To Remain Apart or to Unite Against COVID-19?
International politics do not stop in the face of a pandemic.
While the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc around the world, it seems that realpolitik continues even when global cooperation is needed to combat the virus. The U.S. Commerce Department, following TSMC’s $12bn plan to build a new chip plant in Arizona, had signed new orders on May 18 that specifically targets Huawei Technologies and preventing them from purchasing or creating chips using U.S. software and manufacturing technologies, further limiting the Chinese company’s access to crucial chip supplies. This feud between the government and Huawei is part of a larger U.S.-China trade war that, for years, have largely described Trump’s overall foreign policy on trade that are even used against traditional allies in the European Union and East Asia. Previously, as COVID-19 began to spread to many countries worldwide, U.S. President Trump pushed to label the disease as the “Wuhan Virus” that led to the G7 being unable to form a joint statement in March. While realist politics such as the previous cases are the status quo of international relations, the current pandemic have threatened not only the domestic conditions of each country but the relationship between them as well, and–in light of how widespread and damaging the virus has been as of May–health professionals have called for international efforts to successfully contain the virus.
The U.S. is not the only actor currently remain engaged in such practices. China, as the first to have reportedly contained the initial outbreak of the virus, began supplying other countries with medical aid in a display of soft-power, while broadly painting the effort as humanitarian in nature. Observers have pointed out Chinese propaganda that attempted to shift the possible origin of the virus to outside of China, especially in Italy where an outbreak led to a continent-wide health crisis that shifted the centre of the pandemic from China to Europe. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia accused Singapore of withholding the identities of supposed Indonesian nationals tested positive for the virus, despite the latter’s revelation further instigating the low public confidence in the former’s health care system. It can be observed that publications in both nations continue to lob criticism against one another, mostly owing to the differences in response by the two countries. Meanwhile, in a controversial move, Malaysia rounded up and detained undocumented immigrants that include Rohingya refugees as part of attempts to contain the coronavirus, which Human Rights Watch Asia director Phil Robertson said to have “promoted a policy of xenophobia that transfers the anger of the Malaysian public on to foreigners.” The same xenophobic attitudes also appear in China, where reports have sprung up of African students being racially harassed and rejected by the local population.
Not only do realist politics apply to relations between states, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are also subjected to the same pressure. The WHO has been criticized for preventing many countries from fully realizing the threat of the virus due to its escalating warnings, in addition to further accusations of having favoured China due to publicly praising the nation’s efforts in mitigating the epidemic. U.S. President Donald Trump, as the first to bring these charges to light, have recently threatened to pull funding for the WHO and to revoke U.S. membership in the UN body if it “does not commit to major substantive changes” within a month, after previously having moved to withhold payments for 60 days to the organization in April. Though the specifics of the demand remain unclear, the U.S. has been WHO’s largest single source of funding, the loss of which will undoubtedly cripple WHO’s capacity in dealing with current and future global health risks. While global health governance is a separate topic, this change is significant as the WHO has been responsible for monitoring and assessing nearly 180 health events each week in 2018 alone, and have been the primary actor in mitigating the recent MERS-CoV and Ebola pandemics in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
All this happens while treatment options for the disease remains elusive at best, and efforts on possible vaccines have not yet yielded substantial results. Maintaining realist attitudes in international relations risk exacerbating the severity of the pandemic as well as potentially slowing down any recovery efforts in the future. There is a way, however, to strengthen international cooperation in tending to a global crisis, by providing a more diverse information stream. Often, misinformation happens due to many sources reporting on the same event under a different lens, through which malicious actors could use to inject false information. Moreover, state actors generally formulate their foreign policies based on how well it is perceived domestically, as is the case with President Trump’s accusations towards the WHO which have garnered some popularity among Americans. So far, media attention on COVID-19 mitigation efforts are focused on a per-country basis with little exposure given to the likes of the European Union, ASEAN, and the African Union, which–while such styles of reporting are more relatable to the general public–hides the various cooperative efforts that have been made so far and conceals the fact that the coronavirus is a global phenomenon. Even if that’s not the case, the crisis has arguably furthered the argument that multilateral organizations can be made beneficial to all member states by virtue of pooling resources into one shared basket. Furthermore, by shifting the burden of handling the pandemic in one country to a body consisting of several others, the impacts of any crisis that ensues can be minimized, recovery efforts can be accelerated and reduces the likelihood that any future issues can threaten as much as COVID-19.
