Conversely, President Franklin Roosevelt began planning for the post-World War II settlement before the United States even entered the war. America and Britain issued the Atlantic Charter, which articulated their goals for the postwar order, in August 1941—four months prior to Pearl Harbor. The Bretton Woods Conference, which outlined the postwar economic system, took place in July 1944. By the time the war ended in 1945, the tenets of the new order were already well established, enabling the allies to focus on the critical details of implementation.
The coronavirus will arrest our lives longer than we’d like, but not forever—and when the crisis passes, the contours of the new order will take shape rapidly. To ensure that brief window is put to good use and not consumed by squabbling, U.S. and world leaders should begin collaborating now to formulate principles.
It would be foolish to expect President Donald Trump, who is one of the reasons that today’s international order isn’t working, to spearhead planning for a new one. We might have to wait for a more internationally minded president to form the institutions of the new order. But Trump’s presence doesn’t mean that valuable progress can’t happen in the meantime.
Leaders in both parties—especially younger leaders whose lives will unfold in the wake of the pandemic—should urgently start developing, debating and rallying around objectives for the post-coronavirus order. Before diving into specifics, such as the future of the United Nations, we must align on basic goals. We are likely more than a year away from the dawn of the new order, and a contest of ideas, in which the intellectual foundations of the system solidify, will precede any institutional innovation. Members of Congress, leaders in civic organizations and businesses, and scholars should follow the example of health care professionals who have collaborated across all manner of forums—from medical journals to Twitter—to design strategies to treat Covid-19. And they should know that any principles they propose, even if only in print or pixels, may eventually take on greater significance: Both the post-1919 and post-1945 orders originated in simple statements—the Fourteen Points for the former, the Atlantic Charter for the latter—that didn’t win broad endorsement until months or years after they were issued.
The second way U.S. leaders can learn from the past is to avoid the blame game. Led by French President Georges Clemenceau, the shapers of the post-1919 order were fixated on blame, forcing Germany to accept “war guilt,” make territorial concessions and pay reparations. These terms sowed resentment that fueled the Nazis’ rise to power. By contrast, the architects of the post-1945 order focused on the future, committing to rebuild Germany into a thriving democracy—notwithstanding the fact that Germany was more obviously at fault for starting World War II than it had been for World War I. The Germany of today, a liberal exemplar and staunch U.S. ally, is testament to the wisdom of that policy.
Despite temptations to find scapegoats for a pandemic that has already killed more Americans than the Vietnam War, U.S. leaders should be generous in aiding post-coronavirus recovery efforts around the world. Though Beijing doubtless bears blame for its suppression of early reports of the coronavirus, America and the world would be far better served by bolstering China’s public health system than by seeking to punish Beijing or embarrass it through racially insensitive epithets.
Nowhere is generosity more important than in the race to end the pandemic with novel therapeutics and, eventually, a vaccine. Instead of hoarding the benefits of such breakthroughs, as the Trump administration hinted it might do when it tried to poach a German vaccine company, America should lead a global effort to develop, test, manufacture and deliver these medicines as quickly and broadly as possible. More than anything else, America’s role in ending the pandemic will determine how much moral authority it has to shape the world that comes afterward.
America should also be generous in supporting the institutions of the new order. Washington has already spent upward of $2 trillion to pull the country out from the coronavirus abyss—and there’s more to come. These infusions dwarf the $56 billion International Affairs Budget, which covers the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, foreign assistance and contributions to international organizations. If there was ever a crisis that demonstrates why an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, it is this one: America should fund the institutions of the new order so that they are capable of averting the next crisis before it spirals out of control.
Finally, the new order should be grounded in domestic consensus. Wilson didn’t include a single prominent Republican in the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, icing out not only radical isolationists but also moderate internationalists with whom he might have found common ground. In the end, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, 53–38, and America never joined the League of Nations. FDR and Harry Truman learned from Wilson’s mistake, focusing early on building support for the post-1945 order. When the UN Charter came before the Senate, it won overwhelming approval, 89–2.
Source: politico.com
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