H. Kissinger pointed out in his recent WSJ article “The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people”.
I couldn’t agree more. And the fact is, in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis there are several possible scenarios, most of them leaving us with a grimmer reality that the one our generation is accustomed to.
Call me blunt, but I can arguably see liberal democracies, government legitimacy, globalization, international trade, free markets and the productive world order that we know facing an existencial crisis.
We are seeing opportunistic rivals already in action. China has started to take advantage of the situation by bribing up countries and playing hero to serve its own political interests. One of China’s foreign officials has publicly blamed the US army for the planting of the virus.
Socialist groups are taking advantage of economical collapse by assuring capitalism is to blame for…well, basically everything. Drug cartels are trying to smuggle drugs and gain new “plazas” in the midst of chaos. The US has sent combat ships to the caribbean and Venezuelan coasts to patrol drug smuggling attempts and in the process potentially take down the Maduro regime. I could go on and on…. Whether self interested, nationalistic or fear-induced actions have a real benefit or not is less important than the fact that the coronavirus posts a systemic threat to the current(like it or not) world economic system.
To arrive at the best possible scenario, nations need to maturely evaluate situations, avoid costly emotional reactions, deter the urge of finding foes to blame, contain opportunistic ambitions as much as possible, and be patient to plan and act using long sighted vision during these difficult times.
Failure to do this, I write with sadness, could really put the world in a very undesirable state.