Entire countries are on lockdown, state visits canceled, travel curtailed, key meetings postponed or moved online.
The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically altered international diplomacy. While the interruptions may seem to many like trivial inconveniences for a well-heeled jet set, they may have significant implications for matters of war and peace, arms control and human rights.
Already the US has canceled at least two leaders’ summits it planned to host this year and moved a Group of Seven foreign ministers online. As the global crisis threatens to alter the world balance of power, NATO’s top diplomats abandoned plans to meet in person this past week, the EU has scaled back its schedule, a major international conference on climate change in Scotland was called off, and many lower-level UN gatherings have been scrapped entirely.
Photo: AFP
If the pandemic isn’t brought under control by summer, it could jeopardize the diplomatic granddaddy of the post-World War II era, the annual high-level UN General Assembly meeting in virus-stricken New York, which this year is set to commemorate the organization’s 75th anniversary. The General Assembly may have only a fraction of the audience as an global sporting event like the already postponed Summer Olympics in Japan, but it is the diplomatic equivalent of the games.
The president of the General Assembly said last week that the 193-member world body will make a decision “in the coming month” on whether to delay the gathering, set to begin on Sept. 22.
If there is a global center of diplomacy, it’s the sprawling UN headquarters complex in New York, considered to be a top diplomatic post, if not the top, for almost all countries. It hosts many formal and informal meetings but much of the business of diplomacy takes place over coffee and drinks in the Delegates Lounge, and at lunches, dinners and the numerous nightly receptions.
Photo: AFP
The arrival of COVID-19, which has turned New York into the US epicenter of the pandemic, suddenly ended this diplomatic lifestyle that has existed for decades. As the world fights what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls “a war against a virus,” many diplomats are wondering if that life will return when the “war” is over.
Diplomacy at the UN and elsewhere has now moved to phones, emails and virtual meetings, including of the UN Security Council. With face-to-face meetings increasingly rare, diplomacy by teleconference and secure video has become the norm, offering easy outs for those unwilling or unable to engage in delicate or controversial negotiations.
In the absence or severe cutback of in-person diplomatic discussions, some fear countries such as Russia and China may seek to exploit the crisis to further weaken international institutions already stressed by the Trump administration’s hostility to them.
Some fear the virus crisis could fuel diplomatic atrophy.
“It’s making a lot of things harder,” said Ronald Neumann, a former US ambassador who is president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. “I don’t think it will stop things from getting done that people want to get done but the epidemic is likely to be an excuse rather than a cause. It’s a very convenient excuse for people not to do things they don’t want to do.”
Peace talks between Afghanistan’s warring factions, between Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the government, and long-stalled negotiations on an end to Syria’s war are all diplomatic initiatives that may have to be put on hold because of the virus. At the same time, discussions on human rights, nonvirus global health issues, climate change and trade are likely to be foregone.
Several UN events have been curtailed or scrapped: one to mark the 25th anniversary of the UN women’s conference in Beijing that adopted a 150-page road map to achieve gender equality; a session on the Law of the Sea; one on the rights of indigenous people; and the five-year review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
“Here at the UN in New York we must turn our attention to the tools we have. We must make them work better for the situation we face. And in the process, we might learn something about both what is truly important as well as the wonders of video conferences,” Norway’s UN ambassador, Mona Juul, said.
In Geneva, another hub of UN-sponsored diplomacy, the coronavirus has torpedoed some gatherings. A Human Rights Council session was suspended in mid-March “until further notice” and two plenary sessions of the Conference on Disarmament were put off.
On Monday, U.N. envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen told the Security Council that the heads of a committee created to talk about Syria’s constitution had agreed on a new agenda for talks, but added, “COVID-19 makes it impossible to convene Syrians in Geneva at present.”
Uncertainty is clouding the prospects for two big Geneva-hosted diplomatic meetings in May and June: the annual assembly in May of the World Health Organization, the UN agency that has had a front-line role in fighting coronavirus, and the top annual gathering of the International Labor Organization in June.
In Brussels on Thursday, NATO foreign ministers held the first of their two biannual meetings this year via a two-hour secure teleconference instead of the usual two-day in-person session.
The EU has been reduced to conducting its diplomacy at distance. It’s seen a multiplication in the number of meetings, most by video conference, and others with only small groups of officials, formats that diplomats complain have diluted their usefulness.
Last Thursday, European Parliament President David Sassoli presided over a virtually empty chamber in an emergency session focused on the coronavirus pandemic.
“We had to slow down, of course. But we have not stopped, because democracy cannot be suspended in the midst of such a dramatic crisis. Indeed, it is our duty, in these difficult times, to be at the service of our citizens,” he said.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
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