After the Coronavirus: America Needs to Reengage with the World, Not Retreat from It

The COVID-19 pandemic is bound to raise questions, including in the presidential campaign, about what direction America should take in the future. Should the United States continue on the path of globalization and become further integrated with the global community, to benefit from resulting gains and collectively solve problems? Or should it make permanent some of the barriers that have been erected to fight the epidemic, whose origins lie on foreign shores, and become less globalized?

Long before globalization, before even the realization that the earth was round, as early as 10,000 B.C., smallpox was carried by Egyptian merchants to India, and the disease was not eradicated until 1979. Black Death (a global epidemic of bubonic plague) struck both Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The H1N1 outbreak of 1918 (“Spanish flu”) remains the most deadly pandemic in history, with 50 million deaths worldwide and 675,000 in the United States alone.

More recently, the globalized world has seen multiple waves of Ebola, starting in 1976, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, swine flu in 2009 (a resurgence of H1N1) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012, none of which had nearly the toll of those earlier plagues.

In the modern era, economic and financial crises have also proved contagious. The East Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which started with the collapse of the Thai baht, reverberated in the region and the world. The spreading of this economic virus was in fact referred to as a contagion (PDF). The Great Recession of 2008, which originated in the United States as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, could likewise be considered a financial pandemic.

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Πηγή: rand.org