How COVID-19 Has Upended American and Global Politics.
The global outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 has completely changed every calculation and outcome of both national and international politics (to say nothing of every other facet of life). All pending primaries in the United States Presidential election have been postponed, as New York became the latest state to announce that it was moving its election date back from its original spot in April to late June.
The remaining candidates have been forced to cancel all rallies, only communicating with their voters either in television interviews or over various forms of online media, such as “virtual town halls.” These have been an imperfect substitute to holding in-person rallies, and in some cases, such as with Joe Biden’s attempt to hold virtual town halls, were plagued by technical issues.
New York Governor Mario Cuomo, giving daily briefings on television to articulate New York state’s responsive measures to the virus, has emerged as perhaps the alternative face (to Donald Trump) of the crisis response, with many Democrats favorably comparing his performance to the President’s. Whispers of the unthinkable slowly began to emerge- what if Cuomo, who had considered a 2020 Presidential bid before ultimately declining to join the field, could become an out of nowhere contender for the nomination.
With the prospect of having a nearly eighty-year old nominee in Joe Biden raising some questions, speculation has grown that Cuomo could somehow replace Biden at the Democratic convention (if it is even held, another unprecedented possibility caused by COVID-19). Although many in the media have have dismissed this idea of out of hand, the fact that this is even being discussed is a sign of where things have gotten to. If this scenario were to somehow play out, it would be the first time that a nominee to be chosen at the convention with zero primary wins since John W. Davis in 1924.
If politics is the art of the possible, then the palette of what could happen in 2020 has been drastically expanded. As mentioned before, both parties may very likely have to come up with a solution for their respective conventions, currently scheduled for July and August. Optimists hope that the virus’ spread will have been contained by then, pointing to examples of countries that have done well in figthing the virus such as South Korea or, eventually, China.
However, as the pandemic’s global epicenter shifts from Italy to the United States, it becomes harder to hold on to any kind of optimistic viewpoint about how long it will take to “flatten the curve,” to use a frequently bandied about term for what needs to be done to limit the spread of the virus. And as instantly absurd as the idea of “virtual conventions” for the Democratic and Republican conventions might seem at face value, something like that might very well be the only option for even holding these conventions at all.
The United States is far from the only country to have its political landscape impacted by the COVID-19 virus in unexpected and unprecedented ways. In Israel, the virus upended a political landscape that had been characterized as deadlock between Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and rival Benny Gantz’s Blue and White bloc. The two men had contested three elections for the Knesset (Parliament) in less than a year, but even after the third such election held in early March 2020, neither had enough coalition partners to form a government.
Under different circumstances, it is hard to fathom just how long that deadlock might have continued. However, the situation made it so that holding another election under these circumstances was totally intolerable, and it raised the possibility of the incumbent Prime Minister, Netanyahu, essentially being able to rule by decree despite not having the votes in the Knesset to back his government (and with the Knesset unable to meet in person due to Israel’s imposed quarantine).
With no path to government formation himself, Gantz agreed to form a unity government with Netanyahu, seeing that as a better alternative than to Israel having a government with no legitimacy during the country’s greatest crisis since, arguably, the Yom Kippur war of 1973. This end to Israel’s political deadlock may well be temporary, and this new unity government may not outlast the duration of the crisis.
However, it has prompted concerns in a country which has long prided itself on being “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as critics accuse Netanyahu of stamping out civil liberties and garnering unprecedented new powers under cover of the crisis. It is possible that Gantz, unable to come up with any scenario where he could form his own government, felt that his only choice in this situation was to put himself in a position where he could at least have some influence on Netanyahu’s actions from inside a unity government. Time will tell if this was a wise decision for his party or the country as a whole.
Concern over civil liberties has been a recurring theme in a number of countries since the pandemic began, although it has been relatively muted in the face of the undeniable need to take extraordinary measures to stop the spread of the virus. One of the measures taken by Israel has been the enlisting of Shin Bet, its domestic security agency, to use the surveillance measures it had previously reserved only for suspected terrorists to track the spread of the virus.
Such measures can be justifiably argued to be necessary for public safety even in democratic countries, but the question will be: what happens when the pandemic is over? Will the measures be rescinded when the crisis has passed, or will they be kept in place afterwards?
The example set by the post-9/11 United States is not particularly inspiring- even though the Obama administration consciously sought to advance the idea that the “War on Terror” was not a permanent state of affairs and that the administration would indeed wind down from said “war,” the results were mixed. The closure of Guantanamo Bay’s detention centers never came to fruition, and laws such as the Patriot Act remain on the books even today.
In the United States, other political issues and tensions (besides the obvious) have been brought to the fore. As deeply as the pre-existing polarization was in the country, the virus has arguably exacerbated it. Predictably, Republicans and Democrats are starkly divided on their approval of the government’s response to the virus, although the initial divides on levels of concern has now abated, and both sides see the virus as a serious threat.
Whatever consensus may exist across political lines on the seriousness of the threat posed by the virus, it is no thanks to the initial response by the Trump administration. The administration and the President himself repeatedly played down the severity of the virus epidemic early on, repeatedly comparing it to a regular flu season. Trump’s base of supporters was also encouraged to underestimate the danger by many at Fox News, with some exceptions such as Tucker Carlson, who appealed to Trump himself to take the pandemic seriously.
However reluctantly, the Trump administration has adjusted its position to more aggressively encourage members against the virus. The administration issued national guidelines for people to exercise “social distancing” measures, although Trump seemed rather eager to want to end it in a fashion that other experts called premature. His initial desire was for “social distancing” to end by Easter, saying that he hoped churches would be “packed.”
Ultimately, it appears that Trump did back off on his vision of packed Easter church scenes. With seeming reluctance, the administration announced today that it would extend its “social distancing” guidelines through April 30. Despite this, however, Trump and his team are pulling out all the stops in order to use the pandemic to ensure his reelection in November.
Prior to the crisis, the strategy for Trump’s reelection seemed to be to run on the (on paper) strong economy and by tarring any Democrat that emerged from the primary as a “socialist.” But the pandemic has completely changed that calculation. Trump’s team has replaced that positioning with a new strategy, this one selling Trump to the public as a “wartime President,” in the hopes that that will produce enough of a “rally around the flag effect” to put him over the top against (presumably still) Joe Biden in the November election.
Although he and his administration’s “war footing” posture has been appropriately criticized by the media, Trump is used to this by now. Despite his initial downplaying of the pandemic and other missteps, his approval ratings have risen slightly in the past few weeks. It further helps him that the lack of primaries and singular focus on the pandemic response have made it comparatively difficult for Joe Biden to get media attention, with his profile seemingly even eclipsed by the likes of Andrew Cuomo and other governors at the front and center of the coronavirus response. They question will be how long this state of affairs can persist.
The administration’s assumption of a “war footing” has not been solely limited to its domestic posture against responses to the virus. It has been just as aggressive in staking out a position against China, which it has blamed for the spread of the virus worldwide, exacerbating the trend over the past few years of the two countries entering a “new Cold War.”
Trump and the administration have insisted on referring to COVID-19 as “the Wuhan virus” or “the China virus.” This posturing recently caused a host of issues at the latest meeting of the G7, of which China is a member. Other members of the Republican Party have been just as aggressive, with Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton introducing an official resolution to hold China responsible for the virus’ spread. Cotton has also echoed conspiracy theories that the virus originated as a Chinese biological weapon.
China, for its part, has not taken this aggressive stance by the Trump administration lying down. Controversy was provoked by Lijan Zhao, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, when he made tweets that suggested that the United States, specifically the United States military’s weapons lab at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, was the true origin of the coronavirus.
Did Zhao actually believe this hostile narrative he was advancing on Twitter? Or was he simply responding in kind to the allegations advanced against China by senior American politicians like Tom Cotton? The competing spectacles conjure a surreal, postmodern version of the old Cold War’s MAD (mutually assured destruction), only instead of each side building new missile sites, they were sending tweets.
In any case, Zhao’s making such accusations was highly uncharacteristic of China’s media approach in the past. In contrast to Russian and Iranian media outlets, which had more frequently indulged in hostile, conspiratorial narratives aimed at the U.S., English-language media put out by China, such as CGTN, have typically taken a more dry, neutral tone towards the U.S, even as confrontations between the countries began to mount in recent years thanks to Trump’s trade war.
In response to the threat that the COVID-19 pandemic posed to the country, China’s President Xi Jinping declared the fight against the virus to be nothing less than a “people’s war.” Xi has often been accused of being a crypto-Maoist, and this was red meat to those who are of this opinon. “People’s war” is a term straight from the late Chairman’s own lexicon, meant to describe a method of staging communist revolution by which the rebellious countryside surrounds a hostile city and then absorbs it (the Communists’ victory in the Chinese civil war more or less followed this approach).
Up until the final years of his time in power, when he made the famous diplomatic summit with Richard Nixon, Mao’s reign was characterized by anti-Western hostility. Subsequent Chinese leaders shied away from this rhetoric even as they paid lip service to Mao in other ways. Even as the trade war with the U.S. escalated under Trump, the official line out of Beijing stressed the need to return to a friendlier state of relations if possible. But no longer.
With the pandemic seemingly under control within its own borders, China has begun what can only be categorized as a charm offensive in Europe, sending doctors, medical supplies, and face masks to several countries. The countries of the E.U. have been split over this, with some wary and suspicious of ulterior motives.
Others have accepted this aid with open arms- Serbian President Alexander Vucic declared that “European solidarity is a myth” and that only China could help his Balkan nation. The Italian government of Giuseppe Conte has also been willing to accept help from China, Russia and even Cuba in its dire straits.
China has long sought to position itself as an economic competitor to the United States. The Belt and Road Initiative has been the main underpinning of its bid to re-orient the world economy in a direction more favorable to it. But the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted China, through its “mask diplomacy,” might be its most significant offensive against the United States in the political arena yet.
Even as Iran suffers under the COVID-19 epidemic, the Trump administration already pushed to impose new sanctions on the country. The country’s leadership will not suffer due to this, it will be only be to the detriment of the average Iranian. It is a sad irony that an administration that is cynically hoping to get its own people to rally around it in hard times no doubt thinks that imposing additonal sanctions will cause the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their “regime.”
Some, including this author, had previously posited a hope that the COVID-19 pandemic could provide an impetus for a new era of international cooperation. That may yet prove to be somewhat true in limited arenas, such as eastern and northeastern Asia. But on the global scale, this has not been the case, rather the opposite has been true, with devastating consequences.
The U.S. and China have been on a collision course for years, dating back to the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” if not before. Things have escalated since the Trump administration imposed its trade war against China as soon as Trump entered into office, and despite repeated attempts at coming to an agreement, the trade disputes persisted into this year.
Now, the disputes over COVID-19 have brought relations to a point where they may be beyond repair. It was long assumed by many that the increasing trade and economic cooperation between the two countries would erode away any cause for political or even military competition. If the two countries had not been in a new Cold War before, they certainly are now. And if the shared need to stem a pandemic could not cause them to see common ground, then perhaps nothing will for the time being.
