New world of covid

World leaders have pledged €7.4 billion (£6.4 billion) in a digital fundraiser as part of a new “international alliance” to fight COVID-19. Assembled political leaders declared their support for the World Health Organization (WHO), which will receive some of the funds alongside other organisations working on vaccine and treatment development.

Conspicuously absent so far from this new alliance, which was driven by the European Commission, was the US. This follows President Donald Trump’s decision in April to halt funding for the WHO, claiming that the organisation covered up the spread of the coronavirus in collusion with the Chinese government.

Trump’s decision is a major blow, given that the US is the WHO’s largest single funder. At a time when the WHO is desperately trying to raise a US$2 billion (£1.6 billion) global humanitarian response fund to assist the world’s poorest countries, it spells disaster.

COVID-19 reminds us of the dangers posed by global systemic risks to the protection and safeguarding of human life – the first duty of any state – in our ever more global civilisation. It also exposes a basic contradiction between an enormously complex planetary ecosystem and our still dominant form of political organisation: a fragmented system of sovereign states.

The American architect and theorist Buckminster Fuller captured this mismatch almost 40 years ago: