LONDON - Some forecast the dark cloud of the coronavirus pandemic would hold a silver lining — it would bring the world closer together.
Back in April, the World Economic Forum ran an article headlined: “A pandemic of solidarity?” And noted that as the virus continued to spread, “it’s bringing out the best in people across the globe,” adding that in Europe “people are singing to one another to keep spirits up.”
They were then, but the singing has now stopped.
Far from drawing the world closer together, it appears, if anything, to be having the opposite effect, all too often eroding the solidarity between allies and intensifying the enmity of foes. The world seems to be spinning apart, with the virus acting like a vast centrifugal force, warn analysts.
“We have seen nations across the globe turn inward and focus on containing the spread of COVID-19, taking unilateral steps to protect themselves with minimal global cooperation,” Denisa Delic of the charity Save the Children recently complained.
The world was out of sorts with itself even before the coronavirus. Established political orders were being challenged in ways not seen since the end of the so-called gilded age in the late 19th century or the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression.
Writing in his pre-coronavirus book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra argued that many people felt powerless, had lost faith in traditional political authorities to protect them or confidence in their ability to restore predictability. Resentment was rising at the increasingly unequal distributions of wealth and power. The economic shock, and reverberating aftershocks, of the 2008 financial crash were of even greater magnitude than experienced in the late ninetieth century, he noted, with “dangers more diffuse and less predictable.”
And that was before the deadly virus emerged, which is testing governments and countries like never before in modern peacetime history and adding new layers of unpredictability.
The public health crisis has morphed into a multi-headed hydra of interlinked crises. Polarization has only deepened. Tens of millions have already lost their jobs and many more tens of millions are likely to lose their theirs. Governments of all types and persuasions are borrowing massively or burrowing deep into their reserves. International organizations have been wanting with mounting criticism of the World Health Organization.
“Only 12 years ago, the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s shook the global economy,” said Martin Wolf, chief commentator of Britain’s . “Affected by how that was handled, the subsequent economic malaise and the perception that capitalism was rigged against them, the public in a number of high-income countries became angry.”
Wolf added in a recent commentary said that “mustering a concerted and effective global response is nigh on impossible” and he fears that the pandemic will leave in its wake even more polarized politics and “dreadful international relations.”
Trust is increasingly in short supply. China has seized the moment to try to gain political and economic advantage over rivals, say Western leaders, agitating in the South China Sea, clashing with India, punishing countries that backed a call for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus and Beijing’s handling of the initial outbreak and cracking down on dissent in Hong Kong.
Along with Russia and Iran, Beijing stands accused by Western intelligence chiefs of launching aggressive state-backed cyber attacks aimed at stealing data from Western universities and pharmaceutical companies. And, according to U.S. intelligence officials, Russia and China are likely to seek to try to meddle in the upcoming U.S. elections.
“Foreign efforts to interfere in American elections is something we constantly must contend with, and we’ll contend with that here,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Washington’s newspaper last week. He added America’s diplomats are working “to make sure our adversaries understand the cost imposed” if they try to interfere.
Christo Grozev, lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, the investigative journalism website, warned recently that Russia’s troll factory in St. Petersburg, which sought to influence the outcome of the last U.S. election, has been honing its skills. The thousand or so trolls it employs have been instructed not only to plant disinformation but also to amplify on social media sites any fringe opinions in America, of either left or right.
