Coronavirus
Malcolm Chalmers, of the Royal United Services Institute, counsels that the pandemic is so changing the “foreign policy baseline” that it would be absurd to forge a multi-year policy without taking those changes into account. “This is not a minor moment in international security. It’s comparable to 9/11 as a shock to the international system, in some ways bigger, but it’s going to have some very big impact on our thinking. It will generate a new debate about whether we are giving enough priority to homeland security,” he notes, which could even include new consideration of the diversity of our supply chains and a greater need for national self-reliance. Charles Parton, a former British diplomat, now at Rusi, a British think tank, called China’s efforts “a deep propaganda campaign” intended “to obscure the fact it caused the virus in the first place”.
