Opinion | Coronavirus must push the US and China to pause strategic competition in favour of a coordinated war on the epidemic

A US and China-led meeting, like the 2009 G20 summit in London at the height of the global financial crisis, could bolster the world economy, especially if coupled with concrete support to developing countries, such as an emergency lending mechanism

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US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka in June last year. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:30am, 3 Mar 2020Updated: 3:47am, 3 Mar 2020

It has been 50 years since the American polymath Buckminster Fuller wrote his masterpiece Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and 30 years since Nasa’s Voyager image of Earth from space, which inspired Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. As the coronavirus epidemic has swiftly spread across every continent but Antarctica, the metaphor of Earth as a pale blue dot floating in space becomes more captivating.

In 2017, the US’ national security strategy framed our epoch as ripe for great power competition between the United States and China. Since the opening shots of the trade war were fired, “decoupling” has become a buzzword.

Once seen as inevitable, globalisation is now under pressure from emotive nationalism. Where once the imperative of capital to seek higher returns was seen as the force binding the US and China into “Chimerica”, today’s talk of a new cold war, of national security trumping economics and of technological primacy as a national end in itself is commonplace.

To be sure, realist scholars from University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Steven Walt to Tsinghua University’s Yan Xuetong never really bought the optimism of liberals that welfare and international institutions had replaced warfare. For them China and the US were destined to securitise their relationship.

That would not necessarily mean armed conflict, as the prospect of mutually assured destruction resulting from the deployment of nuclear weapons ensures that neither country would have a path to victory. This condition holds as long as disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, a conventional prompt strike, lasers, drone swarms and cyberwarfare, do not destabilise strategic deterrence.

Yet, even if a great power war is not going to occur, a decoupling and a strategic race for new spheres of influence or conflict in the grey zone will only aggravate the already existential predicament of our planetary home.