SIPR Fukuyama

The Covid-19 epidemic that emerged early in 2020 has already greatly impacted world politics, and is likely to continue to do so for many years into the future. If we look at earlier global shocks like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the September 11 attacks, or the 2008 financial crisis, the long-term consequences often took years to materialize, and occurred in ways that no one anticipated at the time. What we can do now is only sketch out some possible scenarios for the future, keeping in mind that different parts of the world could experience the crisis in very different ways.

Let’s begin with the question of global democracy. Following on a generation-long expansion of democracy known as the “Third Wave,” global democracy has been in what Larry Diamond has labeled a “democratic recession” now for nearly a decade and a half. It is clear that Covid has already challenged democracy and accelerated that decline in many countries. Leaders all over the world have been taking advantage of the crisis to extend their powers in ways that threaten the long-term health of democracy. This has happened the most clearly in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been granted emergency powers by the Hungarian Parliament, allowing him to rule by decree. Similar things have happened in the Philippines under President Duterte, in El Salvador under President Bukele, and in Serbia under President Aleksandar Vučić. In authoritarian countries like Egypt and China, government powers have been broadened. China has used the epidemic to tighten its grip on Hong Kong, taking advantage of the distraction of the rest of the world.

Overall, there has been no clear correlation between a country’s handling of the crisis, and whether it has a democratic or authoritarian regime. There is tremendous variation with both categories. While authoritarian states like China, Vietnam, and Singapore have done reasonably well in containing the epidemic, others like Russia and Belarus have not. Similarly for democracies: while the United States, Italy, and Brazil have fared poorly, South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany have performed well.

On the other hand, people around the world are not doing careful statistical analyses of the relative performance of democratic versus authoritarian governments. They are looking at the bilateral comparison between China and America as exemplars of the two forms of government, and in this comparison, American democracy does not look that good. This perception has been strengthened in the eyes of many by the racial justice protests following the killing of George Floyd on May 25, which have been portrayed by authoritarian governments as riots and violent disorder rather than peaceful protests. This negative perception may be rectified to some extent if Donald Trump is voted out of office in November, but the underlying polarization that has weakened the United States will not suddenly disappear.

The real sources of good performance in the pandemic lie elsewhere than in the type of regime a country possesses. One clear factor is state capacity, that is, a country’s possession of a qualified and well-resourced public health bureaucracy. Trust in government is also critical: compliance with difficult quarantine measures depend on citizens believing that their government is competent and legitimate. Finally, leadership at the top matters greatly. The leaders of the United States, Brazil, Belarus, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan have all spent long periods denying that a health crisis existed in the first place, and indeed took efforts to make sure that people would continue to go to work and to mingle in defiance of the warnings of public health experts. It is not surprising that they have experienced significantly worse rates of infections and deaths.

The importance of these factors—state capacity, trust, and sound leadership—then explains why many East Asian states have come through the crisis relatively well. East Asian countries like China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all draw on a long history of consolidated state institutions, underpinned by a cultural emphasis on meritocratic bureaucracy and education. They handled the crisis well for the same reasons that they performed well over the past decades in managing rapid economic growth. South Korea’s impressive performance was due to the fact that the government delegated management of the crisis to Jeong Eun-Kyeong, a professional health expert who became one of the most trusted people in Korea. Governments did not allow responses to become politicized the way they did in the United States or Brazil, where one’s stance on the epidemic reflected one’s identity in the larger political polarization.

This suggests that the crisis will accelerate the long-term trend towards a shift of the center of the global economy to East Asia. The states of East Asia as a whole look much better poised to reopen their economies sooner than either Europe or the United States. It is clear that there will be no V-shaped recovery anywhere, which puts a premium on a state’s long-term capacity to deal with an ongoing crisis, and to manage the distributional aspects of the economic recovery fairly.

Note that I said the shift in economic activity will be towards East Asia as a whole, rather than towards China. China has been trying to take advantage of its performance in the crisis to boost its global standing, by sending, for example, PPE supplies to many countries around the world. The long-term impact of this campaign is not clear, however: countries also understand that China was the source of the epidemic in the first place, and that the Chinese government let the disease get out of control by initially suppressing news about it. Indeed, many countries have suddenly realized their degree of dependence on China for medical supplies, and have already sought to diversify their sources as a result. This will accelerate an effort to move supply chains away from China where possible, something that began as a result of the Trump administration’s trade war.

Another geopolitical consequence of the crisis has to do with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Many countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Tanzania have already found themselves overextended in their dealings with China, and were seeking to renegotiate the terms of their borrowing from that country. Now that many have fallen into large fiscal deficits as a result of the economic crisis, they are even less able to repay these debts. Unlike most Western lenders, China has frequently demanded collateral in return for its loans, and in instances where default was threatened, has seized assets in response (see for example Sri Lanka’s Hambantota and City Harbor port projects). This kind of asset takeover appears to many developing countries like a new form of imperialism, and puts China in the uncomfortable position of choosing between having to write down a good portion of its loan portfolio, or else risking a serious deterioration of its global prestige.

The short-term consequences of the crisis for the United States have been, as noted above, quite negative. The longer-run picture is more complicated.  The United States has been severely weakened over the past few years by its deep polarization, and by having a president who at every turn has sought to deepen that polarization. President Trump has set himself in opposition to Democratic governors in encouraging resistance to shutdown orders—indeed, he has opposed many of the initiatives taken by his own administration. In response to the killing of George Floyd on May 25, he responded by trying to order the U.S. military into the streets, and forcibly cleared the area in front of the White House of demonstrators so that he could stage a photo-op in front of a church. He has shown no solidarity with the anti-racism demonstrators, and has gone on to defend Confederate statues around the country against those that would try to take them down.

Back in January, Trump was heading towards a relatively easy re-election: the economy was booming, and employment was at an historic high. All of that was changed by his incompetent response to the epidemic; he now faces historically high unemployment levels. Many jobs will be recovered between now and the November election, but it is very doubtful that the U.S. economy will be anywhere near the position it was in last January. The Democrats have chosen a highly electable candidate in Joe Biden, and have seen extremely high voter turnout in primaries since South Carolina. Recent polls have shown Biden opening up double-digit leads over Trump nationally, and doing well in those swing states that will ultimately decide the election. A number of Republican Senators who stuck by Trump during the impeachment hearings like Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, and Martha McSally look increasingly vulnerable.

What will the global order look like if Biden is elected in November, and the Democrats retake the Senate? In foreign policy, many things will change rapidly since the new president will have clear authority to act in this realm. Biden will doubtless reconfirm American commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to its Asian alliances; the United States will likely resume membership and dues-paying to the World Health Organization, and will recommit to the Paris Climate Accords. The United States will return to its rhetorical support for global democracy and end its flirtation with dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The United States will also likely reverse recent decisions to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies Arms Control Agreements.

The one area where things may not change too rapidly under a Biden presidency would be in U.S.-China relations. Growing hostility towards China has been shared by many Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The Democrats’ remaining base in the trade union movement has always been hostile to outsourcing and close ties with China, and the Covid pandemic provides a perfect excuse to disengage. As John Bolton’s memoir has revealed, Trump himself begged Xi Jinping behind the scenes to aid his re-election campaign, undercutting any tough public messaging. This kind of hypocrisy would presumably not afflict a Biden administration.

While many traditional American allies and partners will doubtless welcome an American return to the international stage, it will not be that easy for a new Biden administration to restore the earlier bonds of trust that existed between the United States and other democracies. For one thing, polarization will not simply end if he is elected. The situation will be the worst if the Republicans retain control of the Senate: as in other periods of divided government, there will be continuing gridlock and the inability of Congress to pass major legislation, beginning with yearly budgets. There will be bitter partisan fights over Supreme Court nominees, with the Republicans continuing their obstruction of Democratic candidates for the bench. In foreign policy, the Senate may block nominees to important offices, and treaties or agreements requiring Senate approval would be impossible to pass.

The situation will be even worse if the election is close in the swing states where the contest will ultimately be decided. The United States has a highly complex and decentralized electoral system, with election administration carried out not by professional administrators, but by a hodge-podge of local authorities. There has been long-standing politicization of the voting process, with Republicans seeking to restrict voting as much as they can under the guise of preventing voter fraud. This year’s election will be carried out under a pandemic when in-person voting becomes highly problematic, both for voters and election officials; the obvious solution, mail-in balloting, has already been attacked by President Trump as inviting massive voter fraud. This is a president, of course, who has already argued that he actually won the popular vote in 2016 due to massive voter fraud on the part of the Democrats, despite the fact that he lost by almost three million votes.

It is entirely possible, then, that the legitimacy of the results of the November election will be challenged, both by Republicans charging voter fraud, and by Democrats charging voter suppression. Up to the present, the United States has been lucky that its polarization has not led to widespread violence, but given the stakes involved in a presidential election, that may not hold.

Thus anything but a landslide victory by the Democrats may simply prolong the partisan polarization the United States has experienced up to now. This is why many U.S. allies may not jump at the chance to restore ties with the United States under a Biden presidency: they will see that they are still dealing with a sharply divided country, in which the Republicans could make a quick comeback in 2022 (as has happened under both Clinton and Obama). There would have to be a much deeper shift in U.S. public opinion, and a sharper repudiation of Trump’s nationalist-isolationist legacy, for trust to be restored.

A further question about the Covid pandemic’s global impacts concerns the longer-term effects it will have on political mobilization. Politics in many countries shifted sharply to the right after the 1980s. This was true in Britain and the United States, with the election of Reagan and Thatcher; in continental Europe with the slow decline of socialist and social democratic parties, and in Japan with the disappearance of the Communist and Socialist parties as significant actors. Where the left has regained power, it has usually been in the form of a center-left (e.g., Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, or Clinton and Obama) who have accepted much of the market-friendly consensus on economic policy, and an agenda of limiting expansion of state sectors.

Intellectually, this shift was underpinned by the rise of what is called “neoliberalism”: not classical liberalism, but a more extreme version associated with the Chicago School of figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, or George Stigler, that saw state sectors everywhere as enemies of economic growth. This intellectual shift led directly to some of the policy outcomes that seem so problematic today. One of the less-recognized consequences of Chicago School thinking was the decline of antitrust in the United States. Under the intellectual leadership of people like Robert Bork and Richard Posner, corporations were allowed to merge and bulk up with very little opposition from antitrust authorities. When combined with the economies of scale and scope that accompany digital technologies, this laissez-faire attitude has permitted the emergence of enormous technology platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple to dominate the world economy. But concentration is evident across many sectors, from hospitals to pharmaceuticals to airlines, with deleterious impacts on prices, income distribution, privacy, and democracy. The Covid pandemic has benefitted these large platforms enormously by demonstrating their role as critical infrastructure for a shut-in world, and weakening smaller competitors without the cash cushions to survive economic downturns.

The post-pandemic world is not likely to accept this kind of economic framework for thinking about public policy. The crisis has reinforced the importance of the state and of state capacity, and laid bare the vulnerabilities that emerge when agencies like the Centers for Disease Control are weakened. Coupled with a broad social mobilization brought on by the Floyd killing and a revival of progressive politics around the world, the Overton window of acceptable public policies has shifted considerably to the left. How far the pendulum will swing in this direction over the coming years is anyone’s guess.

The rise of the internet and digital technologies more generally have contributed to the anti-democratic trend. When the internet came into widespread use in the 1990s, many observers believed that it would be of broad benefit to democratic movements around the world. This often appeared to be the case, with popular mobilizations against dictatorship, facilitated by social media, appearing in many parts of the world. Authoritarian regimes took note of these developments, however, and began using the same technologies to increase their control over their own populations, and to create offensive weapons to weaken their rivals. China focused on the first route, building a social credit system that allows the government to minutely track the behavior of its citizens. Russia exploited the latter, using social media to intervene in democratic elections around the world. The latter interventions would not be possible were it not for existing distrust and polarization within democratic societies. Digital technologies have permitted the bypassing of hierarchies of all sorts, including those that played important functions like checking facts, verifying sources, and filtering out outlandish conspiracy theories. Many democracies now face a muddled cognitive landscape in which their citizens cannot agree on basic facts, much less agree on common solutions.

There are thus reasons for both pessimism and optimism in imagining the geopolitics of a post-Covid world. The pandemic will encourage authoritarian and nationalist impulses already plainly evident in many countries around the world, and will produce a prolonged economic downturn that will push millions of people in the developing world back into poverty. On the other hand, by helping to lay bare the inequalities that already exist around the world, the crisis may help to catalyze a broad grassroots movement that will push governments to reform. Our experience of global crises in the past should make us very wary of excessive certainty as to which of these outcomes will ultimately prevail.