Pandemic Posturing.

• Author: Gvosdev, Nikolas

When it became clear that the "Grand Alliance" that defeated the Axis powers during the Second World War would not endure into a postwar "Pax Americana," American strategists and policymakers were forced to confront the realities--and potential costs--of engaging in an adversarial geopolitical and ideological contest with the Soviet Union. They soon came to understand that defeat would imperil not only the security of the United States but the very "American way of life." To forge effective strategies to contain the USSR, it would be necessary to contemplate risks and possible losses. With the introduction of nuclear weapons into the mix, it was understood that any clash with the Soviets could be quite destructive in terms of American lives and property. Yet America's Cold War strategic thinkers did not simply throw up their hands and declare the task to be insoluble. Instead, they came up with the framework for the cost-benefit analysis of superpower competition. From the "concept of tolerable loss" developed by General Robert Richardson to the writings of Herman Kahn, Cold War strategists understood the importance of finding ways of preventing unpleasant outcomes from becoming catastrophic ones. Lampooned by musicians such as Tom Lehrer or spoofed in such films as Dr. Strangelove, this way of thinking about the unthinkable helped to guide U.S. administrations to successfully navigate out of the Cold War with the United States as the sole remaining superpower.

After the collapse of the USSR, American strategists embraced the hope that the application of democratic peace theorems, aided and abetted by globalization, would obviate international rivalries in the twenty-first century by incentivizing rising and resurgent powers to accept their positions within a U.S.-led and managed international system. But countries like China or Russia want to revise that system in directions that the United States does not wish to proceed. While we are nowhere near the conditions of the twentieth-century Cold War, the assessment of the 2018 National Security Strategy--that the world has returned to conditions of "great power competition"--is valid. Yet, while "great power competition" is the new flavor of the month in the U.S. national security community, where are the twenty-first-century versions of Herman Kahn, coldly calculating what and how much America must be prepared to risk to retain its position in the world? For Americans, great power competition remains, for the most part, a bloodless bumper sticker where the United States expects to compete and prevail against its competitors without paying much of a price. The problem, however, is that other great and middle power rivals--China, Russia, Iran, and others--have come to play--and have been prepared not only to pay but also to inflict costs on Washington.

At the start of 2020, China's inability to contain a lethal coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan inflicted the COVID-19 pandemic on the world. And while the virus is not a "weapon of mass destruction" on the scale found in Cold War arsenals, the deaths attributed to the virus in the United States are equivalent to the casualties that would have resulted from the detonation of a small nuclear device in an American city. Whether we like it or not, the coronavirus pandemic is now part and parcel of great power competition, a reality, again, recognized by our competitors. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov complained, "The attempts of some states to use the current situation in order to promote mercenary, momentary interests are evident, to settle scores with undesirable governments or geopolitical rivals."

The virus has already inflicted its damage on the United States. The challenge for American strategists is how to prevent the pandemic from further weakening the United States and strengthening its rivals. However, there seems to be a curious disconnect on the part of American strategic thinkers, between discussing how great power competition plays out in economic statecraft (the Belt and Road Initiative, the race to build a 5G network) or in gray-zone competition (in cyberspace, for instance) and the unwillingness to address how the damage caused by...