Global Archive

The Wuhan coronavirus, now officially named COVID-19, reveals how vulnerable humanity remains to virulent pathogens. A century after the devastating Spanish flu pandemic, public health officials are scrambling to prevent this latest plague—which as of Feb. 24 had infected more than 79,000 people in at least 29 countries, most of them in China—from becoming another pandemic. As they do, it’s worth taking a step back to consider the stubborn staying power of infectious disease. Far from an anomaly, this outbreak is the shape of things to come. Humanity is currently experiencing its fourth great wave of infectious disease. The first […]

Decades of technological advances have made drones readily available not only to governments, but to non-state groups, commercial actors and hobbyists as well, for everything from military strikes to package deliveries. The United States last month used an MQ-9 Reaper drone to assassinate Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Soleimani. In September, an attack on Saudi oil facilities utilizing drones and cruise missiles temporarily cut Saudi oil production in half. Even smaller, unarmed drones can cause massive disruptions. In December 2018, London’s Gatwick Airport, the second-busiest in Britain, shut down for 36 hours after a drone was spotted nearby, causing hundreds […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Richard Gowan is filling in for Candace Rondeaux this week. When former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar turned 100 last month, his current successor, Antonio Guterres, sent a congratulatory message stating that “I have often reflected on your example and experience for inspiration and guidance.” This sounds like a standard diplomatic pleasantry, but there may have been a more to it than that. As U.N. chief from 1982 to 1991, Perez de Cuellar, a former Peruvian diplomat, was intimately involved in ending Cold War conflicts from Afghanistan to Central America. Guterres, since his appointment […]

The fast-spreading new coronavirus that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan is, at its most immediate level, a public health crisis. But it is also much more than that. As governments struggle to contain the epidemic, the virus is already having economic ramifications in China and around the world. That’s the second level of its impact. And as the epidemic threatens to become a pandemic, and the speed of the contagion exceeds the number of cases of the 2003 SARS outbreak, there is a third level of consequences that has received far less attention: This coronavirus could leave a […]

The rapid spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, which the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency last Thursday, is immediately testing the multilateral system’s capacity to respond to a pandemic. As of Jan. 31, the virus had infected a reported 9,720 people in China and around 100 more in 20 other countries and territories, killing at least 213. The deepening health crisis underscores that we live in an epidemiologically interdependent world, in which outbreaks anywhere can hopscotch around the world at jet aircraft speeds. Preserving global public health depends in large part on three things: timely and credible action […]