COVID-19 Put the Lie to the Idea of a Unifying National Tragedy

For the last two years, the daily lives of most people in most of the world have been impacted more significantly by COVID-19 than by any other single cause. And while the pandemic’s impacts have differed markedly based on individual characteristics – age, gender, access to healthcare, location – it has been a singularly global event, monopolizing attention worldwide and interfering in both macro trends and day-to-day life in a way unique in living memory.

The other notable thing about the pandemic is that – precisely because of its totalizing nature, unequal distribution of outcomes, and interference in daily life – it has not generated social solidarity. It has, rather, done the opposite, with disputes around vaccination, masking, school closures, and restrictions on what would have broadly been considered normal life and commerce growing ever-more fierce and bleeding over into the broader socio-political tensions in Western public life.

One thing the pandemic has not done – despite some overeager predictions mostly made in spring 2020 – is replace geopolitics. Wars continued even as the virus spread - in Nagorno-Karabakh, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And now, a month into 2022, the odds of a major state-on-state war seem to be higher than they have been in years or decades. As I write this in late January, the biggest immediate danger seems to be Ukraine’s eastern flank, where Russia has concentrated a significant chunk of its army while also surging its naval and air assets to areas farther afield. But a new round of North Korean missile tests and Chinese incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone suggests that the danger of major war is not limited to Ukraine.

Western observers of international politics often bemoan the fact that domestic audiences are not especially interested in foreign policy. This, of course, is highly situational: Americans became hugely (though not necessarily helpfully) interested in the country’s post-9/11 foreign policy. But for the most part, and despite some half-hearted branding (like President Joe Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” slogan), the major things that the United States and its allies can do to prepare for, defuse, deter, or manage a war will be carried out by a small subset of the population.

That is a mixed blessing. For all the wistful remembrances of times when the nation was united in common purpose, the reality is that such unity was usually the result of tragedy, and what it produced was far more morally murky than the national mythology might suggest. The ur-example of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, with the clear moral imperative of defeating the Axis powers, obscures more than it illuminates in a far different world facing far different adversaries with far different goals and belief structures.

The other lesson of the pandemic is that there exists in developed nations an enormous tolerance for other people’s suffering. And here, let us not confuse “conventional” war with “humane” war. It is indisputably true that a Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war on the Korean Peninsula, or a Chinese assault against Taiwan would produce vast and horrific harms: mass casualties amongst civilians, unconfined refugee flows, and license for all manner of war crimes and reprisals. But whether or not the U.S. was directly involved, those horrors – like the horrors that COVID-19 wreaked on emergency rooms and nursing homes – would read to the bulk of the U.S. population as remote. They would be folded into existing culture-war positions, as though questions of whether the military has become “woke” or whether it was right to withdraw from Afghanistan are more important than the agency of decision-makers, soldiers, and the publics in the actual places where those wars might be fought.

Would it change matters if a war directly impacted American citizens? Far-fetched thriller and video game plot lines notwithstanding, there are only a few ways this could be the case. A war in East Asia – central to so many supply chains already stretched by two years of pandemic – would create economic turmoil, which could easily derail economic recovery. A war in Ukraine in midwinter could disrupt the supply of natural gas to Europe, causing enormous hardship for the populations of key U.S. allies (though likely less for Americans themselves).

But there is no reason to believe that such disruption would be sufficient to change the underlying conditions. Supply chain disruption and higher oil prices would probably have the same result as a new wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths: generally reinforcing existing beliefs rather than fundamentally changing the political calculus.

Obviously, in the searing heat of a truly unrestricted war, previously ironclad political constraints can melt down and be reforged into new and unpredictable forms. But the pandemic already nearly broke our supply chains, and each of those potential wars has at least two potential participants armed with nuclear weapons. It is hard to imagine the upside that justifies that level of risk. Better to try and manage the risk of war through existing means and try to consciously improve society rather than hoping for a unifying silver lining in a likely horrifying conflict.