Fareed's Global Briefing

October 14, 2020

The Pandemic: Not So Historic, in the Long Run?

While Covid-19 has disrupted nearly every part of life, political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. argues at Foreign Policy that it may not alter world history so drastically.

Plagues shifted the courses of ancient Athens and Middle-Ages Europe, but Nye points out that the 1918 flu pandemic left few lasting marks, and he disputes the “myth” that pandemics are always transformative. The 1918 flu “killed an estimated 50 million people (including 600,000 Americans)—more than twice the number of fatalities caused by World War I,” Nye writes—”but most historians attribute the important geopolitical changes of the ensuing decades—such as the rise of communism and fascism—to the war and its aftermath, rather than the pandemic.”

Nye largely argues against certainty that Covid-19 will prompt 180-degree turns. Covid-19 won’t necessarily “spell the end of the era of globalization that followed World War II,” Nye argues: globalized interdependence rests, in many ways, on modern travel and communications, which won’t disappear even if countries pull back from global trade. Nor will it necessarily mark the “end of liberal democracy” and the rise of authoritarianism, or give China immutable soft-power supremacy over the US, Nye argues—despite the short-term hit America’s reputation may take, after its Covid-19 failures.

If the world changes radically, Nye theorizes, those disruptions are “unlikely to be caused by the COVID-19 pandemic any more than the disasters of the 1930s were caused by the Great Influenza. In geopolitics, some big causes—no matter how unpleasant—may not always produce big effects.”

The Case for a Latin American Rise

Latin America is faring poorly amid Covid-19, and its economic forecast is grim, but Americas Quarterly Editor in chief Brian Winter argues that predictions of a “lost decade” are overly dire. Having witnessed Argentina’s economic crisis in the early 2000s and a decade of unexpected regional prosperity after it, and having seen euphoria over Brazil in 2010 prove misplaced, Winter argues that big predictions about Latin America’s future are often completely wrong.

Despite pandemic-related doubts, Winter identifies five trends that could help the region. Post-secondary education rates are soaring; the “percentage of young people in Latin America who were enrolled in higher … education more than doubled from 1991 to 2010, and now includes more than 40% of that age group,” Winter writes. Mobile-technology growth could let the region “‘leapfrog’ stages of development in areas like fintech and mobile banking.” Low global interest rates could prod investors to seek higher-reward investments in Latin America’s emerging markets. The region’s democratic institutions have proven resilient, as Chile will hold a constitutional referendum after last year’s massive protests, and as Brazil’s legislature has guarded against executive overreach. A shift toward corporate responsibility and environmental sustainability tops off Winter’s case.

Does China Run the World?

In the current issue of The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum uses America’s pending withdrawal from the World Health Organization as an example of a trend others have noted: a US pullback, under President Trump, from international institutions and especially the UN—where China has gained leadership of various bodies and has promoted language about “sovereignty,” for instance. The US has lost its ability to lead liberal-democratic coalitions and to shame human-rights violators, Applebaum argues—and it may have a hard time restoring its traditional role in the future.

“Post-Trump, whether in 2021 or 2025, some will argue for a return to the status quo—for the U.S. to rejoin the Human Rights Council and the WHO; to sign on once again to the Paris Agreement; and to recommit to the old language of universal rights, transparency, and accountability,” Applebaum writes. “But the next administration may well discover that some of the UN’s institutions, created for another era, cannot be saved. Authoritarian influence is too strong now, bureaucratic stasis too powerful. Besides, once burned, our foreign friends will be twice shy. Even if a President Joe Biden chants the old mantras, everyone now knows that his successors might not. Maybe someday President Mike Pompeo, or President Tom Cotton, or President Tucker Carlson will flip everything up in the air again. Knowing this is still possible, our allies will be wary of committing to any cause that we back.”

First, a Vaccine; Then, ‘Chaos’

The American public is unprepared for the “chaos” (as one expert puts it) that will ensue if a vaccine candidate proves successful, Carl Zimmer writes for The New York Times. Given the sample sizes of phase-three trials, any successful vaccines will leave us guessing within wide margins as to their efficacy, Zimmer writes. (And there’s a good chance efficacy will be low enough that people should still wear masks, Zimmer warns.) Meanwhile, participants in trials of other vaccines could drop out, once the first successful vaccine becomes available, in order to be inoculated—which would complicate and delay the advancement of other, potentially more effective vaccines.

Zimmer depicts a 2021 in which multiple vaccines are on the market, but because trials have been run by individual companies, we lack direct comparisons between them. Risks and side-effects will be slow to emerge, while random events and illnesses will raise fears that the vaccine is to blame, Zimmer writes, predicting uncertainty could reign. All of which suggests the first vaccine won’t end the pandemic as cleanly as some may hope.

Is the Southern US Changing, Politically?

At CNN, Ronald Brownstein takes a detailed look at two typically Republican US regions—the Southwest and Southeast—ahead of next month’s elections, finding each to be tilting more toward Democrats than before, thanks to demographic changes and President Trump. While Virginia remains the prime example of a formerly red state that has since turned blue, Brownstein finds a similar trend in Colorado and more muted versions of it in Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and even (thanks to this year’s Senate race) South Carolina.

Rises in Black and Hispanic populations have boosted the already prominent role of minority voters in some of those states, but other important trends include college-educated White voters and residents of increasingly diverse suburbs rejecting Trump, while “well-educated voters of all races” in some suburban areas “recoil from” Trump’s “belligerent racial nationalism.” Democrats’ growing popularity in formerly red suburban Phoenix is instructive, Brownstein writes. Texas remains a big prize and potential mirage for Democrats, and while they may not be close to capturing it, suburban trends there are informative: “The giant metro areas of the Southwest -- from Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio to Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver -- appear poised to repudiate Trump next month in numbers that will reconfigure the region's political landscape,” Brownstein writes. “[I]f Republicans can't reverse their losses in these explosively growing Southwestern metros, the balance of political power in not just the region, but also the nation, could increasingly tilt away from them through the decade to come.”