Charles W. King

The recent outbreak of Ebola in a remote part of Congo prompted a rapid and comprehensive response from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) including the first time in its seventy year history that its Director has traveled into the midst of an active hotzone. The response from the United States has been decidedly muted, unlike the previous outbreak in West Africa that began in 2013 where thousands of U.S. Army troops were deployed to construct field hospitals and support aid efforts. In the years since the West African outbreak the Trump Administration has requested Congress roll back funding that had been allocated for addressing Ebola and other virulent outbreaks. While costly, the expenditures by the United States between 2014 and 2016 to combat Ebola in West Africa, primarily through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) and U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), represent an important strategic deployment of American resources to address a national interest.

Like food aid, medical aid to foreign countries, especially to address potential epidemics, is not solely altruistic. Infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg are easiest to contain when populations of infected are localized. The the outbreaks of SARS and Avian Flu, which are much less lethal to humans than Ebola or Marburg, demonstrate how difficult fighting a disease that has penetrated the international travel network. If the United States was attempting to prevent Ebola or a similar disease from making it through American border posts, seaports, and airports it would be significantly more costly and dangerous than the billions spent in the West African campaign. American support for the fight against Ebola in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 was ultimately a single-digit billions line item in a trillions of dollar budget. A medical quarantine of the United States would not only be a major federal expense, but would have a significant effect on gross domestic product and economic growth.

The relatively contained outbreaks close to their origin are also important for the development of medical remedies and vaccines. The WHO is now deploying a vaccine for Ebola that was first tested in the last months of the West African outbreak in the thousands of doses in Congo. Without international funds for fighting in West Africa or Congo Merck, the pharmaceutical giant who developed the vaccine, would not have been able to incentivized to do so, which would hamstring future responses whether the outbreak was in the developed world or the undeveloped world.

It is also in the long term interest of the United States that the developing be stable and prosperous world. Stable developing states are markets for American goods and services. Unstable ones are sources of not only misery and death, but dangerous pressures on the United States and its allies, the Syrian Refugee crisis being only the largest and most recent example. Civil strife has been simmering in Congo and among its neighbors for decades, the return of major conflict at the same time as an outbreak could be orders of magnitude deadlier than the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa which killed approximately eleven thousand people. Epidemics cause their own refugee crises, but combined with flight from conflict such an outbreak could be un-containable by current measures. Policy-makers in the United States and Europe have a good case for supporting medical aid to the rest of the world, both in crises and in times of relative calm. They simply need to make it.

Charles W. King

The 2018 Olympic Winter Games began last week in PyeongChang, South Korea. In a reprise of a number of international sporting events in the early 2000’s the North Korean and South Korean delegations marched together under a join flag during the opening ceremony and will field a women’s ice hockey team with players from both North and South Korea. This is a significant event in the simmering international crisis that is the Korean Peninsula, but it is hardly the only event of the games with geopolitical importance. Also competing under a flag that is not their own are one hundred and sixty eight “Olympic Athletes from Russia” (OAR). The Russian Olympic Committee has been sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for its extensive state-sponsored doping program that has been revealed in the wake of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

The Russian government and Vladimir Putin, its President, have been vocal in their criticism of the IOC’s ban on the Russian team, to the surprise of no one. What has been surprising is the reaction in South Korea to the joint participation of North and South Korea. Created in 1990 for the Asian Games, the Korean Unification Flag has been used at a number of sporting events since, including 4 Olympic Games. This time it has received significant push back. It is doubly surprising because the pushback has come from younger, liberal voters in South Korea who to date have overwhelmingly supported Moon Jae-In and his administration’s attempts to negotiate with the increasingly belligerent North Korea. Most of the objections appear to be over the joint hockey team according to polls.

The same polls also indicate a common refrain from the rest of the world; that politics shouldn’t influence sport. This inherently conservative argument is typical of when countries or individuals use sporting events to confront others with ideas or positions they disagree with, and it fails to recognize that sport, international competitions in particular, is and always has been inherently political. Various nations including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have used the Olympic Games to showcase the superiority of their political systems. Tommie Smith and John Carlos used an Olympic medal ceremony in Mexico City in 1968 to protest for civil and human rights in the United States and abroad. Sport is political because competitors are deemed to be the best in their field, held up by society as pinnacles of human achievement and role models for children to emulate. Society cares what prominent athletes believe, say, and do, and that means that sports always make a political statement. Typically that statement favors the status quo, but when prominent athletes take positions on controversial issues there is outcry not because sport is apolitical but because it is inherently conservative.

If the politics of sports typically favors the status quo then why is the unified Korean Olympic team so controversial in South Korea? The unified team received widespread support in previous iterations. The reason is that the demographics of South Korea are changing. South Koreans in their 20’s and 30’s cannot remember at time without a belligerent North without a nuclear program, the increasingly oppose reunification. Just over a third of South Koreans who claimed to be estranged from family in the North by the Korean ware remain alive, and 60% of them are over the age of 80. South Korea is in the middle of its forty years in the desert. When it comes out the other side in a generation or two there may remain little to no support for reunification. The window for Korean reunification is closing and the North knows it. North Korea’s continued pressure on South Korea and its American and Japanese allies is part of a long standing plan to reunify on the North’s terms while reunification is still possible.

Charles W. King

With the ubiquity of air travel and the trivial cost of ocean freight it is easy for contemporary policy-makers to neglect the importance of land borders as a conduit for trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement has allowed American manufacturers to spread their supply chains to Canada and Mexico to take advantage of economies of scale and cheaper labor prices not possible in the United States. This, along with the movement of other American manufacturing, has garnered the ire of both labor unions on the left and economic nationalists on the right, but a number of other examples demonstrate how open borders not only facilitate trade that is good for domestic consumers, but are an important method for creating safe and stable regional communities.

The Good Friday Agreement has been the bedrock of peace in Northern Ireland since it was signed in 1998. The prospect of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union and the makeup of the ruling coalition in Westminster threatens this tenuous peace because it threatens the status of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Theresa May, the current Prime Minister of the U.K., has committed to leaving both the E.U.’s customs union and common market, known as a Hard Brexit. After a disastrous snap election last year May’s Conservatives were forced into a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland to create a majority in Parliament. The nature of a Hard Brexit would establish a customs border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, requiring checkpoints and the other institutional features of a regulated border. The Democratic Unionists are in favor of this because it would weaken ties between the province and the Republic. Republicans both in the Republic and Northern Ireland object to this vehemently, and point out that such a border would be indirect contravention of The Good Friday Agreement. The status of the Irish border remains one of the major issues of Brexit negotiations, it will take compromise and creativity to fulfill the Article 50 requirements without violating the Agreement, but violating it would imperil twenty years of peace and progress in Ireland.

In recent years, India and Pakistan have increased the size of their border posts on their mutual border. Rather than increasing their military presence on the border, and therefore tensions, the construction and staffing has been to facilitate cross border trade between the two countries which has been anemic for decades, despite the two countries location and the existence of large markets for each other’s goods. While the relationship between India and Pakistan remains fraught with tension, especially when terrorists with links to the Pakistani intelligence services conduct attacks in India, the increase in trade has helped to create a more stable foundation for the official diplomatic relationship between the two countries. Conversely the relationship between Israel and Gaza has deteriorated since Israel established a military blockade in 2007. The Israeli Defense Forces now contend that the reliance on aid and inability to cross the border for trade and employment has been ineffective at best, and likely counterproductive to improving Israel’s security.

These relationships demonstrate that even in an increasingly connected world the relationship between neighboring countries should have a place of preeminence in the thoughts of policy-makers. It can be frightfully easy to turn a peaceful relationship into one that is only a spark away from violence. They also demonstrate that closed and fortified borders do not necessarily translate into physical security, but that economic security can.

Charles W. King

Increasing attention is being paid to how the People’s Republic of China is seeking to influence foreign governments. An Australian MP, Sam Dastyari, recently resigned due to a number of pro-China statements he had made and his relationship with a Chinese businessman. The presence of Chinese money in the war chests of American political candidates has been contentious since the 1990s. China also exerts increasing influence in Western academia, through both funding and public criticism. The National Endowment for Democracy has termed this influence ‘Sharp Power’. Distinct from the attractive nature of soft power and the military power projection of hard power, sharp power is described as manipulation and pressure in the public and political spheres.

While exercising sharp power is new for the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, the United States and others have been the target of sharp power before. Sharp power itself is not a new idea, it was a staple of the great power politics that existed throughout the nineteenth century, and was an important tool during the Cold War. One of the hallmarks of Chinese sharp power in recent years has been its ability to influence the academic discussion surrounding china. The Chinese government is funding Confucius Institutes all over the western world to teach the mandarin, and increasingly as budgets are getting tighter academic institutions are letting them set their own curriculum and programs. The spontaneous stick to the Confucius Institutes’ intentional carrot is the intense public criticism academics face for slights (real or perceived) against the “feelings of the Chinese people” for things like using maps that do not reflect the Chinese position. Influencing academic discourse is a classic method for government influence of a population. Frequently it involves censorship as governments attempt to manipulate their own population; but as international travel became easier—particularly in Europe—it became an important part of great power competition. While the Soviet K.G.B. was probably most proud of the high level agents it was able to insert into British political institutions, it cannot have been dissatisfied with influence the Marxist method of historical analysis continues to have in British academia.

The fear of losing funding is also a large proportion of Chinese sharp power. In the past three decades China has begun to spend huge sums of money not only on Western consumer goods, but on investments abroad. Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road infrastructure investments are just a small part of what China is spending abroad today. China recently founded the Asia Development Bank and is constructing a large military base in Djibouti. This is not dissimilar to the financial influence exerted during much of the Cold War. Egypt’s Nasser famously played the United States and the Soviet Union against each to see who would give him more patronage. More frequently the U.S. and U.S.S.R. used their financial support of governments to get them implement policies they favored, be they control economies or allowing market access. The trick was always to get the client state to a position where they could not function without the foreign funding, and then impose dictates upon them.

Chinese sharp power deserves the attention of Western policy-makers and counter-intelligence experts. It is a new approach for the Chinese, fueled by recent Chinese economic prosperity; it is not an altogether new approach for influencing foreign powers. The West can look to its own playbook from the Cold War and those of the nineteenth century great powers for how sharp power was used, and how it was countered.

Charles W. King

Earlier this year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that it had selected Paris and Los Angeles for the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympic Games respectively. In recent decades finding cities to host the Olympics has become increasingly difficult. Nations that typically excel at the Winter Games like Norway are balking, forcing the games to be held in locales like Sochi which is more seaside resort than ski slope. The citizens of cities of western democracies like Chicago and Boston raise vociferous objections when their cities are suggested as potential Olympic venues. The cost of the 2016 Rio Olympics and 2014 World Cup continue to cause significant problems for Brazil’s government, both fiscally and politically. While the IOC has avoided it so far, the Olympic bidding process has increasingly become the province of unsavory dictatorships. The 2022 Winter Games were awarded to Beijing over Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan.

The plight of the IOC in the twenty-first century raises the question; why did nations like the United States, Spain, West Germany, and many more compete so hard to host the Olympic Games in the twentieth century? The Olympics have been, since their modern reinvention in 1896 been a prestige event. Like the World’s Fair, the Olympics were an opportunity for nations to showcase themselves to the world. Always an opportunity to lose money, the modern Olympics were something that only a Great Power could afford to host. At the height of their respective empires both Belgium and the Netherlands hosted Olympic Games, in Antwerp in 1920 and Amsterdam in 1928. Neither nation has hosted an Olympics since. In 1936 Adolph Hitler attempted to use the Olympics in Germany to demonstrate to the world the resurgence of Germany under his Nazi regime. After imperialism began to decline after World War Two the Olympics were a chance for rising powers like the Australia, South Korea, and Brazil to make their debut on the world stage, and for declining powers like the United Kingdom to maintain some of their old prestige.

Nations, including the United States, continue to value their international prestige, so why are so many now reluctant to bid for, let alone host, the Olympic Games. One reason is certainly cost. The amount of construction requires for the Olympics is enormous, and many facilities, like velodromes, are useful only during the games. One year after the 2016 Rio Games, many of the facilities constructed for those games look like they’ve been abandoned for decades. This is exacerbated by the fact that in the twentieth century is it easier than ever for nations promote themselves abroad. Indonesian and Korean cinema is booming in popularity in the West. Travel throughout the world is easier and faster with each passing year. The benefit of hosting Olympics in an increasingly connected world has declined, just as hosting the games has skyrocketed in cost.

The Olympic Games is not simply a sporting event. The modern Olympics are an international institution like the United Nations and the World Bank. Hosting the Olympics has been a prestige event for a hundred years, and it will continue to be the hallmark of nations trying to stake a claim to the world stage. The Olympic Games demonstrates that sport is inherently political and the International Olympic Committee and western democracies cannot afford to neglect the legitimacy that hosting an Olympic Games may give to a regime like that of Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan.