The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

32 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Some of the most telling work is what they’ve done with Ebola in the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo in the past three years. In eastern Congo, in an active war zone, there has been an Ebola outbreak. It has been contained through a part- nership between the Congolese government, WHO, the wider humanitarian community and, most importantly, the frontline communities themselves. What is most notable is that there is no big U.S. deployment, no large CDC deployment. The U.S. involvement and posture has been exponentially smaller than it was in West Africa. That is partly because the security environ- ment is so forbidding, and WHO is willing to take risks the U.S. government would not in deploying its own personnel. At its peak WHO had 800 to 900 international personnel deployed into eastern Congo and hundreds more Congolese staff working with their operation. The fact that they could do that meant the world could still contain this outbreak even without the state-based capacity of the U.S. and the U.K. that had been deployed during Ebola in 2014. So I think the investment has paid off in a substantial way. JB: In your view, what should the role of U.S. diplomacy be in protecting the American people’s safety and well-being? JK: Without getting too political in this forum, I think there’s a real contrast in the level and trajectory of global engagement by the United States today in comparison to the Ebola outbreak in 2014; you get nowhere near the sense that the United States is attempting to lead a global movement on this today. The United States seems much more concerned about its own domestic issues. For instance, just yesterday [May 4] there was a global pledging conference for vaccine development and the U.S. refused to take part. That’s just extraordinary. It’s indicative of the fact that the posture the U.S. is showing the world is an “America First” posture, and while that’s a questionable signal for the world in the best of times, it’s just not feasible for a pandemic. A pandemic does not have a passport; it does not respect borders. If your priority is focused on containment at home, for a country like the United States whose economy depends on trade and engagement with the rest of the world—even from a narrow self-interested point of view, in order for us to get back to the kind of economic prosperity we all urgently want to get back to, we need to end this at a global level, not just domestically. We will not end it domestically unless we end it at a global level. We don’t see that fundamental insight reflected at the global level, which puts our diplomats in a bit of a tight spot. China is making a big show of donating PPE to all sorts of countries, even European countries, at the very same moment that the U.S. government is going around competing with those countries and trying to buy PPE out from under their noses. We will be suffering for years, if not decades, from the reputational damage we’re incurring right now. It’s difficult for frontline diplomats to know best how to handle that. What the country you’re in wants, and what they have been conditioned to expect from all past emergencies, is U.S. leadership and U.S. support. Instead, what they’re seeing is U.S. retrenchment and U.S. competition. JB: If you were briefing at a high level within the U.S. govern- ment today, what would your main talking points be? JK: The way that we will defeat this outbreak is by means of fundamental public health measures taken to scale. To defeat this takes a global effort. There are times when American excep- tionalism is good and times when it can hamper us. I think what we’re seeing here is a reluctance to learn from and apply the measures that have been used in other places. The countries that have done the best on this are those that acted early and utilized aggressive public health tactics like testing, contact tracing, targeted quarantine and isolation. Coun- tries that did that early and robustly are the ones that brought the outbreak under control quickly and then were able to begin reinitiating their economies. We are not learning from and applying the lessons from other parts of the world. There are some states that are trying to do that, but it’s a hard thing to do at a state level. It has to be done and led at the federal level. We need to be learning the lessons from the rest of the world and acknowledging and being humble. We have a hard time being humble on the world stage, but we need to say we have done worse than just about any other devel- oped country, and we’ve done worse in part because we’re not applying the lessons. There’s a playbook here, and it’s an at-scale application of We are not learning from and applying the lessons from other parts of the world. There are some states that are trying to do that, but it’s a hard thing to do at a state level. It has to be done and led at the federal level.