The Multilateral System Still Cannot Get Its Act Together on COVID-19
In the absence of U.S. leadership, multilateral
responses to COVID-19 have been inadequate to date.
Blog Post by Stewart M. Patrick
March 26, 2020
In the three months
since China first reported a novel coronavirus to the World Health Organization
(WHO), international cooperation has been missing
in action and global solidarity has been AWOL. Rather than
cooperate to defeat a shared threat, nations have repeatedly taken unilateral
steps to shield themselves and engaged in counterproductive
sniping over who is to blame for the pandemic. This week was
supposed to offer a reprieve, with the Group of Seven (G7), Group of
Twenty (G20), and the United Nations announcing important international
initiatives. Instead, it underscored just how divided and unprepared the world
remains as it confronts the greatest threat to global public health since the
Great Influenza of 1918. The biggest disappointment has been U.S. President
Donald J. Trump, who has been more preoccupied with countering Chinese
propaganda than exercising global leadership.
A Fractured G7
There were a few
glimmers of hope, notably on international economic coordination among G7
nations. On Tuesday the finance ministers and central bank governors of the
world’s most important advanced democracies issued a joint statement pledging
to “do whatever is necessary to restore confidence and economic growth, and to
protect jobs, businesses, and the resiliency of the financial system.” They
promised to use all the fiscal and monetary tools at their disposal to ensure
liquidity and maintain aggregate global demand, while implementing the public
health measures to stop transmission of the coronavirus, and to support the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as they grappled with “the human
cost and the economic challenges posed by COVID-19.” The unified
statement reassured financial
markets and suggested that the Trump administration, which had upended recent
G7 summits and been slow to
invoke the forum in the current crisis, might finally be warming to the group.
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Unfortunately,
Washington undercut that solidarity very next day, when G7 foreign ministers
convened via
videoconference to discuss broader political and security dimensions
of the pandemic. Efforts to release a joint communique collapsed when
the United States, following President Trump’s lead, insisted that the document
refer to the “Wuhan virus” and blame China for its global spread. America’s G7
partners categorically rejected the U.S. demand as a needless affront to
Beijing and a colossal distraction from the international response, resulting
in each nation issuing its own communique. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
justified the U.S. stance, noting the
“intentional disinformation campaign that China has been and continues to be
engaged in,” but he offered no explanation for why U.S. Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin had signed onto a statement the previous day that referred only
to “COVID-19” and “the coronavirus.”
A G20 Summit Short on
Action
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Address
On Thursday it was the
G20’s turn, in a videoconference summit of heads of state and government
organized by Saudi Arabia, the group’s 2020 chair. Until this week, the G20 had
been conspicuously silent on the emergency, mystifying
observers who argued that President Trump should have exercised
U.S. global clout and convened the group weeks ago, when the pandemic was still
in its infancy. Had he done so, the G20 could have reprised the firefighting
role it played in the depths of the global financial crisis.
In November 2008,
then-President George W. Bush had invited the leaders of the world’s most
important established and emerging economies to Washington. Under his
successor, Barack Obama, the G20 asserted itself as the world’s premier forum
for global economic coordination, taking coordinated, decisive action to save the
world from a second Great Depression. With a pandemic raging
and the global economy once again teetering on the brink, it was high time to
call in the G20 fire brigade.
Media commentators
framed Thursday’s virtual summit as a test for
both U.S. global leadership and international solidarity. If so, the United
States and its G20 partners managed a barely passing grade. Their joint
statement was broad and vague. G20 members pledged to
do “whatever it takes” to minimize the social and economic fallout from the
pandemic, and they offered reassuring language about the need for multilateral
cooperation in confronting an “unprecedented” pandemic.
The assembled
governments proclaimed their desire to bolster the mandate and capabilities of
the WHO, assess gaps in global pandemic preparedness and response, accelerate
research and development on vaccines and the production of essential medical
equipment, and to “strengthen global safety nets.” Beyond these generalities,
the document was devoid of specific commitments. The leaders did not address
the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) request that G20 nations double its
resources to $2 trillion, nor did they agree to allow poor nations reeling from
the pandemic to suspend repayment of their debt obligations, a step the World
Bank and the IMF had both urged. At
least the forum did not get bogged down in debates over what to call the
pandemic, which it called the “COVID-19 crisis.” Still, Sino-American frictions
were evident, as Chinese President Xi Jinping used his allotted speaking
time to call out U.S. trade protectionism as the major impediment to global
economic growth.
The UN Global
Humanitarian Response Plan
Given that the G20
collectively represents eighty percent of global GDP, its desultory response to
the pandemic will have negative implications for the rest of the UN
membership—the “G173," as it were. This is particularly true for
fragile and conflict-affected states that were in dire circumstances even
before the coronavirus appeared.
To address their
plight, on Wednesday morning UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a
$2 billion appeal to member states to support a coordinated Global Humanitarian Response Plan to
fight COVID-19. The scheme’s purpose is
to ensure that the world’s most vulnerable populations are not abandoned to
face the pandemic alone. The need is urgent. COVID-19 has already strained
advanced market economies like Italy and the United States, as well as emerging
ones like China and India.
The scale of human
suffering could be catastrophic as the disease takes hold in less developed
countries, particularly weak and war-torn nations where the majority of the
world’s poor now live—and where doctors, nurses, hospital beds, masks, and
ventilators are in much shorter supply. If New York City risks being
overwhelmed by the disease, what hope is there for Lagos, Nigeria, or Dhaka,
Bangladesh, to say nothing of the one million newly displaced living in camps
in northern Syria or the inhabitants of shattered Yemen, which has already
recorded more than two million cases of cholera?
The UN response plan,
to be run by the Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), is
aimed at 51
vulnerable countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The money will support the
relief operations of nine UN agencies and their nongovernmental organization
partners, as they seek to deliver essential testing kits and medical supplies,
craft public information campaigns to reduce infections, protect at-risk
refugees and internally displaced persons, and create “airbridges and hubs” to
get relief workers and supplies where they are needed, among other things.
COVID-19 has already disrupted the lives in the world’s rich countries, explain WHO
Director General Tedros Adnahom Ghebreyesus and UN Under-Secretary-General for
Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock. “It is now reaching places where people live
in warzones, cannot easily access clean water and soap, and have no hope of a
hospital bed if they fall critically ill.”
The plan’s weakness is
its modesty. Two billion dollars amounts to two dollars apiece for the roughly
one billion people living in fragile states, or, alternatively, twenty-five
dollars for each of the world’s 70 million-plus displaced persons. There is
also a danger that UN member states will simply shift their current
humanitarian outlays to meet the $2 billion UN target. To have any appreciable
impact, the UN response plan must leverage additional sources of foreign
assistance. Earlier this month, the World Bank pledged $12 billion
in concessional loans, grants, and technical assistance to developing countries
grappling with coronavirus. It is now time for wealthy donor nations including
the United States, which is poised to approve a $2.2 trillion domestic rescue
package, to step up their global game. Though its performance to date has failed
to match previous U.S. crisis stewardship, there is still time for it to lead
an effective response to this multi-pronged threat.
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