The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Coronavirus proves a country is only as powerful as its people are healthy

In the era of coronavirus, N95 masks are just as important to national security as F-35 jets

Perspective by
Yoav Fromer is the Director of the Center for the Study of the United States in Partnership with the Fulbright Program at Tel Aviv University. His new book, "The Moderate Imagination: The Political Thought of John Updike and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism" is forthcoming.
April 7, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Medical workers take in patients at a special coronavirus intake area at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Navy Capt. Brett Crozier was relieved of duty last week after he allegedly tried to warn of an impending crisis aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Since then, Crozier’s warning seems prescient; as of Sunday, 155 sailors tested positive for the coronavirus.

The ship will undoubtedly return to active service in the Pacific theater, but the effects of the coronavirus are ominous for the future of American power: If an aircraft carrier — the pinnacle of U.S military might — can be compromised, even effectively neutralized by the virus, what happens to the United States’ position as a global power?

It is entirely possible that America’s global hegemony will join the list of casualties from the coronavirus once the pandemic subsides. Not necessarily because other nations — namely China or Russia — will use the crisis to expand their military arsenals, but because the traditional assumptions about power that dominated the 20th and early 21st centuries could become undone. Instead, a new age of power may emerge in which far different state capacities, resources and priorities will be needed to compete on the world stage and meet the new set of international challenges.

Yes, Russia spreads coronavirus lies. But they were made in America.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously coined the notions of “Biopower” and “Biopolitics,” which suggested quantifying the health stats of the body politic — like its birth and mortality rates, calorie intake, disease frequencies — enabled modern governments to better regulate and dominate their populations by vaccinating, treating, nourishing and, ultimately, reproducing — or limiting — them.

Foucault mainly examined the internal implications of biopower within states and upon individuals. But the coronavirus pandemic has elevated it onto the global stage of international relations. Military and economic capabilities — the traditional criteria with which power is still mostly measured — are not unrelated to biopower: to successfully fight wars and sustain economic growth, states need healthy populations; the strength and wealth of nations, in other words, all too often depends on the health of nations.

The United States still has, by far, the most powerful military, largest economy, and retains the world’s leading currency — which is to say it leads the world in so-called hard power — but it lags far behind in terms of its demographic health. The coronavirus has already exposed what many health-care professionals, scholars and politicians have long warned: that America’s grossly unequal and severely underfunded public health system poses a clear and present danger to national security. The egregious shortage in testing kits, hospital beds, ventilators, trained personnel and protective face masks painfully revealed in the past few weeks, exposes its geopolitical Achilles’ heel: its inherent weakness, even outright inability, to sustain the health of large parts of its own population.

There is a tendency to relegate health care to domestic politics and minimize its importance to foreign policy. But the age of this coronavirus has shown it is central to the national interest exactly because of its direct effect on American power abroad. Rather than an altruistic liberal cause or a talking point for Democratic campaigns, health care is now considered vital for balancing rising powers that seek to undermine America’s waning global influence, which makes a robust social safety net essential to preserving American power.

Having universal health coverage, providing citizens access to high-quality care and social insurance — as well as maintaining appropriate medical supplies, infrastructure and manpower to manage pandemics — are no longer liberal pipe dreams. Rather, they are a strategic necessity. Just as the United States won the race for the atomic bomb in 1945 and the space race by being first to put a man on the moon, so too must it win the race to find a vaccine for this coronavirus.

I didn’t have a quarantine plan when I got covid-19. Trust me: You’ll want one.

If the United States wants to preserve its global dominance and overcome challenges from China or Russia, it must recognize that the new front lines are not just in the south China sea, Crimea or eastern Ukraine, but in its own hospitals, clinics, universities, research labs, assembly lines and emergency supply warehouses. That the U.S. can deploy F-35 jets to bomb its enemies and protect its citizens anywhere in the world is immaterial if its doctors and nurses don’t have enough N95 masks to treat New Yorkers. Economic growth and innovation, similarly, are dependent on a healthy workforce to power them and on the health and wealth of its consumers to purchase them.

Although the global crisis is far from over, early winners are possibly beginning to emerge: China, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and even Germany, are faring much better, at least relatively, than developed countries like the United States. The difference was strategic stockpiles of protective face masks (or the industrial capacity to produce them quickly and cheaply), myriad testing kits, experienced staffs and well-funded labs, ventilators and critical care hospital beds. All of these resources seem to have allowed these countries to successfully contain the virus, timely diagnose, quarantine and treat those infected and minimize death tolls, which mitigated the disastrous impacts on their national economies by facilitating an earlier return to full economic productivity.

While other factors like laws, political institutions, culture and geography contributed to their ostensible success (not to mention the danger from a second wave of the virus that still threatens them), the strength of their public health systems appears to have given them a strategic edge over America that may place them at an advantageous position to recover, and prosper, once the virus recedes.

State power has always been fluid and is relative to shifting geopolitical conditions and changing technological circumstances. In the 20th century, new industrial capacities enabled European nation-states, and eventually the United States, to mobilize unprecedented resources, develop unimaginably destructive weaponry and, quite literally, conquer the world, then nearly destroy it in two world wars. The post-1945 nuclear era and, more recently, the advent of cyberwarfare, have once again redefined the nature of power.

Now, we might very well have reached a new stage in this evolution. Thanks to the discovery of antibiotics, the development of vaccines for polio, measles and mumps (among other diseases) and breakthroughs in genetic and medical research since the mid-20th century, along with vastly improved sanitary conditions and widely available affordable nutritious foods, the U.S., like most developed countries, has almost uninterruptedly enjoyed rising life expectancy and declining child mortality.

But the coronavirus reveals just how tenuous and fleeting are such securities. With globalization having reached a dangerous new stage of interconnectivity that facilitates the rapid permeation of germs and viruses into every corner of the globe, sustaining geopolitical power requires of even the most powerful and wealthiest states to cease taking the health of their populations for granted. If the U.S. wishes to remain the strongest country in the world, it will have to make sure it is also one of the healthiest.

The rich can run (to their second homes), but they can’t hide from this pandemic