COVID-19, the knockout punch for multilateralism?

Paris (AFP) - The coronavirus pandemic blindsided international organisations, prompted individual states to unilaterally strike out alone and heralded a new chapter in the 21st century's chief geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China.

Regional and international organisations from the European Union to the United Nations have not managed to muster a coordinated response to the pandemic, while even economic organisations like OPEC have failed to halt the slide on markets.

The United States, meanwhile, is halting payments to the UN's World Health Organization (WHO), the only body equipped to deal with a health emergency that knows no borders.

The crisis, described by many governments and groups as the worst since World War II, has led many states to put self-interest first and relegate the common good to second place.

"We are in a period where we are seeing a return to sovereignty, and the crisis will surely prompt states to behave in an even more sovereign way," Zaki Laidi, a professor at the Sciences Po university in Paris, told AFP.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who led the coordinated G20 response to the 2008 financial crisis, has warned that more, not less, multilateralism was needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

"It needs global action and not simply national action. We've had too much of America first, India first, China first," he told the BBC last month.

The author thinks that the death of multiculturalism is a bad thing. He asserts the US is incapable of assuming a leadership role. The US has stepped back from its leadership role because it’s expensive and no longer serves a national purpose. The US was the world’s leader during the cold war because the US was fighting the cold war. That is over. Therefore the US no longer sees being the world’s policeman as in the interest of American citizens. The US wants the world to solve its own problems. Take Chinese aggressions in what China refers to as “the first island chain.” The US has no interests there. Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines and others do have an interest. It appears they are rapidly building their navies up to handle the threat. Then there’s Libya. Again, the US has no interest there. The fact that Turkey is playing spoiler is of no concern to the US. If they are, then it’s up to those who do have an interest to invest their treasure and blood in addressing their problems.

I like this new nationally focused world.

The author speaks of the death of multilateralism which is a very different thing than the death of multiculturalism. To participate in either has its advantages and disadvantages.

Multiculturalism domestically has been touted in the world of political correctness to be America's strength, "diversity is our strength," when historic examples abound of multiculturalism in the form of diversity undoing empires and nations. On the other hand, a few nations, America almost uniquely alone among them, has done well with multiculturalism, that is, diversity of thought but less so with racial and ethnic diversity.

Multilateralism, like multiculturalism, has its advantages and disadvantages. Our multilateral relationships with NATO were effective in containing and ultimately defeating the Soviet Union, for example. Multilateralism worked out well for the United States in the first Gulf War. If we had paid more attention to our multilateral allies in Europe and elsewhere we might perhaps have avoided the tragedy of the second Gulf war.

But multilateralism can be a handicap for a capitalist, representative democracy such as exists (and hopefully will continue to exist through this crisis) in America. I think there is a distinct difference between our efforts to fight the Cold War and the subsequent efforts to play the world's policeman and we ought to keep intellectual rigor in segregating these activities and not lump them together.

That is because we our in an undeclared Cold War with China which is becoming progressively warmer and which might require us from time to time and in place to place to police areas of the world. The South China Sea certainly is such a place. To say that Singapore is a place in which the United States has no interest is to ignore the Singapore Straits or the Straits of Malacca and to fail to understand the huge proportion of the world commerce which passes through.

But the new Cold War with China will not be played by the same rules as the old Cold War with the Soviet Union rather it will be fought in new frontiers, in space, in cyberspace, on belts and roads, along trade routes, in the space of 5G. It will be fought as a battle over information, communication and conductivity. The prizes will be riches, water supplies, minerals, markets and minds.

The loser, if it be China, will in the long run be the better for it. But if the loser is the United States, the free world, the world of relatively free markets populated by citizens whose individuality is treasured, the end result will be catastrophic. To quote Churchill, " if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

We are a democracy founded on the individual which at least in lipservice does not submit to the collective mentality. But too often our commitment to freedom is only lipservice. We have seen this tragic flaw in our character demonstrated time and again in the last 40 years when our elites of the Academy, on Wall Street, on Main Street, on Pennsylvania Avenue have sold the American birthright to China for a mess of porridge.

On the whole, it is not been our multilateral connections that have weakened us to this point today, it is our internal vulnerability and greed which makes us vulnerable. The Chinese are simply corrupting us to death.

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