Disaster Politics
“In fear of death one commits suicide,” an unenthusiastic wag is supposed to have said of the Saltsjöbaden agreement between workers and employers organisations in Sweden in 1938. Though greeted with suspicion by many on the left at the time, Saltsjöbaden proved to be a defining moment on the path to the Scandinavian welfare state. At times of national and international crisis – and the 1930s were certainly that – cooperation and compromise are rarely a bad idea.
By withholding US funds for the WHO this week, Donald Trump, in fear not of death but of what he does not understand, has initiated an act of collective suicide the like of which is mindboggling to comprehend. It is the very opposite of the spirit of negotiation and concession that will be necessary if different countries, all very differently positioned with respect to this common foe, are to overcome the combined viral, economic, social and moral challenge posed by Covid-19.
But Trump’s nation-centric failings are to some extent also our own. We have all become accustomed to reducing the challenges of Covid-19 to the matter of steepening national infection and case fatality rates; of national health systems overwhelmed. While frightening enough – since even the post-ascent glide of those few nations to have passed the peak heralds no clear answers as of yet – these domestic snapshots hide the true scale of the problem. Globally, the confirmed death toll is already rising by around 10,000 per day. Its impact upon nations like Nigeria, which has just 169 ventilators nationally, and where 20 of its 36 states possess none at all; or on the Central African Republic, which has just 3 ventilators in total, has barely begun to register.
These are some of the reasons why Bill Gates, the second largest contributor of funds to the WHO, tweeted in response that Trump’s move was “as dangerous as it sounds.” It is why the head of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat, observed Trump’s decision to have been “deeply regrettable”. They both understand what Trump does not: that it will only be through a global sharing of resources – masks, Protective Personal Equipment, expertise, reliable data, knowledge, experience, even hope – that the aftershocks of Covid-19 will be overcome. For this pandemic is only just getting going.
Yet there is a politics here that Trump understands all too well. Trump may be belligerent, reckless and morally confined, but he is no fool. Nor are his advisors. By attacking the WHO Trump seeks political theatre: like Vedius Pollio feeding his slaves to the eels. He is rhetorically connecting the organisation’s sluggish response to the initial outbreak in China with his own favourite conspiracy-theory: China as the root cause of all that ails America. At the same time, he positions himself as boldly bringing home the nation’s fiscal outlays, just as he sought last year to bring home the nation’s troops from Afghanistan. What we see as a shameful denial of vital funds at a time of global crisis, Trump will spin to his followers as decisiveness and national political responsibility.
Naomi Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” to describe how capitalist enterprises move in to take advantage of war-torn settings (think of Peter Singer’s description of the private security contractors who struck it rich in Iraq after 2003 as the “coalition of the billing”); well, this is disaster politics: in which Trump’s rogue political artillery moves in to capitalise on the social and economic disaster of a global lockdown.
And it too will prove destructive on at least two fronts.
First, for America, one can begin to see how Trump’s corralling of the narrative around Covid-19 – and forget the paucity of his actual response – is positioning him in just the right ways to secure re-election in November.
Just prior to Covid-19, I was chatting to a former editor of mine in New York. We were both convinced that Trump was done for in November, whoever won the Democratic nomination. In the weeks since, while New York has been silenced by a public health catastrophe equivalent to several hundred Hurricane Sandys, Trump has focused almost exclusively on the “narrative” – up to and including his freezing of US contributions to the WHO and his press conference yesterday, in which he defended recent tweets mobilising his political base: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA”, “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”. Perversely, the more that the US national response fails under his command, the easier it is for Trump to say “I told you so”. New York will see through this. But New York isn’t voting for Trump anyway.
Second, the US needs to be a central element in any global response: the world will not succeed without it. This is not just because of America’s international influence. It is because of its accumulation of scientific expertise (Anthony Fauci at the CDC may be new to coronavirus, but he carries with him the hard won lessons of earlier pandemic responses, including HIV) and perhaps above all, because of its unique leverage over the pharmaceutical sector.
The 400 million dollars that Trump has withdrawn from the WHO are thus merely the tip of an iceberg that his act of “international vandalism” breaks off from where it was needed: at the disposition of global need. Trump’s abdication of the United States’ global health leadership role further denies a yet more vital machinery of response from the rest of the world. But perhaps above all the impact of his move will be felt in the nail it hammers into the coffin of a multilateral world order rapidly disaggregating into regional and national interests at the very moment it is needed more than ever.
Either we find a way to overcome this, or we will all end up swimming with the eels.