Daniel W. Drezner writes:

I needed to do two kinds of research when writing “Theories of International Politics and Zombies.” The first was mastering the zombie genre. The second was reading the social science literature on the politics of disasters and pandemics, because those kind of events most closely mirrored what a zombie apocalypse would look like. The conclusion I drew from that research, which I noted during the 2014 Ebola outbreak as well, was that conflicting trends would dominate the U.S. response to a emergent threat:

Recall the discussion of how domestic politics would affect counterzombie policies: government institutions would be able to act in an unconstrained manner at first, but politics would impose a stronger constraint over time. The organizational perspective offers the reverse narrative — bureaucratic competency will improve over time. If both domestic political pressures and bureaucratic politics play a role in affecting government policies, their combined effect could be doubly disastrous. Government agencies would have the most autonomy when they are most likely to make bad decisions. By the time these bureaucracies adapted to new zombie exigencies, they would face political hurdles that could hamper their performance.

This certainly happened during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. As Yuval Levin noted at the time, the Obama administration was overly confident in its ability to cope with the disease. Fortunately, bureaucracies moved quickly down the learning curve, the Obama administration got out in front of the politics, and the pandemic never got past the containment phase in the United States.

Fast forward to 2020, and some of the same dynamics seem to be at play in the Trump administration’s handling of the novel coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19. The bureaucracy — composed of the experts dedicated to solving the problem — royally screwed up its initial handling of the crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services overruled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in how infected Americans trapped in Japan were brought back to this country. According to a department whistleblower, HHS also appears to have bollixed its handling of Americans returning from Wuhan, China, leading to community spread of the virus in California.

The CDC is hardly blameless. Its initial test for the coronavirus was faulty. Furthermore, long-standing bureaucratic rivalries led to absurd moments like an FDA official getting locked out of the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters.

So let’s be clear, the experts were far from perfect in handling the initial stages of this crisis. And the politicians, as with the Ebola outbreak, also radiated a false sense of calm. In January and February, the Trump White House kept insisting all was well, even though it very clearly was not.

The result has been a passel of stories in the past 72 hours that all arrive at the same conclusion: The United States blew its window of opportunity to prepare for the pandemic that is now about to happen. [Continue reading…]