A catastrophe like covid-19 cries out for interpretation. Has it revealed anything about the structure of international politics today? Two new books attempt an ambitiously early answer to this question
Two new books attempt an ambitiously early answer to this question. Colin Kahl, now an under-secretary of defence at the Pentagon, and Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, draw on a detailed chronicle of the pandemic in “Aftershocks”. Mr Maçães, a former Europe secretary in the Portuguese government, gives a more philosophical tour of the horizon in “Geopolitics for the End Time”. Both books seek insights into the future in the events of the past 18 months.
Meanwhile the pandemic opened up new opportunities for competition. The supply chains that undergird the global circulation of goods became a point of contention, as Americans and Europeans quickly discovered how dependent they were on exports from China, including those of ventilators and other vital medical kit. Mr Maçães observes that China saw the pandemic as a national-security threat, rather than simply as a public-health emergency, and acted accordingly.
For their part, Mr Kahl and Mr Wright detect a vicious circle in which “great-power rivalry made the pandemic both more likely and harder to contain”. Henceforth, they think, America must be prepared to confront transnational threats without expecting to collaborate with China and Russia. Both books note, as others have, that technology will increasingly be a key measure of power. Mr Kahl and Mr Wright dwell on the dark temptations of new technologies for authoritarian leaders.
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