THE WAKE-UP CALL

The pandemic has exposed many things, write Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Micklethwait and Economist columnist Wooldridge, especially the effectiveness of governments in trying to do something about it. “The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity,” they write, and very few Western governments performed well (Germany, Switzerland, and Greece among them). Better still were nations in Asia: Though China’s initial response was somewhat confused, it borrowed epidemiological regimes from Singapore, perhaps the most successful state in Asia. Though the Chinese communist state is riddled with inefficiencies and corruption, “alongside the thuggish dictatorship there is another China: one that studies where government works and where it doesn’t; that is recruiting a cadre of highly-trained administrators and monitoring them through the Party’s Organizational Department.” These people are called into account every day while Western bureaucrats shunt off responsibility—which all plays into the hands of the authoritarians of the West, with Donald Trump leading the way in incompetency. Trump, with Boris Johnson in the U.K., botches everything to which he turns his hand; write the authors, “Trump and Johnson are undermining the idea that statecraft is a serious business; instead they have treated it as a branch of mass entertainment.” The pandemic may give faltering states the opportunity to retool—and to clean house. The authors decry excessive regulation that stifles innovation as well as a political culture driven by lawyers, as in the U.S., rather than by scientists and engineers, as in China. More likely, therefore, the pandemic, coupled with the ineptitude of Trump and company, will have a broad effect on power dynamics: “in terms of geopolitics, the crisis has left the West weaker and Asia stronger.”

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