04 June 2020
Good Old Uncle Sam
A breaking reed?
By John Watson
Sometimes it is the straws which you have to watch. There is a lot of alarming news coming from the US at the moment: riots across the land; social fragmentation on a scale not seen since the 1960s; a president who talks about White House security rather than showing leadership; a confused response to Covid. All worrying enough to be sure but in the end a distraction from something which should be giving us pause, the proposal that the US will withdraw its funding from the World Health Organisation on the basis that that organisation has rejected its proposals for reform.
There are two elements to the funding of the WHO. Each country pays an “assessed amount” on a formula which reflects its wealth and population but, in addition to this, there are very large voluntary contributions. These may be from member states or from rich people or institutions (the Gates foundation gave $531 million to the 2018/2019 two-year budget cycle) but are often tied to specific projects such as the eradication of polio or HIV. Over the budget cycle the assessed contribution of the US was $237 million and its voluntary contribution $656 million, out of a total budget of $4.8 billion. That is a large proportion but Mr Trump’s beef is not so much at the amount of the expenditure as with the fact that the US as a single member does not have influence in proportion to it, and indeed finds the WHO favouring China, whose assessed contribution is $76 million over the two year cycle and which gives little in addition to that.
The complaint then is that the US does not get the influence which its contribution justifies and one can see how President Trump comes to that conclusion. That is in contrast with the view his predecessors took, when the World Health Organisation was set up in 1948, that the US would contribute to the project without requiring proportionate influence, rather in the way that a rich taxpayer pays more tax without expecting more than one vote at a general election. The US is less generous than it was.
The purpose of this article is not to criticise the US’s change of attitude but rather to look at its practical implications if applied elsewhere. There are a number of areas where the US is expected to bear a high burden because it can afford to do so and the obvious one is the defence of the West. Look at Wikipedia’s list of defence spending as a proportion of GDP, and you find the US at 3.4%, as against Britain at 1.7%, France at 1.9% and Germany at 1.3%. That may be okay as far as it goes but at a time when the US is questioning where they are being taken for a ride one can see that figures like these could be used as an excuse for disengagement.
There unfortunately is the rub. We in the West have got used to relying on an American security blanket to defend our way of life, preferring to put the emphasis on improving the way we actually live. Better health services, finer roads, improve labour conditions, more holidays, we have no trouble in investing in these but when it comes to defending our way of life we are apt to skimp and save, relying on Uncle Sam over the water. What though if the changes of mood there meant that we had to fend for ourselves? How well-placed are we to do it?
As a campaigner for membership of the European Community in 1975, I had hopes that it would fill this gap. No, not some neo-colonialist or world dominating body, but at least a coherent block strong enough to stand up for its citizens and the way of life to which they aspired. That would have involved some sort of common foreign policy and, ultimately, a merger of military command. Combined with easy-going internal policies it would have presented the world with a sort of hedgehog, relaxed on the inside but not the sort of thing you would want to attack. Unfortunately it has come out the other way round with no progress on the external front and internal uniformity zealously imposed through the European Court of Justice.
Regrettable? Perhaps, but it is far too late to do much about it. Our own path is an independent one now and the difficulties of Eastern members with migration issues are unlikely to promote harmony over foreign policy. The security of Western Europe has to be left to NATO or to any other treaty organisation which may replace it and, as they chart the way forward, the European powers have to keep in mind how their defences would work if, for one reason or another, the US should turn isolationist. Proper planning will certainly need money, but if the Covid epidemic teaches us anything, it is that economizing on contingency planning on the basis that the contingencies may not occur is a very dangerous policy indeed.
