It isn’t just totalitarian regimes but also populist governments, imperialist forces, non-state actors and anti-globalist forces that are attempting to use the pandemic to legitimise illiberal forms of governance, economic protectionism, ethnonationalism, xenophobia and even terrorism.

In the aftermath of World War I, America reluctantly and ambivalently agreed to abandon its policy of isolationism and engage in global affairs when the then US president Woodrow Wilson founded the League of Nations on January 10, 1920, whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. The precursor to today’s United Nations Organisation, and created upon Wilsonian Idealism, the league met a disastrous fate when it could not prevent the advent of World War II. This failure was largely the result of America’s conspicuous non-participation in the league that it had worked so hard to create. This lesson served US president Franklin D Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill well when, at the culmination of World War II, the United Nations was created with similar aims of preserving security and world peace under American leadership and participation.

Irrational fears

US President Donald Trump’s journey from the Trump Tower in New York to the White House in Washington, DC can be attributed to the rise of the far-right, which exploited the seething xenophobia, racism, economic vulnerabilities and irrational fears of the masses to produce a populist wave that ensured Trump’s victory. Once there, Trump has been quite vociferous about how he wants the US to play a diminished role on the global stage. He has used multilateral treaties and organisations as scapegoats for his political base as reasons for their fears and anguish.

It should be lucid to everyone that meeting global challenges of any nature requires international cooperation and understanding. However, the current administration has been using the pandemic to further fuel xenophobia with Trump calling the Covid-19 virus a 'Chinese virus'. Washington is also using the pandemic to press for decoupling itself economically from China. The pandemic is cited as being an example of how cooperation with China has failed, which is simply wrong especially while considering a lot of areas where cooperation with China has served US interests. Deeper economic engagement with China helped the US to dismantle the Soviet Union and win the Cold War. It helped the US to build a far cheaper and efficient supply chain for its global corporate behemoths like Apple and Microsoft.

China has been involved in a protracted maritime tiff with its Southeast Asian nations to assert control over the South China Sea. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, China seems to have decided to leverage the status quo as a strategic opportunity to do just that. While other Southeast Asian countries are grappling with the pandemic, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy and other forces which were unscathed by the virus are flexing their muscles in the sea by holding major military drills, consolidating control of disputed features, and most recently, overawing smaller Southeast Asian claimants.

In April 2020, China sank a Vietnamese fishing boat and detained the eight crew members in the overlapping waters each claim off the Paracel Islands. The Chinese Coast Guard held the crew on a nearby island and apprehended two nearby Vietnamese vessels that had sought to rescue their countrymen.

At home in Nepal, the government is in the throes of making an amendment to the 2015 Constitution to change the country's map to include an area which India also claims. The move follows the construction by India of a road in the north-western part of Nepal without its permission or participation. Lipulekh, where the tri-junction between Nepal, China and India is situated, has been transformed into a battlefield by India to meet its unhealthy imperialist proclivities and aims in its neighbourhood. India would do well to remember its past history of cruel colonisation by the British Raj and its current status of being the world’s largest democracy and act as one where it promotes the democratic order.

A glaring example of attempts to exploit the pandemic for power by authoritarian leaders can be witnessed in Hungary that has curbed civil liberties and freedom. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose party enjoys a majority in the Hungarian parliament, used it to secure an indefinite state of emergency allowing him to rule by decree and incarcerate any journalist for up to five years for disseminating news deemed as 'false' by his government. Since it is his government that gets to define what is true and what is false in the news, Orban effectively has given himself the power to censor the press single-handedly.

In a similar vein, the Algerian government saw Covid-19 as a blessing in disguise since the advent of the virus provided it with a convenient pretext to limit political demonstrations for genuine democratic reform, which have been ongoing there for a while.

International terrorists

International terrorist outfits like ISIS are using the pandemic as well to try to expand and carry out offensive attacks on governments and citizens who are vulnerable to the pandemic and have spread their resources thin to contain the virus. Violent extremism continues to flourish in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Philippines, where three years ago ISIS had seized the southern Philippine city of Marawi, the only Muslim majority city on the island. ISIS organisers are now exploiting the current situation to recruit a new generation of militants that security officials fear are poised to strike again.

The scourge of Covid-19 has been baptism by fire for all of us when it comes to truly understanding and appreciating how interdependent and connected we are in the world today. Problems today can no longer only be local as with the seamless ways in which all our lives are connected, they always have the potential to transfigure themselves into global concerns.