Ebola continues to ravage eastern Congo, slowly spreading from isolated river villages to district towns and soon perhaps to Goma, with a million people, Congo’s sixth largest city. Already the second largest Ebola outbreak in history, the situation may soon get much worse. Ignorance, conspiracy theories, and poor governance makes the existence of a new vaccine irrelevant if it cannot get to those who need it in time.
It’s easy to write off the outbreak. Congo is hardly an American national interest, and Ebola outbreaks are not infrequent in tropical zones in Africa. That said, the past decades’ globalization raises exponential risks. Close to a half million Congolese traveled by air in 2015. Poor air infrastructure in Africa makes it more likely that travelers will transit through large African cities like Addis Ababa, Casablanca, or Johannesburg, or European hubs.
Just two decades into this century, there have already been a number of pandemic scares: SARS, MERS, the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, and Zika, not to mention localized cholera epidemics.
While the aid industry might urge greater activism (and investment in their own organizations) to launch Band-Aid missions to treat the immediate problem, pandemics are as much a symptom of poor governance as they are medical emergencies.
A Modern Contagion, a brilliant new book by George Washington University professor Amir Afkhami, delves into the phenomenon with an in-depth examination of Iran’s efforts to combat influenza in the early 20th century. Whereas epidemics and pandemics would periodically ravage Iran prior to that time, the situation began to change for the better at the beginning of the 20th century. What turned the tide wasn’t so much better medicine, but better governance.
Iran’s 1905-1911 Constitutional Revolution (inspired in part by the 1905 Russian Revolution) ushered in a period in which the shah was, at least for a time, accountable for his actions to an empowered parliament. Eventually, Cossack brigade officer Reza Khan ousted the weak Qajar monarch and established his own Pahlavi dynasty which would rule Iran from 1925 until his son’s ouster in 1979. While critics of the Pahlavi dynasty abound — ironically today more outside Iran than inside — and it is easy to fault Reza Shah and Muhammad Reza Shah’s human rights records, the two leaders did strengthen Iran’s infrastructure, water systems, and created a national vaccination program, the type of project that requires a high degree of organization, infrastructure, and a government desire to invest in human capital.
Iran’s shahs were not entirely altruistic: Epidemics have their own history of impact on governance and state security. Afkhami convincingly shows that cholera epidemics in Iran drove mass political movements such as the 1891-1892 tobacco protests and contributed to the Constitutional Revolution, hitherto in the academic literature attributed to anti-colonial and nationalist sentiments or, in a stretch of fact and fancy imaginable only in the modern academy, even feminism.
But what does this history mean for U.S. policy and the present day?
Many realists prize stability and security. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” is the common refrain. If that is true, then forfeiting good governance and capacity-building programs, such as those in which the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute engage, is counterproductive. Not only does good governance benefit ordinary people, but it can also hamper pandemics and other destabilizing events like famine. Both pandemics and famines are barometers of the quality of government, rather than random events which undermine it.
SARS spread rapidly in Asia in part because Chinese opacity prevented information-sharing and coordination (especially where Taiwan was concerned). Despite the fear-mongering of climate change activists, while drought is a natural phenomenon, famine is essentially manmade and usually preventable. At the height of the 1980s Horn of Africa famine, for example, Ethiopia had enough food to provide for its population; the problem was a lack of roads in the affected areas and capacity to distribute supplies. That Ethiopians died en masse was less an accident of geography than the result of an incompetent, anti-market Marxist government.
Beginning in the 1970s with the crises arising out of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda, aid and humanitarian organizations began to form their own lobby. Rather than address events like the Ebola crisis in Eastern Congo on an ad hoc basis, they sought continuous funding and perpetual, ever-shifting missions. Their staff traveled the world, treating symptoms but never addressing root problems. Advocates of aid reform, however, are right to question the utility of behemoth, bloated organizations like Oxfam, CARE, or a host of U.N. organizations which respond to emergencies but too often ignore or paper over the poor governance which catalyzed them.
With yet another epidemic ravaging a third world country, what might the lessons be for the United States? Washington cannot afford to simply ignore the outside world. All it would take would be an infected Congolese person collapsing in Charles de Gaulle or Heathrow airports to illustrate that. While U.S. aid should never be an entitlement as many recipients treat it, investment in good governance stabilizes countries and is insurance not only against war, disease, and state failure but against their second-order effects: destabilizing refugee flows and the threat of disease. Throwing money into the climate change amelioration pot may feel good, but it often reinforces poor governance and corrupt regimes while doing nothing to address the problems some policymakers attribute to climate.
There is simply no substitute for the type of government transparency and accountability democracy and free markets encourage. That Congo last week experienced its first peaceful and democratic transfer of power is great news, but the current crisis highlights that it comes only after decades of broad failure and misguided foreign assistance.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
