The Problem with Elephants that Dance Badly

If you look at geopolitics through the lens of Covid-19, one thing should be very clear. Neither the world’s big economies have distinguished themselves. Both China and the US have behaved in such a way that leaves much to be desired.

China is the obvious bogyman. The virus started here. While China has gained applause for locking down Wuhan, one cannot accept everything from China’s government at face value.  The Chinese government did try to cover it up. The doctor who tried to warn the world died and there have been enough reports floating around the net to suggests that all is not as well as the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) would have you believe. China’s sudden generosity should remind one of sayings like – “Beware the naked man offering you his shirt.” There has to be a catch somewhere.

If China is untrustworthy, the US is arrogant and stupid. The nicest thing that one can say about the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic is that it has given comedians material for the next decade. Comedy aside, watching the pandemic unfold in the US is tragic. The nation that gave us human progress has now become a bad zombie apocalypse movie in denial.

Unfortunately, the rest of us seem rather beholden to the elephants of the global economic system. America in particular is listened to because it underpins most of the global security architecture that supports our entire global system. While I have said that America is the world’s most benevolent superpower in history, the problem is that American foreign policy has always rested on the principle of “Us versus them.” During the Cold War, this was easy. The USSR was strong enough to be a challenge and the system of Communism was obviously “bad.” With the fall of the USSR, the US had a tough time trying to find a polar opposite. It tried with Saddam Hussain but even then, nobody thought Saddam was a serious threat to the rest of the world. When America goes into “With US or Against US” mode, the rest of the world gets stuck as it means losing potential business to keep Americans happy.

It seems that the rest of us are stuck between an untrustworthy and a stupid elephant. It sounds like a case of choose one and the other squashes you. Navigating between them becomes something of a thankless art form. There is, however, a third way – namely for smaller countries to find ways of cooperating.

In this respect, the Europeans got it right. After the second World War, the Europeans realized that the two world wars started between competition between France and Germany. The trick was to tie French and German interest so closely together that they’d realise there was more to gain together than to go to war.

The European Union is by no means perfect. Covid-19 has shown how little unity there is behind the talk of a United Europe as countries shit themselves down. There is also more bureaucracy than one might consider healthy. At times it seems that the great beneficiaries of the European project are the armies of bureaucrats in Brussels.   

Having said that, the EU has succeeded brilliantly in its original aim, which was to ensure peace through prosperity. Nobody from the Baby Boomers onwards imagines that its possible for war to break out on the European continent. The generation before never imagined peace would last in Europe.

While the individual economies of the Europe are smaller than the two elephants, the EU as a collective with a single customs union is bigger than either China or the US.

Where the EU fall short is on the issue of defense. As of the time of writing, the Europeans have not been able to create a unified military structure in the same way it has created an economic structure. There was a tacit admission from Angela Merkel that Europe had been too dependent on American military support after Donald Trump scolded European leaders for not spending enough money of defense. A more aggressive Russia and an unreliable America should give the Europeans an incentive to change this.

The rest of the world should take note of the EU as a project. There have been mistakes made. There is, for example, a sense that Europe is a fortress against the rest of the world. However, the idea of small nations getting together, pooling resources and trading with each other, is healthy. Poland, for example, has prospered by being in the EU. It trades with America and China but it is not dependent on either because it has trade with its neighbours.

There is a downside to regional groupings. In many cases it becomes replacing dependence on the global elephant with a regional one. Europe is lucky because the regional power is Germany, which has been relatively benign and stayed dug into the European project. There are less benign examples.

The answer may be to form unions that are close enough to encourage trade with neighbours but at the same time allowing individual member enough space to be their own nation.

Encouraging greater cooperation is not going to be easy but as Covid 19 has shown, depending on elephants for your needs is not an option, especially when the elephants in question have obvious flaws. Elephants are still necessary but smaller players need to know how to band together in order to secure their own destinies.