At time of writing, the key members of the Western security alliance are still dealing with the consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic. The virus has touched almost every country and has brought death and misery to many, and unemployment, perhaps for a long time, to many more. Governments across the world, literally from Helsinki to Wellington, are facing significant financial challenges as their national economies go into a period of hibernation if not a coma.
This virus is ravenous in its contagiousness, and preys especially where urban density and mobility is greatest, hence why Italy (via Milan), the UK (via London), and the US (via New York City), have been so hard hit, with casualties best compared to those incurred in a war. Analogising these major nations with much smaller polities, of a comically toy-town size, are unserious and best dismissed. While Australians – inhabiting as we do an enormous island continent of our own at the bottom of the world – are blessed, for once, by our geography and remoteness, the sheer density of Sydney and Melbourne pose public health problems comparable to those of London and Milan, and require aggressive mitigation strategies to “stop the spread”. In due course, the best public health response to deter a recurrence may be to cease urban centralisation, and instead encourage suburban and rural living with attendant fast rail and other transportation.
In the case of all Western polities, the issue has become, or will soon become, one of whether the infections curves have been flattened by a societal and economic lockdown (“the Hammer”) so as to subsequently enable a staggered relaxation of social isolation and distancing if and where possible (“the Dance”). Policymakers that must weigh the competing demands of public health and a ruined economy have an unenviable job of determining when to stop the Hammer and begin the Dance.
However, while we are too early for conclusions – and many of these matters are nice questions for health experts to ponder over – we who live in the member-states of the Western security alliance, generally, are not too early for some lessons of the Coronavirus from the point of geopolitics and our shared security interests, especially as regards the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party that runs China’s affairs.
Firstly, no one should underestimate the damage that the virus has done to China. At the very least, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have died from the virus, with many others infected and (imperfectly) recovered. The death toll in China will never be properly known by us (perhaps, even, by Beijing) but the suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of their both repressive and lying state is something everyone should mourn. We have no idea, moreover, of the suffering of the Uighur Muslims, interned and living in cramped cantonments.
Secondly, the Chinese regime lied and obfuscated about the virus’ origins in Wuhan and, to this date, has never been open and transparent about where and how precisely the virus emerged and was transmitted from animal to human. All of the onus lies on China to explain – to the degree that Beijing refuses to explain, inevitably, other explanations will be proposed, especially in view of the presence in Wuhan of Chinese government laboratories, including those of a dubious provenance. The US media’s detailed reporting on the Wuhan laboratories – via off-the-record briefings and ‘leaks’ and ‘drops’ of information from officials in the US Government – are a not so subtle message from Washington to Beijing that the US is well aware of what happened in Wuhan and, likely, the Chinese regime’s other experiments with esoteric wildlife and viruses. All one can say at this stage is, “Watch This Space”, while also noting that whatever statistics are produced by Beijing are almost certainly lies or without any basis in reality.
As I have done in the past with respect to Russia, I also counsel, now, with respect to China, which is the best course is to take the advice of the great British military historian, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. This was Hart’s sage advice for the nuclear age to his readers, who included the future US President, John F. Kennedy:
"Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes - so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil - nothing is so self-blinding."
This wise advice should guide anyone trying to craft a policy towards China, especially in circumstances where Beijing is facing new challenges at home. President Xi, who so recently became “President for life” now also owns all of this virus disaster. It is one thing to assert paramount authority over a great power in whose ascendancy you have played a key role - quite another to maintain authority in a repressive regime which has been unable to deal with a pandemic of its own creation. One of the major problems with Sinology, historically, but especially since 1949, has been a tendency to see the (Leninist communist) Chinese leadership as practising sophisticated, wisened, 20-dimensional, Sun Tzu, strategy, when, in fact, the PRC's leadership is committed only to its own survival. If that means, for President Xi and his successors/competitors, allowing an entirely false narrative on a deadly virus to go out to the world, or for Uighur Muslims to be brutalised in cantonment camps, or this group to be repressed or that person to be silenced, then so be it. No one in Beijing looks at the dissolution of the Soviet Union and with it the former communist party, as anything other than as a fate to be avoided.
The Coronavirus has caused the most significant damage to popular confidence in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its regime since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres, if not the 1971 Lin Biao coup attempt, albeit in both those cases, the CCP could, at least for propaganda purposes, posit political enemies as challenging the regime. In the case of the 2019-2020 virus, the challenge posed to the Chinese regime is entirely of Beijing’s own creation, being a challenge to a legitimacy bestowed, in the absence of free elections, by success – what in the Cold War was termed, 'performance legitimacy'. An incompetent communist Chinese regime that cannot deliver for its own people has neither the confidence of a ballot box nor the assurance of PLA bullets. In every sense of the Chinese curse, we do “live in interesting times”.
But all that is for the future. Similarly, so, too, is what effects the virus will have on the “Dragon Bear” project, which is a geopolitical short-hand for the Chinese-Russian accommodation, best reflected by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes not just Russia and China but, also, Iran, as well as India (which the US has long had ambitions of winning over as an ally) and NATO member Turkey as a ‘dialogue partner’. China’s capacity to maintain this gravitational pull of unusual trading and foreign policy partners – as well as a coterie of tributaries and supplicants in the form of the One Belt One Road and String Of Pearls allies – is probably the biggest of these future questions. A China that can deploy coercive power around its periphery - from the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Hormuz - is a China that must still be reckoned with, virus or no virus.
At the same time, the virus - and its repercussions in terms of trade and China's earning of foreign exchange - pose a direct threat to China's capacity to deploy power. China, like any nation state, needs, first, to be able to feed and power itself – and it must do so in a world in which commodities are traded in the United States Dollar. China has insufficient energy and agricultural resources to provide for itself, let alone any sort of autarky that could survive a war. So how China, in the medium to longer term, will be able to feed and power itself via foreign acquisitions, in the manner to which it had become accustomed, as the United States under President Donald Trump charges tariffs on Chinese-made goods – and American businesses shift supply chains away from China including to Taiwan(!) – is not at all clear. Moreover, a China that cannot feed and power itself, on top of a devastating virus, is a China whose power is diminished and whose regime will be tested and questioned.
For now, as always, the challenge posed to Western statecraft is how, though, now and into the immediate future, the challenge of Russians, Chinese, and Iranians, forming a geopolitical “Dragon Bear” bloc that dominates the Eurasian heartland and rimland, is to be confronted.
It is important to note that the West’s security position is based, as the Anglophone nations have always based their power, on overwhelming seapower and then airpower, to control the 'global commons' that are the world’s oceans and skies. While I doubt, as a military proposition, that there is any straightforward means by which the West could posture military forces to engage in a 'Triple Containment' of Russia, China, and Iran, especially as these are significant land powers, there is a need for a defensive ‘ring of steel’, especially at sea, in the air, and in cyberspace, to defend the Western position and to safeguard trade and commercial routes.
One would add to this, now, a requirement for the Western security alliance to rethink its supply chains and, especially, any dependence on an adversarial China for critical materials. Hopefully that lesson, which has been long looming to be taught to a recalcitrant West, has now been learned.
In this respect, if there is one deserved – and fully welcomed – casualty of the Coronavirus, it is the death of the 'Davos Man'.
It was the 1990s generation – best described as Davos Man – that proposed and propagandised for a post-Cold War world that, on their case, was an ever-more globalised and liberal place of ever freer trade in goods and services, free movements of peoples, and, usually, mindless military interventions in the affairs of states from Baghdad to Belgrade, because this ‘liberalism by blitzkrieg’ was what being ‘on the right side of history’ required to be done. In some respects you had to live through the 1990s (as I did as a university student) to believe that some of this ahistorical nonsense was peddled – and peddled it was by an ascendant Boomer generation who, by the 1990s, had replaced the generation that had fought in and been shaped by the Second World War. According to Davos Man, we were all going to be rugged individuals, market participants, free traders, multi-lateralists, indeed, “globalists” and “citizens of the world”. That all of us – rich or poor, of whatever race or creed – were and are citizens of post-Westphalian nation-states, was neither here nor there.
Indeed, bringing a realistic mind to bear on these matters was, for the past 20 years, an unwelcomed perspective. Anyone raising obvious problems for the globalisation consensus – especially where based on geopolitics, culture, history, and the sheer unlikelihood of consensus being achieved on basic questions of how vastly different societies are ordered – were seen as antiquated, pessimistic, perhaps even various types of ‘phobic’. To borrow from one of the truly appalling books of that age, you buying your own Lexus mattered more than your stewarding your grandfather’s olive tree.
Ironically, nowhere was this delusional, “third way”, liberalism more dominant than in what were nominally social democratic, workers’ parties, such as the Democrats under Bill Clinton and British Labour under Tony Blair, where a veritable ‘new class’ of middle class intellectuals wrested control of political parties from legacy trade union control. One saw basically the same world view carried on into the era of Barack Obama and the liberal “Remainer” David Cameron. Where it was once essential for leadership, apart from war experience, to have worked in the mines, on the wharves, or on the shop, factory, or foundry floor, all that you needed now was an Oxbridge or Ivy League education and the capacity to speak in focus-grouped clichés that would cause a management consultant to be embarrassed.
As it turned out, History had not ended and we were not the change we were waiting for, sadly. Davos Man, rest in peace, who has now died - and died unmourned.
Among the more farcical beliefs held by Davos Man, that also needs to die and be interred with him, was that the People’s Republic of China wanted to become another member of the 'international community'.
Ever since the 1990s, so the theory went, China would, when granted normal trade status and allowed into the World Trade Organisation, and gifted its place in the free trading ‘liberal international order’, be happy with just being another market participant and not a great power, because an expanding number of McDonald’s restaurants will always overcome any Middle Kingdom temptations. That the Chinese regime had no incentive not to exploit a supine and delusional West – many of whose politicians and public servants the Chinese would buy/hire in retirement – was obvious. The United States, in particular, went on to lose via ‘outsourcing’ much of its manufacturing capacity to China and, while mired in Davos Man’s futile wars in the Middle East and its periphery, China engaged in rampant theft of highly valuable intellectual property.
Where the Second World War generation had fought for their nations, and had a very realistic grasp of what the nation-state should and should not do – and what contingencies governments should be prepared for – the Davos Man generation believed we could always ‘leverage’ relationships that could be ‘risk managed’ to produce ‘synergies’ across the ‘liberal international order’. In other words, cometh the world crisis, so cometh would the supply chain. This was a market-based solution in which everyone would win. The Chinese, especially, would see the rational self-interest of supplying the West in its time of need. To which I say, as I so often do, “Whither?”
The sheer unpreparedness of Western nation-states for what actually happened in this pandemic has brought into stark relief just how unwise it was for so much production of basic medical supplies to be based in an adversarial China. It is also a reflection of the sheer lack of understanding by Western Governments – and their Davosite governing classes – that war or like crises, such as a pandemic, require the nation-state to have domestic capacities, even if residual, to design and produce as many of the 'sinews of war' as it possibly can, in this pandemic’s case, medicines, medical technology (such as ventilators), and personal protective equipment (PPE) (masks, gloves, gowns, googles, glasses, visors etc). The sight of many Western governments raiding literal cupboards, begging for supply, and only now improvising manufacturing, is a sight that must never be seen again. What is a national government for – what legitimacy does it ultimately have? – if it cannot provision for and protect its citizens in a crisis?
To his credit, the US President Donald Trump utilised his authority to decree manufacture by industry of these “sinews of war”, including under the Korean War-era Defense Production Act 1950 (USA). The stories of private industry being able to supply, en masse, the materials needed to meet the pandemic crisis have been reassuring that, when push comes to shove, and sufficient pressure is applied (in Trump’s case, in his own ursine way), the national effort can be mustered in quantity and with speed. The spirit of Henry Kaiser lives on.
While Trump will no doubt be assailed (regardless), national governments across Western nations have a panoply of laws and authorities to require industry to cooperate to produce materials. In practice, this crisis simply saw national governments eventually – one suspects too late in some respects – start to engage a vast defence production infrastructure that had been put in place to win two World Wars and the Cold War. The question is what comes next here? My suspicion is most Western allies will now broaden the understanding of the national security edifice – had there ever been any prior doubt – to formally include notionally private businesses and industries, particularly those of relevance to a nation’s struggle in war and against disaster, including pandemics.
For much of the past two decades, discussion has been often held in national security circles of 'Critical Infrastructure' (which is related to the military idea of your supply ‘lines of communication’). Usually this Critical Infrastructure has been taken to mean energy, water, food and the communications nodes, satellites, airports, ports, railways we rely on to communicate and supply goods and services. However, now, the definition of what is critical will expand, in the manner of a veritable Kaisierian Germany, to ensure that a critical producer of war and public health ‘materiel’ is now, more or less, a government sponsored enterprise in the de facto manner of, now, the commercial banks (and these businesses should be specially regulated as with any business ‘too critical to fail’). While some, especially the libertarians, will scream “moral hazard”, there is no greater moral hazard for the nation-state than to be vulnerable if not defenceless, when confronted by war, pandemic, or economic crisis. If we live for the foreseeable future in some form of 'War Socialism', then our Krupps, also, are too critical to fail. In this respect, the idea that any national government prior to 2020 would ever have allowed corporations critical to the supply of military platforms, sensors, weapons, ammunition, and the like, to collapse, was far-fetched – but now it is simply absurd. Indeed, there would be no more perverse outcome for our current crisis than that a virus that originated in China would cause such economic trauma in the West that governments would ever allow their own military-industrial complex – composed of complex supply chains and knowledge networks – to falter.
Indeed, a ‘Beijing bringing down Boeing’ result of 2020, would be a disaster and a senseless victory for the PRC. Similarly, so would the UK persisting in its bizarre desire to include China’s Huawei anywhere in Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the lesson for strategists of this era, where the pressures of the Dragon Bear threat and now Pandemic forces deep thinking about what really matters, is to look forward while looking back. A good model for the West to consider is the defence of the British Empire and its capacity to, in various colonial and two World Wars - and to act as a combined yet singular alliance and to engage an entire global supply chain and population in a prolonged military struggle.
The British Empire’s capacity to endure and prevail in two world wars – when deserted by mutinous French or revolutionary Russian allies in the first war, and when standing alone against the Nazis in the second war – merits close reading by anyone serious about understanding how a global alliance kept going under the stress of war. Similarly, the capacity of different parts of the British Empire to supply trained personnel and critical war materials according to their specialised capacities is noteable, as is the priority placed on control of the sea and air, so as to, like Pericles prudent and patient strategy for Athens in the Peloponnesian War, ensure supply for its war machine and impose a ‘ring of steel’ blockade on its enemies to force their exhaustion. Geography, finances, natural resources, water, and foodstuffs, military power, healthy populations, universities and industries – these national building-blocks all matter. Indeed, they always mattered – and it was foolish to ever pretend otherwise.
While analogies are imprecise, the lessons are clear. The obvious entity to replicate this planning and direction would be NATO – which links North America with Europe – but the ambitions of a European Union to play a bigger security role has frustrated those seeking more from NATO than another Brussels bureaucracy. Perhaps the virus may, also, kill off the European Union’s federalising instincts, which have been tested and catastrophically failed if you are Italian and/or Spanish? Do you really want to trust your friendship to the tender mercies of Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt? Or do you find more family amid the traditional post-war Western alliance? A virus that has damaged the EU but reminded Westerners of the relevance of NATO – and of the broader Western security structures that provide our sinews of war – may be the harsh ‘teachable moment’ that a generation which pretended it could ignore geography and history really needed.
Finally, the lesson of our age is for governments, especially conservative governments, to be prepared to wield the power of the state to protect the body politic, and 'conserve' its people's very existence, and listen to their inner von Bismarck - and ignore any heckles from a von Hayek. Moreover, to borrow from Bismarck's dictum about the worth of the Balkans, the narrowing of budget deficits in the coronavirus era is not worth the bones of anyone, especially our own 'grenadiers in scrubs' - the paramedics, nurses, doctors, teachers, caring staffs, custodians and cleaners - who are bearing the burden of this struggle. Nor is it worth impoverishing the millions of workers, now made unemployed or furloughed without pay, who have been made the innocent casualties of the virus' collapsing of national economies. If political conservatism since the advent of Toryism has been about anything, it has been about the "us" and the "we": preserving the realm, at any cost, and protecting those owed its protection, without heed to liberal pietes and Whiggish econometricism. Moreover, if governments that, over a decade ago, bailed out banks and financiers, especially, that should, in a just world, have been put to work on chain gangs, there should be no objection, if needs be, to the raising of taxes and charges to pay for a temporary provision of adequate incomes and allowances for those made vulnerable by this crisis, for as long as the economy takes to recover. This is not just the morally right thing to do - it is also the realpolitik thing to do, as monies provided to now unemployed workers will help to directly stimulate both national and local economies. Indeed, with global interest rates at record lows, there has never been a better time for Western governments to borrow and build much needed defence, energy, and transportation infrastructure. In simple terms, now is not the time for socialist cloth caps or liberal top hats but for a Bismarckian or Rupprechtian pickelhaube to be donned.
In any case, the world has changed, now, forever, and the virus and its stark geopolitical revelations have brought into stark relief what many previously will claim to have been fuzzy. As Julius Caesar wrote, wisely, “What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.” History never ended but, instead, has simply reminded us of constant threats (pandemics) and enduring challenges (Dragon Bear). To be forewarned as we have now been is to be forearmed. To be forewarned is also to have no excuse for any future crisis - especially when when a pandemic has already forced you to see the world as it truly is. As the Chinese General, Ho Yen-hsi, a commentator on Sun Tzu, said over a millenia ago: "To rely on rustics and not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues."
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