 Good afternoon and welcome to the IIEA on this Friday afternoon. It's a real pleasure to welcome an old friend, an old friend of the Institute, Tom Wright, to speak to us today from Washington. He's going to talk about issues from his latest book, The Geopolitics of the Pandemic, many different aspects and dimensions. I'm looking forward to it as a start to the weekend. I hope you are too and I hope that you'll ask plenty of questions. You can do that in the usual way by using the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. The event is all on the record and before handing over to Tom, let me just briefly introduce him. Thomas Wright is the director of the Center of the United States in Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He is also a contributing writer for the Atlantic and an on resident fellow at the Laouy Institution for International Policy. His most recent book, After Shocks, Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order was published in August. He is also author of all measures short of war, the contest for the 21st century and the future of American power. Tom is a doctor from Georgetown University, a master of philosophy from Cambridge University and a BA and an MA from UCD, from the city from which he comes originally. Tom, great to have you again. Over to you. Dan, thank you so much and it's a real pleasure to be back. And I remember you kindly, the Institute kindly hosted me for my book back in 2017 and that was in person. So the only thing I regret on this occasion is it can't be in person. But I look forward to that again as well, hopefully in the not too distant future and congratulations to you and to the Institute on just the extraordinary sort of work you've all done recently. And we were just talking beforehand about that great event you had last week as well with Secretary Yellen and Pascal Donahue. So it's just terrific to see how well things are going. I thought what I would do, Dan, maybe to kick things off a little bit is to talk about some of the major themes in the book. Before I do that, to say just a little bit about why we wrote the book, the book is sort of co-authored with Colin Call, who is a professor at Stanford, but now is that the back in the Pentagon is undersecretary of policy in the Biden administration. But we finished the book just before he went back in and we started it about in April or so of 2020. And I think it's just interesting to talk a little bit about the rationale for that because I think it gives an indicator as to what we were trying to accomplish in the book. But it became pretty obvious early on in the pandemic that this was a global event, a truly global crisis that affected all countries and people around the world in very, I mean, obviously in unequal ways, but in similar ways in the sense that people are concerned about getting the virus, about keeping their jobs, about what they would do with their kids, about elderly relatives, about the lockdowns. And so it was a truly global moment. But we saw a very little sort of international cooperation. And what Colin and I wanted to try to do was to document that story throughout the pandemic, to try to get beneath the surface to show what is sort of the foreign policy and geopolitics of the pandemic. Why is it that countries are finding it difficult to cooperate? Whereas in 2008, 2009, the world really came together through the G20 to deal with the international financial crisis. So we benefited a lot from extraordinary work that journalists did all around the world and other researchers and international institutions on providing sort of real-time data and information about how the crisis is affecting all parts of the world. But we try to supplement that with about 70, 75 interviews with senior government officials from major countries, the US, Japan, in Europe, Australia and the WHO and elsewhere to try to find out from them on background what they were seeing in real time. And we talked to them at different points in the pandemic. So we talked to them at the beginning in April, May of 2020, then over the summer, then again in the fall, then in the winter and the spring of 2021. And so we try to get a sense of how their sort of view was evolving throughout and what went as expected and what did not go as expected. And the major sort of theme of the book really is how overwhelming the geopolitical rivalries and nationalisms were to the international response. Because this was a period when it was possibly the worst moment to have a pandemic. If you look at where we were in 0809 with the financial crisis and you had reasonably responsible leaders in positions of power around the world, on this occasion we had higher ball scenario and Donald Trump and Xi Jinping and Modi and a big cast of characters that came from a more nationalistic, unilateralist perspective. And so we wanted to try to figure out what that meant. So I'll just talk a little bit about some of the major findings, I think that sort of struck us and then maybe a bit about what went better than expected and then where we might go from here and what some of the policy recommendations are. And I'll start with China and we start the China story really not in December of 19, but in 2002-2003 with the SARS epidemic, which China handled with a degree of sort of secrecy and repression and denial early on. The WHO actually took a strong stance against what China was doing at that moment. China sort of changed this position and became more cooperative with the international community. The SARS sort of petered out around the summer of 2003, although technically it continued on for a while longer elsewhere. But after SARS, lots of reforms were put in place in China to try to ensure that its response the next time will be more transparent, cooperative and effective. So they built up a Chinese CDC modeled on the US CDC Center for Disease Control and empowered it. And they put in place mechanisms to ensure the more rapid transit information from the provinces to central authorities. And they also began to cooperate more with the international community, particularly the WHO and senior Chinese health officials went on international mission threat 2010. So it looked like China had fundamentally changed and engagement had sort of worked in that global public health sphere. What was sort of striking when COVID it was that many of those reforms sort of melted away, right? So instead of being transparent, China was quite secretive. Instead of information being transmitted from central to central authorities in the provinces, authorities in Hubei province were actually very reluctant to do so. And then of course, there was very little cooperation with the international community. Now, some people put that down to sort of local versus central governmental tensions in China. But the fact of the matter is that when Xi Jinping took over the response in early January 2020, we saw a doubling down in that position. Repression of journalists, doctors, nurses who spoke out about the virus, refusal to share information, even the sequencing, the genetic sequencing of COVID was shared unilaterally by a Chinese scientist in defiance of a government order prohibiting such sharing. So throughout January, we really saw a lack of engagement with other embassies in Beijing. We talked to a lot of US and European officials and embassies that sort of documented that in real time. And then of course, the WHO throughout 2020. And so the really sort of interesting takeaway here is that it didn't necessarily need to be this way, right? We wouldn't have necessarily thought on the eve of COVID that China would have responded in this manner because reforms that have been put in place were meant to ensure a different outcome. After it has suppressed the virus relatively effectively, China became more assertive internationally and began to use its aid and later on its vaccine diplomacy for geopolitical ends began to take a fairly sort of assertive approach on Hong Kong and on Australia and Europe. Of course, the Wolf Warrior diplomacy in a way that sort of alienated many other countries at a time when more depth Chinese diplomacy might have driven a wedge between Europe and the United States and the Trump administration, right? So instead, China's behavior sort of brought Europe more in line with the US than one might expect. So the story of the pandemic, I think in China, to us internationally really is a story of the erosion of these reforms of reversion to those sort of practices of SARS, except even maybe more so and an assertive sort of foreign policy that really set the tone, I think, for where we are today. The US of course, in all of this, was the other sort of major actor. And we came into this expecting to see a story about Trump being asleep at the wheel and not realizing how serious COVID was. John Bolton had abolished the directorate responsible for global health in the National Security Council. So we thought that that would be sort of a story, but we actually found that it was very different than we expected. And it turns out that senior Trump administration officials in early January were perhaps earlier than officials anywhere else outside of Taiwan and China itself to sort of understand the gravity of COVID. And that was largely because of one person, the deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger. Pottinger is sort of an interesting character in all of this. He had been a journalist, a young journalist for the Wall Street Journal, covering SARS in 2002-03. So he broke many of the stories the Journal had then on that epidemic. He has an interesting sort of family background. His wife worked at the CDC and his brothers, an expert in infectious disease. So when COVID hit, Pottinger was sort of naturally alarmed because of his sort of unique background, Fauci, Redfield and others. And we're also of that mindset. And what we saw in January 2020 was actually a fairly active NSC trying to game out certain scenarios and what could the U.S. do to try to get ahead of it. But where they failed was unconvincing Trump to really do any of the things that needed to be done. So they got him to impose a partial and not necessarily effective, but a partial travel ban on China in late January. After that, they believed that Trump needed to follow on to put in place lots of investments and measures domestically to get ready for what was surely coming when the pandemic would hit American shores. But instead of that, Trump sort of acted as if he had done his job with the travel ban, and he was convinced that anything he would do could disrupt the economy in an election year and damages political chances. So there was great frustration in parts of the Trump administration throughout February that they were losing valuable time. And that was time that could never be recovered. So if you're to look beyond all of the different statements and outrageous things the president said about COVID throughout 2020 and try to identify one major mistake, I think that was made by the administration, we would argue that those lost five weeks from late January through to early March were probably sort of the key moment for the U.S. sort of erred on this. Now, once Trump had to close down the American economy in March 11th, he then sort of realized the gravity of the situation. And he had been in a relatively good position with China throughout January and February because they had signed phase one of the trade deal. He felt that he had sort of struck this deal that would be a part of his reelection campaign. He was saying nice things about Xi Jinping. But when the U.S. economy shut down, he turned with vengeance on China, blamed Xi directly for his predicament. We have in the book some colorful language I won't use here about exactly what he said on the day when he was when he closed down the U.S. economy, what he said about Xi Jinping and the Chinese regime. But at that point, he sort of changed his position on China to endorse a more hardline containment set of measures that Trump administration had been fairly divided between those who wanted containment and those who wanted to sort of wait and see and saw it more narrowly in an economic sense. Trump was more on the side of rhetorically, was on the side of the hardliners. Substantively, he was more on the side of those who wanted to treat it fairly narrowly in the economic area and he changed sides after March 11th. And so one of the big sort of takeaways is that COVID really profoundly affected U.S.-China relations on both sides. It made China much more assertive and it made the U.S. more singularly focused on China. And so I don't know if there will be or is a co-war between the U.S. and China. I'm sort of skeptical that we should use those terms. But if there is one over time, I think historians may date it to this period in 2020 that that was sort of the trigger moment where it became where what people suspected what happened was actualized. Now, if we look beyond sort of the U.S. and China, sort of the third sort of big takeaway is regarding the WHO, right, because the WHO comes into COVID really stuck between Trump and Xi Jinping, right? They have a very fundamentally different operating environment than the WHO didn't know 203 and they know it, right? They know what they believe that Xi Jinping will be much less tolerant, you know, of soft criticism from the WHO than Hu Jintao was in SARS. And Ted Ross, the director general, I think his view is that he will sort of manage this through his own personal diplomacy, right? He'll work with these leaders. He'll praise them, flatter them even if he believes it's helpful to get sort of practical cooperation on the ground. And so throughout January, we know from leaked reports of WHO meetings, the senior WHO officials are alarmed by China's reaction. Mike Ryan and others are deeply critical of how China's behaving. They believe it's worse than SARS. But publicly, the WHO is spinning a very different tale saying that China's response is exemplary. As we try to show in the book, there's a rationale behind one can agree or disagree with it, but there's a logic behind that position, which is that they believe that if they are to go public with their concerns, that China will just shut down and the WHO would have no access. So their argument is that they believe that it was only through playing nice that they will be able to get some concessions. And Ted Ross goes to China in late January. He does get an agreement to have a WHO team on the ground. They're not allowed to go to Wuhan, but they believe it's better than nothing. Now that brings the WHO into direct conflict with the US, where the US officials, including the ambassador to the WHO, who we quote quite a bit in the book, they believe that you actually have to put pressure on China in order to get anything done, right? You don't necessarily need to criticize them, but you need to be clear about what is expected and then to accurately describe what they're doing or not doing. And if you don't do that, then you take off some of the pressure and leverage. And so there was a dispute early on, but it was a little bit muted because Trump himself was praising China during this period, right? So what Trump was saying was no different really than what Ted Ross is saying, but it all came to a head after Trump changes his view on China after the US shutdown. He then also turns in the WHO and sort of blames the WHO almost conveniently because it's sort of airbrushes his own comments on China. And what we sort of see from that point is this slight comedy of errors episode where Trump sort of bungles into pulling out of the WHO. He's criticizing it. They come to an agreement of patching things up. That's sabotaged from members of Trump's own administration, leaked the information to Fox News and they quickly roll back on it. He then juices up a speech in China by preempting his own deadline and negotiations and pulling out of the WHO early. He hopes that that will lead to further negotiation. It doesn't. And by the summer of 2020, basically the US is on its way out of the WHO. So that is sort of rooted in this fundamental disagreement about how to treat China. To the Europeans, they I think are shocked. They believe that you could have some reformer of the WHO. They're not fully happy with Tedros during this period. But they believe that the last thing the world needs is to actually litigate that in the middle of a pandemic. Their view is there's time to deal with this later on. And so they're deeply frustrated that you will be able to get these reforms through this tactic. Now, interestingly, after Trump leaves office, we see sort of a shift in the WHO position toward China. So Tedros actually begins to take on China after that period. And it is tougher in China in January, February of 2021. He intervenes to say that the WHO investigative team that goes to China is premature in dismissing a lab leak theory. And he says that merits further consideration aggravating China. There were different sort of explanations as to why this is. But one that I find sort of credible is that as long as Trump was waging a fully fledged war against the WHO, nobody else was going to criticize Tedros. And nobody else was really going to criticize the WHO for fear of fatally undermining it. But when Trump was out of the picture, then it was a safer area for countries to begin to take a hard look at what was happening. And the WHO leadership had to change tack a little bit at that point. Europe's role in this is the fourth sort of finding, I think it might be sort of interesting. Europe, I think, really struggled throughout this crisis. But there was lots of ups and downs, maybe more so than any place else. As everyone I think on this call know, as well as I, health policy is one of those very few areas that is fully in the competence or was fully in the competency of the national governments. So the European Union was not equipped to deal with it. There was a lot of denial in the early stages. Even when the pandemic hit Italy, there were delays which you document in the book in terms of having emergency meetings, of delays up to 10 days and two weeks at a time when days, even hours mattered. There was a sense when it did hit Italy that there wouldn't necessarily be a change to the fiscal rules. By April, May, Macron and Merkel, I think really worried that this could be an existential crisis for the EU. And then we did see this major jump forward on the so-called Hamiltonian moment which was an extraordinary development. So when we first started to draft the Europe chapter in the summer of 2020, it really looked like a redemptive story, right? Europe had this terrible problem at the beginning. Everyone was scrambling for critical medical supplies, stealing each other's stuff, runways, and nationalizing factories, and huge, distrust, unilateral closing of borders. But by the summer, it has sort of transformed itself into a different type of constitutional union. But of course, the story didn't end there. Europe did become complacent over the summer. We saw a resumption of travel, an explosion of COVID then in the fall and the winter, a delay in vaccine development, I think because of some mistaken decisions taken by the EU in the fall inside in the autumn and September, October of 2020. And then throughout the spring of 2021, we saw a rapid catch-up in vaccine distribution to the point where Europe surpassed the US in the summer of 2021. So for Europe, I think it really was a roller coaster, but it did leave a mark. It did leave a serious mark, I think, on European politics. The UK is a separate issue I'm happy to come back to in the conversation. I think Europe has come stronger out of the pandemic. But if you look at the overall numbers of fatalities, the European numbers are very similar to those of the US. So the larger overall numbers, I'm going to adjust it for population, they were a little bit lower, but basically they're quite equivalent, which I think is sort of quite astonishing given the role of Trump personally over here in terms of the mistakes that he made on it. More broadly, in the book, we do try to look at this as a global issue. We spent a lot of time in the developing world in countries like Bangladesh, Peru, Rwanda, and others, some of which India, some of which were not dramatically affected by the health aspects of the pandemic early on, but were affected by the economic consequences, particularly the slowdown in the global economy and in tourism and in supply chains, and in the adoption of lockdowns that were not suited for a type of economic model that they had. So in a country like Bangladesh or in India, I think that had a real negative impact early on. In terms of what went better than expected, I would say there were two things that really surprised us in this. One was on the economic and financial side, where Federal Reserve and ECB officials we talked to were, I think, more worried about aspects of the global economy falling apart this time than they were in 1809, especially on the Treasury market. They acted in an extraordinarily rapid manner that alleviated that crisis, but the phrase they used, which I think will be interesting to students of international relations and those interested in theory a little bit on this, is that they kept saying, this was an example of correlation without coordination. So we did not have formal cooperation in a structured sense in institutions or in conferences or in summits, but we did end up with every country doing the right thing on their own and that's reinforcing each other's actions. So there was positive correlation without coordination, which I think shows a little bit how resilient the international economic order was during this period. And we didn't really find very much evidence at all of geopolitical rivalries and nationalism negatively impacting the financial decision-making. So in the U.S. case, the Federal Reserve acted fairly independently. Secretary of Treasury Manchin was, we are told, broadly supportive of those efforts and facilitated them. And Trump just wasn't really engaged or involved one way or the other. So he wasn't a negative force. He wasn't the driving force behind it either. The Federal Reserve had the space to do what they wanted to do. And so that, I think, was an interesting data point to us. And the other area where there was maybe more progress than people anticipated was of course in the vaccine development. And here, it was interesting that on vaccine development as opposed to vaccine distribution, a more nationalistic approach, which I think we thought would not quite fail, but we thought would run into real limitations, did actually succeed beyond expectation. And the fact that countries did not have to agree on bear burden sharing and on a common approach to vaccine development meant they were free to pursue their own strategies. And in the U.S. case, the U.S. threw over $18 billion of vaccine development, which was about nine times more than what the EU spent. And they did so in a way that basically went into business with the pharmaceutical companies, which some people had concerns about, but effectively collapsed some of the lag time in different phases of vaccine development. And so we had the government paying for factories to be built before they knew they would be used, throwing money at anything that had any likelihood of working, whereas the EU took more of an approach focused on liability for pharmaceutical firms and cost control. It turns out that operation more speed was sort of the more correct approach in terms of getting reliable vaccines fairly quickly. We also, I think even in countries like Russia and China, saw vaccines that while they may not have approval here and may not be as effective as European and American vaccines in terms of the percentage effects of it, I think our net benefit in terms of the big shortfall we have globally. So a lot of people are using those and they are certainly better than not having a vaccine at all. So on the vaccine development side, I think that was more positive than we expected, but on vaccine distribution, of course, it's a huge failing not to have multilateral cooperation, a huge failing and there's a massive deficit there that I think we're still struggling to overcome and that's one of the major challenges ahead. I will just finish on sort of a note about where we're headed and maybe the overall sort of takeaway. I think for us, what the pandemic shows is that we as a world are sort of faced with near worst-case scenarios on great power rivalry and on transnational threats, right? Both are worse than people thought they would be a mere sort of 10 years ago. And there's a negative synergy between them. Great power rivalry makes transnational threats like pandemics and climate change in particular more difficult to deal with than those transnational threats actually provide some of the crisis points for relations between the major powers. And coming out of this, I think, as we look for ways to reform the WHO and prepare for the next pandemic, which could be worse than this pandemic, we should definitely try to work with China, find areas of agreement on WHO reform. But one lesson of COVID is that we also need to prepare for a world in which that cooperation is not forecoming. So we need a universal track. We also need a backup plan. We have a number of proposals, most of which aren't particularly new because this issue is a new and studies on it aren't new. But maybe the one we have that is a little bit novel is calling for alongside the WHO, alongside robust US engagement in the WHO for a coalition of like-minded countries that will come together and agree to do more, agree to spend more on global public goods for global public health, agree to higher levels of transparency, higher levels of coordination. We believe that that would essentially reinforce the WHO, not undermine it because you'd have a set of countries agreeing to a higher standard. And if there were to be a future crisis, those countries could act more rapidly if the WHO was gridlocked because I think there is a risk that the WHO will become a venue for competition between the US, China and Europe in a way that the United Nations became a venue for competition between the US and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. So we need to try to figure out a set of redundancies within the system. The final point I will just finish on is on the global vaccine piece of it because we are only in a post-pandemic world in the sense that it is after the pandemic emerged where we are not in a post-pandemic world in the sense that the pandemic is over. The pandemic is becoming obviously endemic to our societies and there is a real risk, I think, of a two-tier or multi-tier world between safe zones and unsafe zones where you have largely vaccinated parts and then parts of the world that really struggle. I hope that we look at that problem in terms of the developing world and the global piece of this being the next front in an existential struggle against COVID and not as a matter of development assistance or foreign assistance. We need to be as dedicated to dealing with this globally and vaccinating the world as all of our countries are in vaccinating their own populations and looking at it as a national problem. And while the Biden administration has done a lot more than its predecessor and is arguably doing more than other countries in Europe is doing quite a lot as well, I still think we have a huge way to go in actually doing enough. The WHO estimates that to get to 70% vaccination rate around the world will be 11 billion doses and that was before booster shots came into play at which would probably make that number even higher. The amount that the U.S. and Japan and the EU have committed through the G7 is about a 10% of that total. So we have a long way to go on that and I think that is something that the G20, G7 and the U.S. and the European Union together need to be focused on looking forward. But Dan, I'll stop there.