Interview with CRI’s The Beijing Hour on Germany and France Quitting WHO Reform Talks

Shane Bigham interviews Josef Gregory Mahoney

August 12, 2020

Podcast: https://chinaplus.cri.cn/podcast/list/17 (this segment around the 17:00 minute mark)

Transcript of Full Remarks

Q1: What are the key issues to be addressed to reform the World Health Organization?

Almost everyone agrees that WHO desperately needs reform. Most experts describe three overarching problems.

The first is how WHO is organized and managed. It’s decisions are too sensitive to the political positions of individual member states. Too often what should be a relatively straightforward scientific solution is instead waylaid by competing political concerns, security interests, and so on.

The second is how it’s funded. Contributions from members states are voluntary and frequently impacted a country’s economic performance and shifting political winds. But more than this, WHO’s funding level is too low, by some estimates only a third of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The third is its focus and mandate. It has numerous priorities that more or less span the whole spectrum of human health. On the one hand, it tries to do too much with too little money and an ineffective management structure. On the other hand, member states have different needs and objectives that can be difficult to balance. For example, developed nations tend to be more focused on chronic diseases like cancer and hypertension, while developing countries are more concerned with infectious diseases.

But given the criticism WHO received for how it responded to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and given the challenges it’s faced more recently with COVID-19—which has devastated both the developed and developing world—we might see a new consensus for reforms that help it respond better to infectious disease outbreaks... if, of course, we can find consensus and funding to even carry reforms forward at all.

Q2: What impacts from these reform do you expect to see on efforts to uphold multilateralism?

Multilateralism as we’ve known it over the past several decades is currently under attack in three ways.

First, while several nations have worked against multilateralism, most consequentially the US has done so increasingly over the past several years. The US has done this to create more flexibility for unilateral actions and, in the case of bilateral relations, to concentrate American power head-to-head, to resist the inevitable dilution of individual national power that takes place in multilateral organizations, which whatever their systemic biases and favoritism, tend towards equity.

And by the way, many experts argue that WHO historically has been too sensitive to the US, even to the point of being US-centric. Several observers have pointed to this irony following Trump’s unfounded allegations against WHO for colluding with China on the outbreak’s origins and initial responses to the same.

Second, with increased globalization, with new rising powers and new challenges, several of the old multilateral organizations, including WHO, have undermined themselves with poor performance, even without US attempts to weaken them.

Third, given performance problems and US attempts to both undermine and at times still dominate organizations, other nations have been forced to rely on groups like WHO despite not being able to rely on them, creating a downward spiral that can sometimes makes matters worse.

As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates, an effective multilateral WHO is vital, not only to get the current crisis under control but to prepare for future outbreaks. Multilateralism is really the only way at this point for dealing with global outbreaks, but substantial, difficult reforms, especially given America’s role as a spoiler, will be necessary to make WHO actually capable of meeting such needs.

Q3: How can China and Europe better cooperate on this issue?

While the US formally notified WHO in July that it’s quitting the organization, this actually sets the clock for a final year of membership. So technically, the US is still a member, and somewhat paradoxically, according to reports, trying to dominate ongoing meetings where reforms are being discussed with such a heavy hand that Germany and France have quit the discussions.

And by the way, this is also paradoxical given the complete disaster of America’s response to the outbreak in the US. I’m sure ministers in Berlin and Paris are thinking, you know, before the US tries to tell the world how to fix its public health problems, it ought to reflect on its own failures and needs for reform.

But more than this, European countries face several existential choices at this time. On the one hand, most are dependent on the US for security and in some cases trade. They cannot afford to alienate the US. Their ability to pursue policies out of step with Washington’s interests are harder and harder to realize, and the Trump Administration knows this and is exploiting it as much as it can.

On the other hand, if they stick with the US, they have to abandon not only their concerns about global progress, they likewise fall victim to American efforts to undermine multilateralism. We have to remember of course that the entire EU project is designed as a multilateral solution to big power aggression. With Brexit, with the US undermining the EU and making unilateral decisions with NATO, the EU is being forced to choose, not just between the US and China, but between the US and itself.

For now, China needs to work hard on repairing its image and relations in Europe, which have been hard hit in many ways over the past year. It needs to avoid getting caught between competing European interests. It needs to find more substantial ways to deliver on Belt-Road projects that have lagged to date, to the disappointment of several European countries. And above all, China needs to avoid the tendency of other great powers that see opportunity in the EU’s demise.