In this episode of “Intelligence Matters,” host Michael Morell talks to Hal Brands, historian and Henry A. Kissinger Professor Emeritus of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, about a new compilation of essays true to life. this effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on foreign security and global order. Brands, who co-edited the volume with his colleague Francis Gavin, describes his main themes and observations, adding how the epidemic could potentially provide challenging opportunities and situations and how it can lead to a global counterbalance coalition. a developing China. Brands also explains to Morell how US leadership, both domestic and foreign, will have positive effects in the short and long term.
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INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNT – HAL BRANDS
PRODUCER: OLIVIA GAZIS
MICHAEL MORELL: Welcome to Intelligence Matters, Hal. It’s to have you on the show.
MARQUES HAL: Thanks for inviting me, Michael.
MICHAEL MORELL: So how did you, together with Frank Gavin, edit an e-book of essays on the strategic implications of COVID? The e-book is titled “COVID-19 and the world order: The future of conflict, competition and cooperation. ” And thanks for joining us. And we’re going to unwrap this e-book a bit today.
Hal, let me start with a few questions about the ebook in general before I delve into the background. The first is: what led you and Frank to do this project? Why this ebook?
BRANDS HAL: Of course. So this assignment was actually the concept of Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels, who has made an effort in his career to relate educational paintings to real-world political challenges.
And so when it became clear that COVID was indeed a global occasion and a global disruption in early spring, he reached out to Frank and me and essentially asked us to host a convention that would lead to such an e-book. And that made sense to us because the Johns Hopkins component where Frank and I work, the Henry Kissinger Center at the School for Advanced International Studies, focuses on the global order as a number one research domain.
And so we think a lot about the main global trends, how to perceive the adjustments of the foreign formula in the context of history. And then we were already thinking about this problem. I think we were of the opinion that even before COVID, the foreign order that the United States and its allies created after World War II and expanded after the Cold War under increased pressure. Array and then there is this massive surprise in COVID, which has led to rapid, perhaps transitory globalization, unprecedented disruption of relationships and patterns of interaction around the world.
Therefore, it became clear that this had the prospect of being quite a transformative episode in terms of the trajectory of global affairs in the global system. So we were already thinking about how to meet this challenge within the limits of our work. So it was actually a herbal suggestion that we got here with this project. So this past June and early July, we hosted a foreign convention that brought together experts in combination from across the country and even around the world to read about how COVID would tackle challenges ranging from global public fitness to national security. This combination e-book is based on essays produced for the convention and all credits to Johns Hopkins University Press. They turned it from a manuscript into an eebook with covers and all in record time, about six weeks.
MICHAEL MORELL: So Hal, the e-book written with some kind of national security and foreign policy in mind, or is it also available to the general public?
HAL BRANDS: I’m saying that the answer is yes, in the sense that it is written with either goal in mind. And so obviously there is a crazy side to many of the questions that we are discussing here; questions such as “How do foreign organizations adapt after COVID?” How does the US national safety net technique address pandemic preparedness issues while also addressing issues like marvelous force competition?
So we’ve tried to combine some of the most productive minds in academia and politics, other people like Kathleen Hicks, Kori Schake, Peter Feaver, Thomas Wright, and others to communicate the issues that policymakers are thinking about. in real time. So, we hope this e-book will tell the debates within the political community, within government, and among the other people who are concentrating on those things for a living.
But the eeebook is also written in an intentionally available way. And so a number of participants who have come together for this project, other people like the historian Niall Ferguson or Anne Applebaum, who writes for The Atlantic, are other people who write for a giant audience. And the eeebook is purposely designed to be written without jargon. Essays are short and available. There is an advent of the eeebook that links all topics in combination in a way for other people who might not possibly stick to all issues closely.
So we hope to be successful in the political network and in the educational network, but also to speak only to the general public who are curious to know where COVID is leading in the world.
MICHAEL MORELL: Great. So let’s explore the background, but before we do, I just need to tell my listeners that they can locate the e-book on Amazon. And I also need everyone to know that a portion of the proceeds from the e-book will go to the Maryland Food Bank to help Johns Hopkins University’s food distribution efforts in Baltimore during the pandemic, not just if you buy. the eebook, they will inform you attractive things, but it will also do it intelligently at the same time. I just need everyone to know that.
So the essence of the e-book, Hal. Two big questions to start with. Describe the design of the ebook and why you chose to do it the way you did. Did the tests drive the design or did you have a design in your brain that drove the tests you requested? I guess that’s the first question.
BRANDS HAL: Of course. So I think the e-book is structured around two factors. And so the first is just the truth of the pandemic, which referred not only to global public health problems, or not only to foreign economy problems, but to a total diversity of problems ranging from foreign organizations to countries. they are organizing, on the possible choices that defense planners will have to make in the coming years.
Therefore, the electronic book necessarily has a comprehensive character. So we have sections of the e-book that address everything from bioethical issues to populism and internal state governance issues to classic national security issues and more.
And then the moment that shaped the e-book was the guiding precept for my paintings and Frank’s paintings and the center, the Henry Kissinger Center, which is that it is difficult to perceive the trajectory of global affairs without a perception of history. . And so we seek to bring an old-fashioned attitude to the examination of COVID and the global order, especially in times when there are so many deep discontinuities in the paintings, where so much uncertainty obscures our view of the environment. International, a perception of history can help you anchor intellectually.
And so, the design of the electronic book starts from that premise. So the opening segment of the ebook is essentially essays and what we call implemented history. So they are historians or others with an ancient attitude hiding in an attempt to make sense of questions like, “Why haven’t we done a bigger job to prepare for the option of a pandemic that everyone understood to be a danger?
We then move on to global public fitness factors, as the crisis is first and foremost a global public fitness factor at the moment. So we have tests that address everything from why public fitness is an inherently complicated field in the first place, to the steps we want to take to prevent long-term pandemics from devastating the world like COVID has.
And then we move on to a variety of functional problems. So the demanding weather situations, the demanding long-term situations of the foreign economy after COVID, transnational problems such as the regulation of emerging technologies.
And from there, we take a closer look at classic security issues and ask ourselves, “How has COVID had an effect on power relations?” What has been its effect on the US national security agenda?
Which brings us to the final segment of the book, which touches on a topic that has actually been at the center of the global COVID debate from the beginning, namely, “ How is all this going with the dating between the two wonderful highs? powers of the world? The United States and China? This is obviously the sixty-four thousand dollar question. So we have a handful of essays that take other perspectives on this.
MICHAEL MORELL: One question that struck me, Hal, when I first read the name is, why is there a “The” before “World Order” in the name? Why COVID and “The” world order? Why do you omit “The”?
BRANDS HAL: Well, one of the reasons is that “world order” is an evolving concept. Thus, there is no static “world order” of singles that has ruled foreign affairs since time immemorial. Has replaced over time. And so the “World Order” that we have been dealing with since WWII is largely the product of how this clash ended and the distribution of force in the foreign formula with the United States and its countries. the most commonly democratic allies in the foreground.
But one of the arguments we make in the e-book is that this order was already strained in the years, or perhaps two decades, before COVID. We had noted the return of the festival of wonderful powers, the return of the ideological festival in the form of increased tension in democracies, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. We would see many foreign institutions, like the WHO, suffer to carry out the purposes they were supposed to carry out. We had noticed questions about US resistance.
So for us, the query of what a “World Order: Now and in the future” looks like is more of a query mark. We cannot say with wonderful certainty what the contours of the global order will be 20 years from now. Fix because COVID has an effect on how we think about it in real time. And that is why we have had “global order” instead of “global order”.
MICHAEL MORELL: I have you. Well, once the reader has read all twenty-three essays, and I think there were twenty-three, what are the main themes that will disappear? What are the flashy lines?
HAL BRANDS: I will highlight a few. The first is that COVID has been so disruptive that it has landed in an already increasingly messy world. And then I talked about the variety of strains that were already testing the foreign order at the end of 2019, for example. And those strains have played a vital role in the progression of COVID. And if the United States and China hadn’t already moved into deep enough competition, it may have had more communication and cooperation between those two countries in the January-February era.
If WHO had worked better, it may have sounded the alarms more effectively. If it hadn’t already been for the wonderful tensions over the globalized formula that arose after the end of the Cold War, you would have had another answer, and so on.
So what COVID did was not have a formula that was perfectly healthy. He edited a formula that was already plagued with a variety of pre-existing conditions, so to speak. And that’s helping explain why the pandemic had the effect it did, and in many tactics intensified the problems that were already shaking the world when it landed. And so it is clear that the US-China festival has gotten much more intense and much sharper just in the six months since COVID has turned into an A-1 tale every day.
We have noticed how COVID has affected the struggles for political force and authoritarian and democratic systems. And so COVID is accelerating many of the ongoing processes.
But the theme of the moment, and one that many of our contributors have pointed out, is that while COVID has had dire effects on the world in many ways, it creates opportunities and challenges. Clearly it is a cliche to say, “You never let a crisis go to waste”, although it is possibly true in this case. And so, from the perspective of the United States, the United States has treated this crisis abominably in many ways. We continue to struggle to perceive the challenge in the country, where there is no sign of a national strategy for public competence. However, when it comes to the United States’ position in the world, there are a variety of opportunities that the crisis reveals.
This may lead to a more powerful counterbalance coalition opposed to an emerging China, as China’s assertiveness in the face of the pandemic and its lack of preparedness at the onset of the pandemic was in many ways more effective in bringing the world into perspective. of an emerging authoritarian China than anything the United States has done in recent years.
It is entirely imaginable that the pandemic places more emphasis on authoritarian regimes, which have a tendency to be fragile, rather than democratic. Watch what is happening in Belarus as we speak. This may be just the first example of a regime change on the COVID issue, although we will see how it unfolds.
And the states that have been most successful in treating COVID are democracies (Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand) or moderate authoritarian states like Singapore.
A third way that covid can be just an opportunity is that it can lead to a more geopolitically academic edition of globalization. So I think what the crisis has done in this regard has awakened other people to the fact that the United States and other democracies have relied heavily on authoritarian rivals like China for critical products like PPE and products. pharmaceutical products.
Now, of course, the answer to this is autarky, but what it may be is a deeper integration into the democratic world as a means of enabling the selective decoupling of spaces of vulnerability from China’s screw.
And there are also other spaces, but I think this is one of the emerging themes that comes out of the volume, and that is that there is an opportunity for some smart things to come out. this crisis.
MICHAEL MORELL: Hal, let me come in here for a bit. At the very beginning of the book’s advent, he writes: “The coronavirus crisis was a shock, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. “
And you, of course, divulge the fact that experts have been cautious for years in the face of such a pandemic, that we have been through a series of precautionary symptoms like H1N1, SARS and MERS. And yet, at the end of the day, we weren’t ready for it.
And I’d just like to hear about your concept and some of the other people who wrote in that first segment you talked about – you know, why didn’t the warnings translate into actions to mitigate the threat? Array is not, and then prepare for its arrival if this mitigation fails. You know, why are we so bad at going from caution to action? What is the answer to that in your mind?
HAL BRANDS: So the answer has to do with two sets of points. The first set of points refers to the disorders that are necessarily inherent in public fitness and the situations demanding global public fitness that are unavoidable in this area.
And the moment category of trouble has to do with things that were unique to the scenario that the United States was facing around the world in early 2020. And so, in the first category, Lainie Rutkow, a professor of public fitness at Johns Hopkins and wrote an excellent essay for the book, he says that global public fitness is one of the things that is invisible in smart times, and therefore other people pay little attention outside the doors of a crisis.
So you can think of public fitness measures as the insurance policy that has been opposed to an invisible risk that might or might not manifest itself. So before a crisis breaks out, it is simple not to invest enough or not to supply the emergency needed to prepare for the crisis. And this was likely compounded by the fact that the United States has been spared the worst effects of past pandemics, be it Ebola in 2014 or H1N1 before that. So that meant that the United States specifically did not have the same delight in the pandemic manual as the East Asian countries, for example.
But there were other problems that were more explicit in the specific setting at the beginning of 2020. And one of them was that a lot was happening. And so, if not forgotten in January and February, the things that ruled the headlines were the confrontation between the United States and Iran, dramatized through the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January; the saga of impeachment; the Democratic primaries. And so it is remarkable, in fact, how long it took COVID to make history in the United States and in other countries as well.
And then I think you should point out that two other sets of early warning systems have failed. One of them is the WHO early warning system, which, for various confusing reasons, did not sound the alarm as loudly and obviously as it could have at first and at the beginning. in mid-January, when there was still time to take preventive measures.
And finally, there was the extraordinarily poor quality of leadership, both national and international, in the United States. So if you compare what happened in 2020 to what happened in 2014 with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, at that point the Obama leadership reacted quickly. It catalyzed collective action and in fact combined a strong unilateral reaction with a strong multilateral reaction.
What we saw this time was very different. We saw management that tried to deny the importance of the crisis and then, as the crisis deepened, fought unilaterally that had the effect of discouraging, rather than encouraging, the kind of cooperation it would want to contain. an inherently transnational pandemic.
MICHAEL MORELL:
Hal, one of the things you spoke about correctly was the opportunities that could come from that. And in fact, he writes in the advent that historically efforts to build effective foreign agreements emerge after periods of war, crisis and unrest, and this may be one of the moments, it is not.
But my question is, is this one of the times and what are the new arrangements that seem to me to mainly rely on what role the United States plays or does not play, okay, in the future?
So really, two questions for you. First, how confident are you that America is going to play the right role in turning this into an imaginable opportunity here? And what is the difference, at the end of the day, between no gambling and no gambling?
HAL BRANDS: So it will look like a dodge, but it isn’t. The answer to the first query is that it depends. And it depends, frankly, on the kind of leadership the American political formula produces in the months and years to come.
So to be very frank, and this is just my non-public point of view, I am not speaking for any of the participants on this, I think it will be incredibly difficult for the United States to get the most out of this. Opportunities presented through COVID revealed, provided the Trump administration continues on its existing path of weakening US relations with other democracies, pursuing omnidirectional industrial wars, and, fundamentally, creating the impression that the United States is increasingly dispersed. and incompetent in its internal and external policies. . I think those are the opposite qualities that would be needed today to build a more powerful dating among the world’s democracies, a deeper globalization along geopolitical rather than cross-cutting lines, and a revitalization of foreign institutions.
So I’m afraid that if we continue on our current path, there will be two genuine costs: The first is that we simply won’t be able to take advantage of some of the opportunities that exist. And so came an attractive proposal from the UK a few months ago, which was based on a concept that had already caught on in parts of the US foreign policy community, which is essentially the reshaping of the G-7, the Group of Seven, the organization of wealthy commercial democracies, in D-10, necessarily to expand it to a larger organization of democracies that would work in combination to save China from building technological dominance, for example, but also from other problems that require cooperation.
I think this is a very promising initiative. It’s hard for me to see how that will happen while the United States is ruled by a president who turns out to have so little interest in deepening ties between democracies around the world. So we may not take credit for this opportunity while under more enlightened leadership.
The time when the danger, or the cost, is that there are places where we could be outdoors. And the example I’m going to give here is the World Health Organization. It is perfectly appropriate to criticize the role of WHO. The WHO was excessively deferential to Chinese sensibilities at the beginning of the crisis. That didn’t sound the alarm loud enough. But walking away, which the United States has done, is not really an answer, because it robs us of the strength to help reform this organization and make it work better. And as we saw just a few weeks ago, the WHO reform talks are underway and the United States has tried to play a role in this, has warned that it is leaving the WHO.
And many of our closest European allies have asked us to leave, because how can you help reform an organization once you have said you are retiring? And so there are a variety of those examples where the United States could be witnessing how the adjustments are taking place, which does not suit us at all.
MICHAEL MORELL: Hal, you said earlier that China is the problem. I could not agree more. He saved it for the last segment of his book.
What I would like you to do is describe what the basic issues are between the two countries and what you then see as the elements of a successful US strategy for China. And I know this is a huge question.
HAL BRANDS: I think we will go back to COVID as we now look at the occasions of 1946, 1947 in relation to the Cold War, as the occasion that crystallized an emerging festival between two wonderful powers and made it transparent to everyone. that this was happening. And this is a point that Niall Ferguson makes very well and in his essay in the book.
So what is driving this festival? Well, I think there are a variety of express questions. The Sino-American festival is, for example, a festival about the military and the geopolitical balance of forces in the Western Pacific. This is a festival to see who will occupy the peaks of the 21st century economy. It is a party to know if state capitalism, authoritarian capitalism or liberal democracy will be the style that will motivate the emulation of the global in this century.
But at the center is the fact that there are only incompatible views of where the global is happening and where it deserves to happen in Washington and Beijing, etc. For many years after the Cold War, American policymakers expected guilty Chinese actors in the foreign order to drive through the United States. And what we’ve noticed instead is that as China’s strength has grown, it obviously craves something very different.
China obviously aspires to become the dominant force in the Asia-Pacific region. There is growing evidence that he aspires to have global parity with the United States, if not global primacy over the United States, within the next 20 to 30 years. And it obviously seeks to create a foreign environment in which authoritarian systems are protected, if not privileged. All of those goals run counter to America’s longstanding technique for global affairs. So I think that’s what drives the crash today.
So what does an American strategy to compete with China look like? I think it requires a variety of things. In fact, this requires efforts to balance the army’s strength in the Western Pacific, especially in places like the Taiwan Strait, where that balance has shifted very unfavorably over the past 10 to 20 years.
This will require diplomatic efforts to be more competitive in key countries and in foreign establishments where China has made a concerted effort for its own influence.
It will take a geo-economic effort to build a more powerful and resilient loose global economy that can be disgustingly rich and competitive, necessarily opening itself up to undue influence or undue vulnerability due to dependence on the Chinese generation or the Chinese market.
It will take a technological effort to ensure that democracies, rather than authoritarian systems, lead the way for the progression of synthetic intelligence and other technologies that will, indeed, bring to life the 21st century economy and military power of the United States. is. century.
In fact, efforts will also be needed for democracies to highlight the flaws of authoritarian systems. In reality, it is an ideological competition.
And the critical point here is that everything has to be a collective strategy. It will have to be a multilateral strategy, than just an American strategy. I’m going to make a very obvious point here, that China has about 1. 4 billion people. The United States has about a quarter. And so China is going to be an economic monster, despite the fact that, according to capital, it is only a third or a quarter of America’s wealth. And that puts an incredibly superior prize on America’s collaboration with friendly countries, democracies in particular. If the United States maintains and strengthens its alliances, if it cultivates a strong network of democracies, the balance of forces in all those spaces will ultimately be on its side. Otherwise, we will be at a disadvantage.
MICHAEL MORELL: Hal, the strategy you just described is huge. And every one of the things that he talked about is incredibly difficult to accomplish and would require an abundant effort on the part of the United States, to come up with resources.
So at the end of the day, given the political and economic problems and the social problems that we have here in the United States, are you optimistic, pessimistic that we are going to be able to take and build the kind of? vis-à-vis China strategy you just mentioned? I’ll have to tell you that this worries me.
HAL BRANDS: I’m also concerned, I still have some long-term optimism.
And so if you go through the list of things that I checked, especially the last one that this will have to be a multilateral strategy, there are some facets of how the United States is acting today.
Do not insist on this point, however, we have weakened relations with our allies in Asia-Pacific and in Europe that we deserve to have strengthened in the last 3-4 years. And I’m afraid this trfinish will get better if we end four more years of President Trump. And so, in the short term, there is cause for concern.
I am also heavily involved in that the source of America’s power, which is the workings of our internal system, our internal economy, is threatened, only through the effects of the pandemic, but through a deeper, political dysfunction. and of another type, which is built. for several years.
What gives me a feeling of optimism are two things. And the first is that the American formula has already been proven and appears to have a built-in ability to adapt and succeed in demanding situations at the last minute. This is not the first debate about American decline that we have noticed. In fact, we have noticed these debates once a decade since the 1940s. And just in case, after what turns out to be an endless period, the American political formula has produced answers, or at least partial answers to the problems. who called the United States. And I have some hope that this is also the case today.
The moment that gives me hope is that China is, in many tactics, its worst enemy. What has produced a wave of global fear and even global anger for China during the 8+ months? This is not a policy that the United States followed. It is because China’s authoritarian regime is at home and on the foreign stage. And what other people are learning, be it in Europe, India or Southeast Asia or anywhere else in the world, is that the Chinese Communist Party has a total view of global affairs and is inclined to behave in the best way. maneuvers and coercion.
And so, no matter how harsh the United States has looked in recent years, the prospect of Chinese hegemony seems far worse to people around the world. And it also gives me a sense of hope.
MICHAEL MORELL: Very interesting, you say that we have faced demanding situations before and we have succeeded. Are there kinds of those demanding situations, of solving those demanding situations that we can apply to this?
BRANDS HAL: Well, the first is that the festival can offer an incentive to solve the internal problems of a country. So go back to the bloodless war here. In fact, the Cold War had negative effects on US domestic politics. We all do not forget McCarthyism, of course, and the rise of the red bait as a political bloody sport. And no one needs to relive those things today.
But precisely because the Cold War was a festival of long-term systems, it was a festival between liberal democracy and Soviet communism, it emphasized that the United States should invest and adopt reforms that they otherwise would not have done. I will give some examples.
The United States would not have made the incomplete but very significant progress in civil rights that it did in the 1950s and 1960s without the Cold War, because the Cold War prevented the United States from talking about democracy, freedom, and human dignity abroad as long as it did. it denied such a giant component of the country’s population.
Also, if you need to know why America has the most productive higher education formula in the world lately, it has everything to do with the Cold War. The Cold War made investing in higher education, investing in fundamental research, a matter of national security. This has led to investments of an order of magnitude more staggering than those the country had made before. The rise of America’s wonderful universities is closely related to the Cold War.
There are other examples too. But what I would like to say is that competitions give countries the opportunity to have bigger versions of themselves.
MICHAEL MORELL: Hal, we’re running out of time here. There are a few minutes. And I need to ask you a kind of weird question. And I need to ask you, because there are many authors of this book.
And I need you to go to a dinner where you just read this eebook and tell the other people about dinner about that wonderful eebook you just read. What are some excerpts from some of the essays that you would like to share as a percentage around the table so that other people will be interested in reading the e-book? What would you say to them?
HAL BRANDS: Let me mention two. The first is a glimpse that my friend and colleague Frank Gavin found, and it has a glorious point in his e-book essay that reminds us that the bicycle was indeed a pandemic invented in horses in the early 1800s. century in what is now Germany.
And the explanation why I love this treat, I love this anecdote, is that it reminds us that horrible crises like the ones we face have tended to be an incentive for the big ones. creativity, as well as serious problems. And so I like it because it gives us a way of thinking about this crisis as a query of what we can achieve in the face of adversity.
The second, I must emphasize, comes from the essay written through Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute, and has a glorious way of illustrating why the reaction of Americans to COVID has been so different from the reaction of citizens and so many. other democracies of the world. So why are Americans naturally more resistant to wearing masks? Why do they need to reopen the economy so quickly?
It is not just that they are careless with threats, it is that COVID reasons them. This is because Americans have traditionally had a fundamentally different threat profile than citizens of European countries, for example. And the way Kori illustrates this is that she says that the Americans were the ones who thought it was a concept to go through and live in Comanche country in the 19th century to continually push the border west regardless. the threats involved. And that clearly raises demanding situations about how the United States is responding to the pandemic today. But it just reminds us that those trends are one component of what makes America such a colorful society in the first place.
MICHAEL MORELL: Hal, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. The title is entitled “COVID and the world order: the future of conflict, competition and cooperation. ” The editors are Frank Gavin and Hal Brands. Hal, thank you very much for joining us.
MARQUES HAL: Thanks for inviting me, Michael.