The Passive-Aggressive Superpower

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

The leadership of the World Health Organization is awfully eager to please the junta in Beijing. Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) writes in National Review:

In December, the WHO refused to act on or publicize Taiwan’s warning that the new respiratory infection emerging in China could pass from human to human. In mid January, despite accumulating evidence of patients contracting what we now know as COVID-19 from other people, the organization repeated the [Chinese Communist Party’s] lie that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. In January the WHO, at Beijing’s behest, also blocked Taiwan from participating in critical meetings to coordinate responses to the coronavirus and even reportedly provided wrong information about the virus’s spread in Taiwan. These actions are unacceptable and should not be allowed to continue.

National Review editor Rich Lowry writes:

Without China’s deceit and WHO’s solicitude for Beijing, the outbreak might have been more limited, and the world at the very least would have had more time to react. China committed unforgivable sins of commission, affirmatively lying about the outbreak and punishing doctors and disappearing journalists who told the truth, whereas the WHO committed sins of omission — it lacked independence and courage at a moment of great consequence.

All true. What to do?

The Trump administration is calling for cuts to U.S. support for WHO. This is typical not only of the Trump administration but of the U.S. temperament in general when it comes to multinational organizations — and it is especially true when our policies are informed by the populist sensibility. And it is not going to produce the results we want.

The populist Right has long been contemptuous of the United Nations and its affiliates — and not without good reason. (The populist Left is less a bit less hostile, focusing its anti-globalist energies on an enemy it holds in common with the populist Right: multilateral trade accords, trade organizations, and affiliated agencies.) The UN is generally ineffectual and frequently corrupt. Some of its agencies are nakedly left-wing political projects designed to oppose the United States and its allies (e.g., UNRWA), others are centers of boutique radicalism (UNICEF), abortion mania (Commission on the Status of Women), etc. Conservatives cheered when John Bolton declared that we could take the top ten stories off the UN building in Manhattan without its making any difference to the world.

But instead of pursuing a program of genuine robust reform, we have pursued a program of passive aggression — heavy on the passive.

When it comes to the United Nations or the World Trade Organization, there are basically three possible avenues of progress.

We could simply declare these organizations beyond redemption, pull out, and go it alone. Conservatives have long dreamed of abandoning the UN. President Trump has spoken often of his desire to pull the United States out of the WTO. The calculation there is that the United Nations needs the United States more than the United States needs the United Nations, and that the same goes for the WTO — and that without the United States, these organizations would become incoherent and, eventually, inactive. The United States, this argument goes, would be in a better position to pursue its own interests unilaterally. Those are some pretty big assumptions; but, in any case, the United States has never shown any convincing willingness to pursue reform through exit.

We could work to reform these organizations. That would mean engagement with a level of energy, intelligence, and capacity for sustained long-term action that our federal government has not shown in some time. That would also mean weathering the populist passions on both sides of the aisle in the pursuit of an agenda that is the one thing our so-called nationalists cannot abide: authentically national, meaning a consensus program defined by genuine broad national interests and not by our desire to hand out favors to special political constituencies (e.g., zombie firms such as General Motors) or to use the international stage to act out dramas rooted in domestic tribal rivalries.

We could abandon these organizations and attempt to replace them with new ones, preferably in alliances of liberal-democratic countries with a shared commitment to basic principles including procedural democracy, freedom of speech, property rights, the rule of law, minority rights, etc. One immediate challenge would be forging an American consensus on freedom of speech, property rights, trade, etc., which has at least partly unraveled. This, too, would demand of us a level of activity and commitment that the U.S. government may not be able to muster.

Or we could go with none of the above.

Instead of one of those options, we bitch and moan and complain, we make toothless threats, and we sometimes dickey around with tariffs, as though that were going to bring Beijing to heel. That’s a joke: The Trump administration, whose trade warriors present themselves as the tough guys when it comes to China, got bought off, and cheap, with some easily broken promises about increasing U.S. exports to China in the future.

Getting real reform out of Beijing would take something else entirely. It would be nice to have, say, a leading voice in an Asia-Pacific economic bloc that includes every major economic power in the region except China, one that was designed specifically to counteract the outsized influence Beijing has in the area — which is exactly what the Trans-Pacific Partnership was supposed to be. That instrument was scuttled by so-called nationalists who couldn’t figure out which end of that shotgun to point at the target.

If we really want to see change in China — and don’t want to go to war in pursuit of “regime change” — then we have to be willing to use the tools that will actually get that job done, which isn’t a national sales tax on imported flip-flops. And it isn’t the United States threatening to leave the WTO: It is the United States, Canada, Mexico, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia threatening to expel China from the WTO and impose economic sanctions on the Beijing government, and doing so with a united diplomatic front. “Globalism” is precisely the instrument with which to bring Beijing to heel. Unilateralist tough-guy talk (and we’ve been hearing that since Bill Clinton in the 1990s — remember the “Butchers of Beijing”?) has got us nowhere and will get us nowhere.

Complaining is not going to get it done. Neither is cutting our contribution to this or that international agency — do you really think that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus et al. are going to start flying coach if we short them a few hundred million, or do you think that money will come out of actual operations? We already know the answer to that.

If you want to be treated like a superpower, then act like a superpower.