For context: the likely correct foreign policy in the Cold War was to build internal alliance strength through liberal government and free trade, and embargo/freeze out the enemy. One certainly could argue, especially at the end of the Second World War when the Sino-Soviets had few nukes, that a more correct policy would have been to attack them or their proxies/Eastern Europe/Indochina/etc. and further weaken their capability to cause general world trouble.
There was a school of thought, supported by the realizations of the Soviets and Communist Chinese regarding the course their revolutions had taken, that an alternative approach of engagement also could be effective. If the tipping point in the downfall of the Gang of Four and the fall of the Iron Curtain was the realization that these societies had fallen far behind in effective military strength because of gross economic deficiency, then the idea would be to force this realization/tipping point and thereby undermine any long-term illiberal and military aggressive agenda. In other words, you win the hearts and minds of the enemy elites and/or population by showing them the dead end and make it impossible for them to muster effective resistance.
The assertion of this title, the “obviously correct”, is because the major risks/drawbacks of the engagement strategy were realized, and one of the biggest damages was biological in nature, and the risk of future biological damages is high. Speaking generally, an engagement strategy:
- Opens you up to the similar attacks on ideology
- Enables theft of technology and military secrets on both sides
- Facilitates general sabotage activities
- Typically benefits both countries economically
- Does not immediately change bad (or good) behavior – that happens later
In the event:
- The ideology of financial expedience infested Europe (petrochemicals from Russia) and America (cheap stuff with slave labor from mainland China and its vassals), while totalitarian Beijing East Asia did not experience fundamental change; the Russians always were well aware of their corrupt elites
- Much technology transfer went in favor of Beijing East Asia
- Direct sabotage in the form of poisonings and attacks (Russia) and the infiltration of Beijing mafia agents in the West for threats, attempted or successful kidnappings, etc. The extent of American sabotage is not so obvious, so I won’t comment on it.
- Probably BEA got the best of the economic growth, but Russia and the American Empire also benefited from the additional labor pool and resource availability
- The bad behavior didn’t change over decades in either Russia or mainland China (contrary data to the fundamental assertion of the strategy); the Russian elites ordered new invasions, while the Beijing mafia betrayed their treaty agreements (Hong Kong), seized new territory in the South China Sea and India, and continued internal slavery
and in particular, the bad behavior now includes engineering of bioweapons, as in all probability, some form of this engineering for some purpose was the genesis of the ancestral/Wuhan variant of COVID. The free trade posture and exchange of people and goods makes such weapons trivially easy to deploy. Even if you consider (it’s possible, but without chronologically specific evidence) that the ancestral variant arose naturally, the Beijing mafia covered it up, which may have had the similar effect as if they had a deliberate campaign to spread a bioweapon. Since the Beijing mafia also covered up SARS-CoV-1 in the 2000s, we must consider that the frequency of attack, even in the naturally occurring case, is on the order of once every 15-20 years, and we will incur ~$20 trillion USD in damages when this happens – in addition to human costs that easily could be on the order of millions of lives lost. The frequency of these massive losses is far too high to ignore, as you might consider with e.g. the 1918 flu pandemic (though a lot of that spread was caused by war activity, not really avoidable).
On top of the historical estimation factors outlined: since at least one obvious blueprint (COVID vectors) for launching effective bioweapons exists, and the technical means to engineer biothreats continues to improve in effectiveness and reduce in cost, trading vulnerability to attack for the opportunity to undermine and convert foreign enemies (or just poor countries) to our way of life no longer can be considered a possibly omniscient optimal approach. As domestic actors also can use this blueprint and the improving technical means for engineering bioweapons, foreign embargo must be combined with domestic threat reduction.
The key actions of this policy are:
- Subject all domestic and allied laboratories to periodic, and random/unannounced, inspection, to ensure the practice of biosafety and limit the opportunities for bioweapons manufacture (practically, the means to engineer are so straightforward to an ordinary practitioner that we should not consider that we will be effective at preventing it).
- Cut off almost all physical foreign interactions with enemy countries, to include business and diplomatic visits, and the vast majority of imports. Only certain bulk commodity imports could be considered low enough risk to be worthwhile (and would have to be subject to the similar cost-benefit analysis of the import, e.g. with Russian titanium).
- Refugees have to be thoroughly examined and quarantined for months.
- Allied countries would exist in one of two customs regimes: the free-travel zone, which resembles the pre-COVID free interaction, and the quarantined zone, which requires expensive customs controls and quarantines.
- To be in the free-travel zone, countries must submit to the similar inspection of laboratories, and in general enforce their borders and the law.
- To be in the quarantined zone, borders must be enforced against the enemy, but the rule of law/biodefense protocols may not prevail within the whole country. Items still could be imported, but they must come from a sub-zone or production line within that country that does have biodefense controls. Even so, those people and outputs exchanged must undergo complete customs inspection and quarantine protocols.
- In either zone, the similar trade restrictions apply with allies. In other words, you are in the biodefended alliance, or you are with the enemy.
- Wildlife movement in and out of the biodefended zone has to be controlled, to include shooting on sight.
While the outlines of this policy in the present situation obviously are valid, I also wish to address a larger question: in which situations is this policy optimal? Will this policy be perpetual, or is its correctness strongly tied to geopolitical factors such as the relative hostility and development level of certain countries?
Given the history of drug prohibition and the ease of information transfer in the 21st century, as well as our desired state of labor market tightness (therefore not a lot of people to be poking around buildings looking for unauthorized labs), we should be especially critical of our projected additional benefit from these measures. It’s easy to see that ultimately this approach would cost many billions of dollars a year. That means the benefit clearly must be much more than billions of dollars per year.
In the below discussion, there is an important caveat to the above: in real life, we shouldn’t be trading with Beijing East Asia and Russia anyway, because they commit many other non-biologically-related crimes against other countries. So the current effective cost of implementing a biodefended alliance is much lower in real life than it would be in an “world peace” situation. However, because I wish to present a generally applicable argument, I am considering that the trading activity of Russia and Beijing East Asia/free trade in world peace is the economic baseline.
Speaking broadly, only a few classes of improvements have the potential for many billions of dollars of benefit:
- Fundamental advances in technology
- Major efficiency increases due to process improvement, better balancing of safety and reliability, reduction of costly overheads, switching between market and command economies, etc.
- Reduction of a major cost like smallpox, where the size of the cost therefore gives the indication of the potential benefit
- Sheer survival/avoidance of war or other significant conflicts
The proposed program of control only can benefit from reduction of major cost, and war-related considerations. The reduction of major cost is not that obvious: while for example COVID-19 will cost the world on the order of tens of trillions of dollars, most of that is one-time cost and therefore over decades, you would be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. Moreover, as an example, the 3 major variants of COVID – Wuhan/ancestral, Indian/delta, and South African/omicron – the infectious capability, biological targets, and damage to victims varied widely. Against the Wuhan variant, one could consider (because it happened e.g. Taiwan, New Zealand) that the above program would save almost all of the cost. However, the omicron variant would have been almost impossible to contain, and so you could not consider that your actual mitigation would be the hundreds of billions of dollars a year; it might be close to zero, depending on whether there were a wild reservoir. You also would consider that engineered bioweapons would tend to be on the more contagious end of the spectrum. As such, we only can consider the cost savings to be in the tens or maybe low hundreds of billions of dollars per year, which is not obviously offsetting the extreme disruption, red tape, and surveillance costs in an world peace situation.
The other point is the avoidance of war. If you considered that Beijing East Asia were a neutral that had launched a bioweapon that killed millions of people, and if they failed to take responsibility/war crime trials/reparations etc., you certainly would wage war on them, and the cost of that war certainly would be on the order of tens of trillions of dollars. We also should apply reduction factors: not all threats will have originated from nation-state nefarious activity; in the extreme case, it could be one biologist working in a home lab, and the cost of that corrective action has no significance in a trillion dollar calculation. There’s also the case where a generally nefarious or irresponsible actor takes the responsibility, and in that case you would not have incurred war costs anyway.
For completeness we should note the possibility that humanity will be permanently altered/maimed/killed by these bioweapons activities; however, specifically to the enhanced control regime outlined above, it is not at all clear that the enhanced regime, vs. basic biosurveillance and public health policies, would add so much more benefit. That’s because if something is so wildly contagious and damaging to germline that 10% or more of the population could be maimed, you would not consider that it would have the “silent spread” capability that you saw with COVID, that makes screening and quarantine infeasible. You could have a more targeted payload that operated only on certain genetic or other biological factors, but that would not be a whole of humanity level threat.
Hence I believe the cost benefit calculation summarizes to:
- (Yearly) Many billions USD to operate the inspections regime
- (Yearly) Certainly hundreds of billions and probably low-single-digit trillions USD of economic loss per year for a typical slice of the world economy, being isolated from the rest, in a very-long-run view (not today)
- (Amortized yearly) Tens or maybe hundreds of billions USD from the avoidance of certain (not all) pandemics that kill large numbers of people
- (Amortized yearly) Hundreds of billions USD from the reduced number of wars due to bioweapons attacks
- (Amortized yearly) Some slop relating to existential threats to humanity or fundamental changes in society
and so the correctness of the policy critically depends on the frequency of bioweapons development, and the good will of world governments. The amortized costs do not obviously exceed the enforcement and isolation costs, but as the number of developed bioweapons/bioweapons activity/virology research etc. increases, the cumulative impact of those activities will overcome the policy operation cost, which primarily is the isolationist foreign policy (the inspection costs do increase linearly, but the coefficients are small). Of course, the economic loss from isolation greatly is reduced if the country is hostile.
Hence, if countries behave well, the benefit of the policy relies on difficult to quantify tail considerations, and you strongly would consider discontinuing or scaling it back; but if they behave badly, the policy of biodefended alliance rapidly becomes correct.