The Global Order Got Over COVID-19 Pretty Quickly

Five years ago last week, the world shut down. The coronavirus that caused COVID-19 had first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. By March 2020, it had become a global pandemic leading to mass death and grinding the global economy to a halt, with some labeling it "the most disruptive global event since the Great Depression and World War 2."
Hoping to prevent those ill with the deadly respiratory virus from overwhelming the capacity of hospital systems, governments around the world sought to "flatten the curve" by mandating the closure of businesses and schools, and ordering people to stay at home. The extent to which governments took such measures varied, both between and within countries. But the overall effect was that for a few months in 2022, the earth seemed to truly stand still.
Even as the pandemic was still unfolding, analysts openly wondered whether it would "fundamentally alter globalization, democracy, capitalism, multilateralism, the predominance of US power, and other core features of the pre-COVID international system," as one collection of research papers put it.
Some asserted it would dramatically change the global order, as it offered an opportunity for China to use its ability to quickly contain its outbreak - as well as its control over the supply of personal protective equipment - to claim superiority over the U.S. and Western countries that struggled to do so.
Others saw the pandemic's impact working in the opposite direction, viewing it as China's "Chernobyl moment." By this argument, Beijing's inability to keep the virus from spreading globally would be a death blow to the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy, just as Moscow's inability to prevent and address the consequences of the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, undermined Communist Party rule in the former Soviet Union.
Regardless of exactly how the pandemic might affect the global order, the international relations scholars Hal Brands and Frank Gavin seemed to be speaking for everyone when they wrote in their 2020 book, "COVID19 and World Order," that "even after the virus is contained, the consequences will be with us for some time."
But reflecting on the pandemic five years later, it seems that its main impact on the global order was that it had no impact at all.
Rather than serving as a profound shock on the scale of the 20th century's world wars, COVID-19 appears to have come and gone. That's not to say that it wasn't meaningful or that it had no impact. To the contrary, consider how many people still make a point of getting the latest COVID-19 vaccination booster, or the fact that masking is now more common than it was in the "before times." But rather than changing the global order, COVID-19 was more a reflection and product of that order.
That it was a reflection of the current international system is most evident with respect to the global economy. As global exchange ground to halt, investors fled the markets to protect their financial assets. But in turning instead to the U.S. dollar, they underscored the greenback's already established role as the world's most prominent reserve currency and ultimate safe haven.
Additionally, the failure to contain the global spread of the virus, which was enabled by the ease with which people and products travel from one country to another these days, underscored the highly interconnected nature of the global economy. Indeed, COVID-19's spread, while staggering in scale, was not unprecedented.
Like the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, virus in 2002, and even worries over the potential spread of bird flu today, COVID-19 simply made it clear that global pandemics are an ever-present risk in today's globalized economy.
With respect to COVID-19 being a product of the international order, the rapid spread of the pandemic was also due to a failure of international cooperation. In particular, the key feature of the current global order is the emergence of China ...