The World Health Organisation (WHO) is a horse that’s been flogged to death. Then it’s been turned over and flogged again. Twice. Now it is time for Mr Dutton to put down the whip and step away.
The WHO’s situation is a result of the United Nations system being exhausted. Like the League of Nations before it, the UN has lost its way. Whereas the League was unable to stand up to Mussolini and Hitler, dictators and other anti-democratic leaders have managed to white-ant the UN from the inside.
The UN is a useful idiot’s vehicle for lawfare, advocating for anything and everything except liberal democracies. If you have ever attended a large-scale UN event in recent years, you will know that the organisation couldn’t boil an egg, let alone support a rules-based world order.
My personal experience of a UN conference in Europe reads like a joke:
How many UN staff does it take to change a light-bulb?
Two hours later: [Cue tumbleweeds]
Four hours later: [Cue person with microphone] Why are all of you here? The light-bulb is in another room. [Cue people moving into a room that is fully lit, then giving up and going home questioning the UN’s efficacy].
Globally, governments trusted the WHO to advise on how to deal with the Covid pandemic. Not only are Western economies still suffering from lockdowns and other approaches that nobody is able to adequately justify, but the WHO proved itself incompetent in fulfilling its core purpose.
If the current generation of Australian citizens experience another pandemic, I doubt they will be so compliant as last time. And the WHO would have zero credibility.
How did it get to this stage?
In a post-pandemic academic book I edited with some colleagues, I argued that attempts to create a rules-based world order went through periods of stability that were interrupted by external events that disrupted the status quo.
Four major events in the last century have disrupted the rules-based world order. While there have been many other crises, the first world war, the second world war, the explosion of global capitalism, and the Covid pandemic were all crises that changed the rules-based world order forever.
Obviously, I am oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, but by the time each of these crises occurred, the status quo was no longer tenable. The existing institutions that had worked for the previous era were no longer relevant to the next generation. The aftereffects of the pandemic are what we are dealing with now.
Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist who was once referred to as the ‘neocon’s neocon’ (neoconservative – put simply someone who thinks democracy should be established in non-democracies by military force), believed that by the late 1990s, global capitalism and liberalism (as in liberty and the sovereignty of the individual, not that Biden-Harris modern communist variant) had won the day.
In a clever jab at Karl Marx, Fukuyama infamously said that it was the ‘end of history’. Regrettably, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 proved him wrong, and the rules-based world order, albeit strained from time to time, appeared to be navigable and useful for liberal democracies.
A few years before Woke entered full swing, Fukuyama revamped his world view. I attended an Australian online event during the pandemic where he stated that ‘identity politics’ was the greatest threat democracy. Identity politics and terms like ‘intersectionality’ had been around for years, but not as prolifically as we know them now.
Identity politics is not really a crisis in that it was created by liberal democratic insiders. Rather, it is a condition that has been pandered to by the UN system in relation to Western liberal democracies while non-democracies have not been held to the same ludicrous standards of inanity.
The pandemic was an opportunity for governments to show their competence. Instead, Australians ended up with Danistan and other anomalies. Mask-wearing became a symbol of identity politics. There are even some who are still panicked by Covid.
Years ago, the academy was beset by Trump Derangement Syndrome. A few are cautiously optimistic about Trump’s impact on Australian politics after four years of weakness by the Biden-Harris catastrophe and the crippling cost of living crisis the Albanese government crafted for us through their sheer arrogance in thinking they could defy economic principles.
To be sure, nobody can afford another three years of the worst government in Australian history. At least we have Trump if we have to sell the farm.
The pandemic revealed what I refer to as the ‘institutional exhaustion’ of the rules-based world order. China and Russia need it to develop their governance capacity. The rest of the world needs it to make sense of the interaction between some 194 countries and eight billion people. But it is easy to forget that the UN, and in particular, the WHO, are funded by the United States.
Without the support of the US, the UN is unable to function. Responding to Trump’s executive order to withdraw the US from the WHO, WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote to his staff:
“This announcement has made our financial situation more acute, and we know it has created significant concern and uncertainty for the WHO workforce…” He stressed that the United Nations’ health agency regretted the decision by the leader of the US – by far the agency’s biggest donor – and hoped “the new administration will reconsider it”.
Dr Ghebreyesus can be seen partly as a product of former US President Bill Clinton. Indeed, Clinton referred to Ghebreyesus as a ‘rock star’ and supported his campaign to improve hospital care in Ethiopia. Ghebreyesus was Ethiopia’s Minister of Health from 2005-12 and no doubt Clinton’s enthusiasm helped Ghebreyesus to secure the role of Director-General of WHO in 2017. Ghebreyesus oversaw the WHO during the pandemic.
One of the most interesting aspects of Ghebreyesus’ experience as Ethiopian Health Minister was his attempt to secure assistance from the US to improve overall hospital care, as opposed to asking for support to tackle a specific disease. In terms of heath policy, horizontal policy refers to general approaches such as improving hospital care, whereas vertical policy refers to grappling with a particular disease or virus as in Covid. Ghebreyesus was all about horizontal policy until the pandemic.
The old saying, ‘I would have liked to be a fly on the wall to hear what they said…’ may well be modernised to being a ‘mozzie on the wall’.
Let’s not forget, our domestic health overlords want to release genetically modified mosquitoes into Far North Queensland (my old stomping ground) to reduce the prevalence of the mosquito-borne disease, dengue fever. Such a large-scale experiment would require significant effort in obtaining ethics approval. I’d rather we asked Paul Hogan’s Nigel to put a mozzie into an oxygen tent containing those involved in the project as a human trial first, just to be sure.
Trump’s call on the WHO, if it goes ahead, will at least shake up an institution that has lost its way. It may even be a good thing if the WHO disappears, and a new institution is created to take its place. It wouldn’t be the first time in the last century that international institutions were revamped. Which brings me back to Australia.
While leftist journalists are attacking Mr Dutton as Trump-lite, it is surely better to be Trump-lite than Labor-lite. Labor-lite will only give us more Labor and nobody except Woke millionaires can afford that again.
The WHO, like the UN and the League of Nations before it, is not infallible. Rather than commit us to the whims of a horse that has been flogged to death, Mr Dutton could do worse than to step away from the irredeemable WHO before the next election.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is a political scientist and political commentator. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILTA), and a Member of the Royal Society of NSW. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, and a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. Michael is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon and was appointed to the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council in 2022. All opinions in this article are the author’s own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other person or organisation.
