Coronavirus Signals the Death Knell of the West

The slow and complacent reaction of the West to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic signals its foreseeable decline on the world stage, as well as the confirmation of the Asian 21st Century. With infection rates and deaths mounting daily, the prevalence of coronavirus across the West is quickly out-stripping those of the East Asian countries at the pandemic’s epicentre. At the time of writing [May 18 2020] the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy all have more cases, and more deaths, than in China. Notwithstanding that their country was the first to become infected, with several weeks passing before doctors realised that it was anything more than a common illness, cases in China have seemingly peaked and flatlined at around 84,000 infections with total deaths amounting to around 4,600. Elsewhere in the region, infections and deaths now stand at around 11,000 and close to 250 respectively in both South Korea and Japan.

Contrasting Responses

Once the situation was realised, the successful isolation of the outbreak in these countries has rested upon the rapid and overwhelming deployment of their centralised state capabilities. Learning from past epidemics such as SARS in 2002-03 and MERS in 2015, these measures have included the quarantining of entire provinces, cities, neighbourhoods and individual blocks, the shutting down of all critical infrastructure and transport links, as well as closing most education and government facilities. Citizens have been faced with extensive restrictions on their freedom of movement, along with the prospect of fines and imprisonment for ignoring government edicts. Such draconian and authoritarian minded actions have broadly mitigated the virus’ wider impact.

In contrast, western states have adopted a more sclerotic and wait-and-see approach. Rather than learning from the experience of those countries where the outbreak originated, leaders have not been proactive but responsive. At times downplaying the genuine significance of the threat, then backtracking on various approaches and often implementing actions on an ad hoc basis, this often languid attitude has combined with having limited domestic medical capacities. With broader public healthcare systems being underfunded, at least in the US and UK, and some governmental bodies steadily hollowed out by a decade of austerity, the ability to effectively test, confine and treat those infected has been inadequate. Rather than fighting the pandemic, these weaknesses have enabled the virus to spread faster, with no clear peaks as in East Asia in sight.

COVID-19 as the Third Knockout Blow

For the West, the impact and aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak is the latest in a succession of events that have critically undermined its wider global legitimacy and reputation. Indeed, in the last two decades, the central pillars of their countries’ national power and strength have all been compromised. The first of these three blows came after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These foreign forays initiated by the US and the UK, resulted in a long quagmire of occupation, instability and widespread deaths, undercutting the acceptability of using overwhelming military force in international affairs. The use of rendition, torture and black sites further questioned the West’s moral validity and their ethical stance in geopolitics, while the political aims of these military campaigns appeared to be nebulous at best.

The 2008 credit crisis then served to challenge the core rationales of the largely western-build international financial system, irrevocably weakening the economic pillar of western power. It also called into question the suitability of associated global governance structures, and eventually resulted in the building of new alternative economic organizations such as the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank by China. With these two events undermining the primary basis of much of traditional western power in military, economic and to a degree institutional terms, the current coronavirus crisis now questions the domestic and leadership capabilities of the West. By highlighting deep-seated internal weaknesses, the ability of western states to serve their most basic function, the protection of the well-being and security of their citizens has been brought into sharp focus, and when juxtaposed with the actions of East Asia countries, points to failure.

Foreseeable Decline

While the coronavirus will result in a deep global recession, as the rate of infections and deaths intensify the reputational gains made by East Asia and China in particular will rise. With peer recognition being a key element in countries becoming great powers, as Beijing’s legitimacy increases, that of western countries will inevitably decline. Already China is deploying its success against the pandemic as a soft power tool, for instance supplying ventilators, masks and medics to Italy and France, among others. In this way it is positioning itself as a global leader, supplanting western leaders in its wake, and building an authority to which others will turn at times of future crisis. As China re-starts its economy, allowing it to recover its material strength quicker, the GDP (in nominal terms) of the world’s first (the US), fourth (Germany), sixth (UK), seventh (France) and eighth (Italy) ranked economics are all looking set to take seismic long-term hits. These falls will badly hamper their domestic and international capacities, relegating their overall global stature.

In combination, these events, and the varying benefits and losses of the world’s leading powers within them, signals not only the foreseeable decline of the West on the international stage, but the accompanying confirmation of the Asian 21st Century. Displaying competent, proactive and stable leadership, and shielding their citizens from the worst of the crisis (the very raison d'être of national security), China and other East Asian states have succeeded where the world’s more developed countries have not. With China in particular and in more normal times, boasting the viability and fruitfulness of its authoritarian-capitalist development model, the West’s spearheading of global affairs in political and economic terms appears to be over. While it will take many many months for the pandemic to end, a new dawn in global affairs has already begun.