The second wave of Covid-19 is now truly upon us, and winter will be hard. Yet for all the talk of the pandemic having changed the world, it’s arguably more true to say that it has acted as a lens to bring our global predicament into sharper focus.
Important though it is to ask what we need, and what we can do better, to manage a public-health crisis of such enormity, we neglect the broader sociopolitical picture at our peril. As Philip Bobbitt, director of the Center for National Security at Columbia Law School, writes in Covid-19 and World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press), a pandemic like this was wholly predictable. But “what could not have been predicted”, he argues, “was the utter foolhardiness of the responses of countries, including those that might have been expected to do better precisely because they had the enormous state capacity, scientific expertise, and educated populace to have fielded the state apparatus, social trust, and leadership necessary to prevail in this sort of crisis.”
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