Stewart M. Patrick
On Dec. 30, 2019, the world first learned that a dangerous new coronavirus had emerged weeks before in China’s Wuhan province. Three months, nearly 740,000 infections and 34,000 deaths later, as of this writing, it’s well past time for the United Nations Security Council to declare COVID-19 a threat to international security. Such a designation would carry immediate symbolic and practical weight, signaling to anxious populations around the world that U.N. member states are united in confronting this plague and determined to deploy their entire multilateral arsenal against it. It would also carry the binding force of international law, as the U.N. Charter obliges all states “to accept and carry out” decisions by the Security Council.
Given these potential benefits, it is beyond maddening that infighting between China and the United States is blocking any forceful action. China, which has held the rotating presidency of the Security Council since March 1, has been dragging its feet on a resolution or even a joint declaration of concern. Zhang Jun, China’s U.N. envoy, explained earlier this month that this “public health” matter did not fall within the Security Council’s “geopolitical” ambit. Washington has reinforced Beijing’s obduracy, demanding that any resolution specify the Chinese origins of the coronavirus, as well as of the 2003 SARS epidemic. The Chinese blasted the United States for “politicizing the outbreak and blaming China” in an email to U.N. missions, declaring: “The groundless accusations and malicious fabrication from the U.S. aim at shirking its own responsibilities, which severely poisoned the atmosphere of global cooperation in containing the outbreak.”
The Trump administration is understandably annoyed that Chinese Communist Party propagandists are depicting Beijing as a heroic leader in the global struggle against the pandemic, while whitewashing its culpability in first concealing and then failing to arrest the outbreak, as well encouraging a conspiracy theory blaming the virus on the U.S. Army. But the monomaniacal U.S. attempt to counter China’s self-serving narrative is a colossal waste of effort, distracting the world from the immediate task of slowing the pandemic and coping with its political and economic fallout.
Although the Security Council typically leaves global health issues to other U.N. bodies, most of all the World Health Organization, it has its own well-established role in responding to a pandemic. Two decades ago, U.S. Vice President Al Gore memorably chaired a Security Council debate on HIV/AIDS in Africa. It helped transform what had been a public health concern into a matter of international security, a shift underscored on July 17, 2000, when the Security Council passed Resolution 1308, recognizing “the importance of a coordinated international response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, given its possible growing impact on social instability and emergency situations.” The Security Council’s actions helped galvanize a multilateral response, including the establishment of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in 2002.
The Security Council passed another historic milestone in September 2014, when the U.S. ambassador at the time, Samantha Power, engineered unanimous passage of Resolution 2177, designating the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a “threat to international peace and security,” the first time a disease had been so recognized. The resolution empowered then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to create the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, or UNMEER, the first U.N. emergency mission directed at a public health crisis. Speaking before the Security Council, the WHO’s then-director-general, Margaret Chan, described Ebola as “likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced.”
Today, the world confronts a public health emergency that dwarfs the Ebola crisis and indeed any pandemic since the Great Influenza of 1918. Despite these stakes, the Security Council’s two authoritarian permanent members, China and Russia, have resisted its involvement in COVID-19 as unwarranted mission creep and an intrusion into the sovereign affairs of U.N. member states. Beyond this generic objection, the Chinese fear public revelations about their lack of transparency in handling the initial outbreak in Wuhan. To avoid embarrassment, Beijing is willing to put global public health in jeopardy.
The disastrous stalemate between the United States and China is preventing the Security Council from mobilizing the international system.
To prevent diplomats from becoming infected, the Security Council on March 12 indefinitely suspended all face-to-face meetings. There is an obvious workaround, of course: having the Security Council meet in virtual session by videoconference. Until last Tuesday, however, Russia’s delegation had rejected this option, insisting that U.N. ambassadors must show up in person to vote. Regardless of the format, the Security Council is unlikely to reach agreement so long as China and the United States continue their poisonous war of words.
The disastrous stalemate in New York is preventing the Security Council from issuing a powerful resolution, or even a declaration, to mobilize the international system. Last week, Estonia, a rotating member of the Security Council, proposed a joint statement expressing “growing concern about the unprecedented extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in the world, which may constitute a threat to international peace and security.” China and Russia, as well as South Africa, rejected the draft, which included an insistence that all countries show “full transparency” in their reporting on the outbreak—a phrase the Chinese interpreted as a veiled attack on their handling of the coronavirus.
The consequences of this diplomatic foot-dragging could be catastrophic. On March 22, Chan’s successor at the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Gehbreyesus, warned that the pandemic was clearly “accelerating.” Reported global infections are now doubling in less than a week. Turning the tide on the pandemic and dealing with its economic fallout will require unprecedented international cooperation, including prompt collective decisions on matters that are fundamentally political, rather than purely technical, in nature.
The WHO, based in Geneva, remains the technical focal point for pandemic response within the U.N. system. It alone has the mandate to declare an infectious disease outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” as it did for COVID-19 on Jan. 30. It alone can also implement the International Health Regulations, a set of legally binding commitments designed to provide a universal framework to prepare for and respond to global health emergencies. At the same time, though, the WHO lacks the authority to cut through the political obstacles ranging from trade barriers to border closures, travel restrictions, supply chain interruptions and impediments to sharing vaccines.
Here is where the U.N. Security Council could help. Rob Berchinski, a former American diplomat who helped Power craft the Ebola response, proposes that the Security Council create a subsidiary body to coordinate high-level diplomacy on COVID-19. Such a body, linked to the highest levels of member state governments and reporting directly to the Security Council, could break logjams in international cooperation, while providing the political cover for more technical agencies, from the WHO to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as they go about their business. It could also manage the U.N.’s engagement with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as informal bodies, like the G-7 and G-20.
On April 1, China will hand over the rotating presidency of the Security Council to the Dominican Republic, a tiny country that will need all the help it can get. To unlock the Security Council’s potential, Washington and Beijing must agree to bury the hatchet, at least temporarily, for the sake of global public health.
Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.
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