Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
As world powers struggle to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, countries across the Middle East are mulling over this pandemic's impact on the regional power balance and foreign policy.
Countries don’t need to be “friends” to get meaningful things done. But U.S.-China strategic competition is giving way to a kind of “managed enmity” that is disrupting the world and forestalling the prospect of transnational responses to transnational threats.
Nationalist and protectionist impulses have hampered the exchanges of knowledge and goods that foster economic growth. Similar failures of global coordination are now exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic.
It is possible that the virus might stimulate greater levels of Sino-U.S. cooperation in some respects, in particular regarding preparations for future pandemics and other transnational security threats
China’s drastic measures helped contain the coronavirus outbreak, which continues to spread rapidly across the United States. Beijing has seized the moment to expand its global leadership and advertise its governance model.
Despite their strategic rivalry, the United States and China have a history of coordinating in past public health and economic crises. Now that they are tipping into enmity, it may take other countries to nudge them back toward collaboration and joint action.
With well over 870,000 confirmed infections and 40,000 deaths worldwide, COVID-19, the disease caused by the fast-spreading new coronavirus, has caused global havoc.
In any crisis, even in the midst of a pandemic, there is a moment where everybody might benefit from taking a deep breath and thinking clearly about the way forward.
Techno-nationalism is resurgent in the world today, and it comes at a time of more intense strategic friction between the United States and China, compared to the U.S.-Japan trade battles and technology competition from three decades ago.
The United States and China worked together to combat the SARS and H5N1 outbreaks, but the new coronavirus has been met with finger-pointing and recrimination.