Macroscope | Cold War rivals fought disease together. Why not China and the US in the face of the coronavirus crisis?

It’s unrealistic to expect rivalries to disappear during a pandemic, but such issues should be set aside for now

The USSR and the US once worked together to develop a polio vaccine. Today, the US is more intent on killing off Chinese competition than working with China to avert economic depression

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A Salvation Army relief worker tends to a line at a soup kitchen in the US during the Great Depression. The IMF has warned that Covid-19 will cause ‘the worst economic fallout since the Great Depression’. Photo: AP

Published: 5:00pm, 14 Apr 2020Updated: 10:19pm, 14 Apr 2020

The world’s two largest economies, China and the United States, need to set aside national rivalries in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, a situation that already has the International Monetary Fund anticipating the “the worst economic fallout since the Great Depression”.

Beijing and Washington need to work together, but will they?

The Great Depression of the 1930s should be a cautionary example of what happens when countries fail to cooperate. It was exacerbated by countries seeking to gain national advantages by imposing tariffs on imports, such as the US’ Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which prompted retaliatory measures by other nations. International cooperation proved illusory.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect strategic rivalries to disappear during a pandemic, but such issues can be parked. Even at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the US realised it was in their economic and public health interests to work together to develop a polio vaccine in the 1950s and to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and 1970s.

On the issue of combating Covid-19 itself, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation, has already made known his view that China and the US must “come together and fight this dangerous enemy … When there are cracks at national level and global level that’s when the virus succeeds.”

But China-US cooperation is also needed in the economic sphere. There is an argument that having been the first economy to be stricken by coronavirus, China will also be the first to recover, but Chinese economic prospects will be brighter still if the world economy returns to a firmer footing.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Macroscope | Cold War rivals fought disease together. Why not China and the US in the face of the coronavirus crisis?

Macroscope | Cold War rivals fought disease together. Why not China and the US in the face of the coronavirus crisis?