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

The European Union recently announced that its member states have decided to utilize Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) for the first time. A feature of the Treaty of Lisbon, the founding document of the European Union, PESCO will enable greater cooperation on security and defense issues. It does not represent a wholesale conglomeration of European militaries, or even the establishment of a rapid response force under a European flag as has been repeated mooted in recent decades. It is an evolution of the existing military-to-military cooperation that has been undertaken by European defense ministries, and important innovations in their future cooperation. The integration of Dutch, Czech, and Romanian battalions into the German Army’s (Deutsches Heer) force structure will only increase, as will bilateral command sharing between Germany, the Netherlands, France, and others. The implementation of PESCO and a Coordinated Annual Review on Defense (CARD) are the most significant steps towards European collective security since the failure of the European Defense Community (EDC) in 1954.

After World War II, Western Europe had to primary defense questions; the Soviet Union and Germany. Initially, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did not address the German Question. West Germany was not a founding member of NATO, and what a re-armed West Germany would do was an open question. The proposed solution was the European Defense Community, which would integrate the defense policies and militaries of Western Europe, a radical move towards European Federalism decades ahead of the economic union that had just been founded as the European Coal and Steel Community. Ultimately the French legislature, led by Gaullists in the Assembly, balked at ceding so much sovereignty, despite the potential resolution to the German Question. Ultimately it was West German membership in NATO that resolved the German Question and permitted both the establishment of a West German military and the continued presence in West Germany of American, French, and British forces.

While some of the individual measures of the European Union’s PESCO and Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) may seem trivial, they represent an effort by defense policy experts to resolve some of the major deficiencies that make it impossible for NATO to function without the United States. The 2011 intervention in Libya demonstrated that even when other nations, in this case France, were the primary conductor of air strikes they could not do so without American logistical support. The United States is the logistical backbone of NATO. It possesses the airlift and sealift capacity, the tanker and AWACS aircraft, and logistical capability and expertise not necessary or present in smaller European militaries. The creation of standardized medical training, a common Staff Officer School for the officers of European militaries, and the integration of European airlift and sealift commands under CSDP are the logistical and institutional foundation upon which future military cooperation, coordination, and integration will be built. These areas represent some of the most serious stumbling blocks to both a European defense policy that credibly projects power without American support and to an effective integrated European military. While the Presidents and Prime Ministers of Europe are a long way from announcing the total integration of European defense policy and military forces, the generals, admirals, and policy officials of Europe’s armed forces have realized their greatest shortcomings and are moving to resolve these deficiencies as effectively as they can in the current political climate.

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.

Charles W. King

Independence is in the news once again as both Catalonia and the Kurdish region of Iraq have held referendums on the subject. The prospect of an independent Kurdistan is unacceptable to the governments of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and already there are rumblings of a new outbreak of violence in the region if the Kurds follow through with the independence that many of them voted for. The referendum in Catalonia has already broken out in violence, as the Spanish government deployed militarized police to attempt to prevent Catalans from voting in a referendum that the Spanish Government and Supreme Court deemed illegal.

The Catalonian push for independence from Spain raises the question of why in the 21st century a relatively autonomous region of a reasonably well off and advanced economy would seek independence. Both Catalonia and Scotland, despite possessing autonomous rule, have legitimate grievances with their respective central governments in Madrid and Westminster. They contribute significantly more to the national budget than they receive in national disbursements. Despite being profitable engines of growth for their respective economies they receive little in the way of reinvestment to ensure that they remain healthy and growing. Along with the fact that they feel like their cultural differences are ignored or suppressed by central governments, it is understandable the politicians and citizens of Catalonia, like the Scotts before them, feel like they are being exploited.

Like the legal Scottish independence referendum of 2014, the prospect of Catalonian independence would grant increased political autonomy, but an uncertain future. There exists no precedent for a member of the European Union to split, and it is unclear which, if any, European institutions an independent Catalonia would be a member of, or eligible to join. If not a member of the Euro Zone, would a Catalonian state be able to issue a currency? On what terms would it trade with the European Union? The sovereign debt crises in the wake of 2008 have empowered the European Central Bank and made European finance ministers wary. It is now common knowledge that Greece cooked their books to join the Euro, and Spain may have as well. It is unlikely that a new Catalonia would be immediately allowed join all of the European institutions that Spain is party to. The effect on the Catalonian economy while the European Union investigates the new country’s books could be devastating, even more so if the result is rejection from one or more institutions.

Prosperity in the 21st century is inextricably linked to the ability to conduct international trade. Catalonian independence from Spain could scuttle the economies of both countries. The tactics deployed by the Spanish government to repress the Catalonian referendum, in the wake of years of ignoring Catalan concerns, are heavy handed but they demonstrate the concern that the Spanish government has for the consequences of losing one of its most prosperous regions.