our regional engagement. But there is no doubt, with heightened US-China strategic competition, increased instability, weakened institutions and growing stress everywhere, the bonds of friendship and strategic common purpose among like-minded nations are more important than ever.
Josh Frydenberg convened his second Five Eyes finance ministers virtual meeting this week. The Treasurer tells The Weekend Australian: “There’s a terrific spirit of co-operation around the table among my fellow treasurers and finance ministers and a desire to learn from each other as we lead our economies through this crisis to recovery.”
The Five Eyes finance ministers’ meetings are an important new bit of global architecture, entirely of Australia’s invention. Canberra would like it to last. It not only broadens the alliance’s purposes, it takes place against the inescapable backdrop of the COVID-induced instability and the increasingly bitter Washington-Beijing competition.
When the Morrison government made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that there should be an inquiry into the origins of the COVID pandemic, it was singled out for ferocious criticism by Beijing, and subsequent trade punishment.
That’s the way Beijing likes to deal with nations — one at a time. Except with the US, the size and power ratio allows Beijing to play the bully. Increasingly, since the COVID inquiry call, Five Eyes members have co-ordinated much of their China response. They don’t share a common view on all China issues. Morrison did not follow US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo into the rhetorical flourishes of calling Beijing’s island occupying and building activities in the South China Sea illegal. In fact, though, that is the inescapable implication of Canberra supporting the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration to that effect. But Morrison was not going to repeat Pompeo’s language.
China’s actions have been so aggressive in recent months that they are provoking a bipartisan reaction all over the Western world and among non-Western democracies, and indeed other nations simply unhappy with Beijing’s actions. The British government of Boris Johnson, in a critically important decision, ruled that Chinese telco Huawei will not be allowed to provide new equipment for Britain’s 5G network and all its existing equipment will have to be removed by 2027. This is not only a striking decision in itself, of profound strategic importance. The British opposition Labour Party actually urged the Johnson government to be tougher and more consistent in its China policy, just as Democrat challenger Joe Biden does not admonish Trump for being too tough on China but instead has ads running accusing Trump of being too soft on the Chinese leadership.
In Australia, opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong tells The Weekend Australian that COVID will change the global strategic environment: “It will be a more unstable world and a riskier world, with intensifying competition between the US and China, weakening multilateralism, and a weakening order in our own region with a much more assertive China. All of these things would be much better if the world were better able to co-operate and collaborate, but competition, mistrust and nationalism are dominating. The consequences will be more poverty and more lives lost.”
The three great changes she identifies, all exacerbated by COVID, are an absence of reliable global leadership, increased US-China competition and a much more assertive China. In an important essay in the journal, Australian Foreign Affairs, she reasonably distinguishes Labor from the government on multilateralism and some regional initiatives, but importantly outlines a series of actions Beijing has taken that have raised concern among all reasonable international actors.
The idea that Beijing’s behaviour is a problem is not remotely a partisan issue in the West. It’s an inescapable reality.
I asked Peter Varghese, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and one of our shrewdest foreign policy thinkers, what he saw as the chief strategic results of COVID.
“The broad view is that COVID accelerates rather than creates trends,” he says. “But what it has created is a global recession and that has geopolitical consequences. It’s still an open question who you put in the winners and losers columns. It may be that everyone ends up in the losers column. In the short term the virus has dented the US image in two ways. The first is the lack of US global leadership. And second is the difficulty the US system is having in dealing with the virus.”
One unknowable is the calculation that key actors make about what the virus compels or allows them to do. Says Varghese: “China seems to have come to the view that countries being preoccupied by COVID provide it cover. The extraordinary thing about Chinese behaviour in recent months is how many fights they’ve picked at once. China clearly foresees significant slowing of its economy ahead and that threatens the whole of its implicit social compact, in which the people accept a lack of political rights in exchange for economic growth.
“Even before COVID the (Chinese) leadership wasn’t doing economic reform to produce that growth. Will nationalism substitute for economic reform?
“After the global financial crisis (2008) China decided that the correlation of forces had moved in its favour. China could make a similar judgment now and be emboldened to do things. The Hong Kong situation does have implications for Taiwan. You could see a situation where Taiwan becomes a serious flashpoint. If Xi decides it has to be resolved on his watch that could lead to real trouble.”
Yet while the virus does change things, some fundamentals remain. Dennis Richardson, another former head of DFAT as well as Defence, tells The Weekend Australian: “Whatever happens with the virus you can be sure that the US will emerge as a global military superpower, and will be that for many decades to come. The US could even end up spending a bit less on defence and still remain a global military superpower.”
I have always thought the proposition of US decline was wildly over stated. The US declines only if it wants to, its strategic reach shrinks only if wants that reach to shrink. And indeed, the raw economic numbers have never borne out the idea of US decline.
Rory Medcalf, of the Australian National University, wrote an important book, Contest for the Indo-Pacific, Why China Won’t Map the Future. His analysis was echoed in part by former PM Malcolm Turnbull speaking a few days ago to an American think tank. Talk of Beijing imposing a so-called Monroe Doctrine in Asia (under the Monroe Doctrine the US prevented other big powers from interfering in Latin America) was absurd, he argued, because it grossly underestimated the independence, power and agency of Asian nations other than China.
Medcalf in a sense draws a somewhat counterintuitive lesson from the disturbances of COVID. It has seen, he argues, a significant stiffening of the spine of democratic allies against Beijing’s unreasonable assertiveness. It has seen much stronger solidarity among democracies, including, perhaps especially, Asian democracies such as Japan and India.
The virus isn’t finished with us yet. We wanted to lose interest in the virus, but it didn’t lose interest in us. It makes our strategic environment much more unstable and contested. We are right to draw closer to the US, and to increase our own defence spending. There is of course much, much more we need to do as well.
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