{"id":61716,"date":"2021-01-08T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=61716"},"modified":"2021-01-08T09:47:41","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T22:47:41","slug":"editors-picks-for-2020-geopolitics-in-the-time-of-corona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/editors-picks-for-2020-geopolitics-in-the-time-of-corona\/","title":{"rendered":"Editors\u2019 picks for 2020: \u2018Geopolitics in the time of corona\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Originally published 1 April 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a world filled with think tanks, shrewd minds and an internet, interesting assessments of the geopolitical ramifications of Covid-19 appear almost daily. From Michel Duclos\u2019s observation<\/a> that the pandemic is \u2018a crisis revealing a new world\u2019, to Sven Biscop\u2019s judgement<\/a> that less will change, and less radically, than pundits now anticipate, to Allan Gyngell\u2019s insistence<\/a> that \u2018the world before coronavirus is not returning\u2019, analysts are clearly not of one mind.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s no surprise. On the traditional strategic agenda, pandemics and other health emergencies are generally listed in the same category as climate change and bushfires\u2014that is, they pose security threats rather than change strategic orders.<\/p>\n

The classic case usually involves a comparison of World War I with the Spanish flu<\/a> (1918\u20131919). The latter likely killed more people\u2014statistics vary widely\u2014but it\u2019s the former that history and international relations students study at school and university. Why? Because strategy and war are about politically motivated violence, not sickness and death. It was the war, and its subsequent settlement at Versailles\u2014not the flu\u2014that set in place the geopolitical order of the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\n

But perhaps pandemics are geopolitical chameleons, and their effects are masked by the environments in which they arise. That would mean the geopolitical consequences of the Spanish flu were comparatively minimal precisely because the outbreak occurred at a time when a major shaping event\u2014World War\u00a0I\u2014was drawing to a close, leaving largely status quo powers victorious. Similarly, perhaps the geopolitical consequences of more recent pandemics were diluted by unipolarity, or by the rigid bipolarity of the Cold War.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s true, we could reasonably expect Covid-19 to accelerate changes that were already unfolding in 2019. And that was a time when the world was becoming more strategically competitive, when US global leadership was weakening and the US itself was in relative strategic decline, and when multilateral institutions were\u2014metaphorically speaking\u2014struggling for breath.<\/p>\n

Even before Covid-19 came along, Western alliances were roiled by insularity and transactionalism. Even before it came along, China and Russia were both flexing their muscles in their grey-zone activities in the South China Sea and Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Those changes were already undoing Australia\u2019s vision of the ideal future, because they pulled against our long-term aspirations: for a world where great-power frictions are managed and contained, where US leadership and strategic clout remain purposeful and strong, and where multilateral institutions effectively dilute the importance of hierarchy in international relations.<\/p>\n

If Covid-19 is accelerating those changes\u2014magnifying their intensity and compressing the time taken for them to work through the system\u2014we will emerge from this pandemic to a sharper, more competitive world, where our main ally is less influential and where multilateral institutions are increasingly under the sway of other great powers that believe in hierarchy, and not in equality.<\/p>\n

Thus far, revisionist powers haven\u2019t attempted a more serious rebalancing of the international order by exploiting the pandemic\u2019s greater disruption of European and US economies and societies than of their own. Of course, we\u2019re still in the early days of what might prove an 18-month battering of the international order. It\u2019s possible that future opportunities\u2014to create a sudden fait accompli<\/em> in the Baltic states or Taiwan, for example\u2014may look more tempting.<\/p>\n

True, the degree of temptation depends on something we don\u2019t currently know: are China and Russia really more capable of managing this virus than we are? If they aren\u2019t, the opportunities will seem less enticing. But if they are, or perhaps more ominously if they believe they are, we have a problem.<\/p>\n

The simple solution, of course, would be to keep Western militaries relatively free of both infection and virus-related commitments, but that\u2019s probably not an option. If we can\u2019t do that, we need to accept that, for the next 18 months or so, Western conventional military forces are not going to be at their peak in their ability to deter international adventurism.<\/p>\n

That might mean the West needs to increase its reliance on nuclear deterrence during that window as a deliberate policy choice. Nuclear deterrence adds a strong dose of \u2018ugly stability<\/a>\u2019 to the upper rungs of the existing order. It doesn\u2019t stop change further down the international ladder, unfortunately, because the threats to use nuclear weapons are only really credible in relation to vital interests.<\/p>\n

And, by itself, nuclear deterrence can\u2019t prop up an anaemic international order.<\/p>\n

Further still down the ladder, countries that depend on the presence of UN peacekeeping forces will be looking at how willing UN member states are to maintain and rotate such forces during a global pandemic. The UN may find it harder than usual to persuade countries to sustain their peacekeeping commitments abroad when their militaries are suddenly burdened with new challenges at home. That\u2019s an issue that Australia confronts given the ADF deployments<\/a> in South Sudan and the Middle East.<\/p>\n

The issue is not just one for contributor nations. It\u2019s possible some nations hosting those missions will push back more vigorously against them, or use Covid-19 as a justification for deciding which countries\u2019 militaries to accept on their territory.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s so, we\u2019ll run into a set of problems centred on issues of state fragility, and there will likely be opportunities for revisionist powers to meddle down on those lower rungs of the ladder too.<\/p>\n

Where does that leave us? Putting it briefly, in the short to medium term, we\u2019re likely to be living in a world of greater strategic opportunism. That\u2019s a worry\u2014but a worry essentially about peripheral strategic interests. Over the longer term, Australia faces a larger concern: a strategically more challenging world. A world in which we probably need to power up, to lower our expectations that the US will be there to save us, to find partners where we can, and to reduce our reliance on \u2018rules\u2019. That\u2019s not entirely the fault of Covid-19. It was coming anyway\u2014go back and look at 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published 1 April 2020. In a world filled with think tanks, shrewd minds and an internet, interesting assessments of the geopolitical ramifications of Covid-19 appear almost daily. From Michel Duclos\u2019s observation that the pandemic …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":54741,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2658,772,983],"class_list":["post-61716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-coronavirus","tag-geopolitics","tag-pandemic"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEditors\u2019 picks for 2020: \u2018Geopolitics in the time of corona\u2019 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/editors-picks-for-2020-geopolitics-in-the-time-of-corona\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Editors\u2019 picks for 2020: \u2018Geopolitics in the time of corona\u2019 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Originally published 1 April 2020. 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