Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel famously quipped that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. With the country laser-focused on containing and eradicating the coronavirus pandemic, we should plan now for life after this global disaster.
In a recent Daily Caller column, I urged a focus not just on the rescue but also on the recovery. Here’s what I meant.
What have we learned from this shattering experience? What are the implications for our country at home and abroad, the reform opportunities and the structural changes needed to strengthen us going forward, enable our economy and democratic values to flourish, and protect American interests and alliances abroad?
In 1942, with the U.S. fighting World War II, the Committee for Economic Development (where I was president from 1997 to 2012) was formed by several American business leaders concerned about the shape of our postwar recovery. How would the country shift from total wartime to civilian production without a recession or depression?
CED’s business leaders sponsored several thousand community discussions around the country to prepare for this resource reallocation. The focus was not just on retooling production but also on increasing shared prosperity for all Americans.
After the war, CED helped design The Marshall Plan that rebuilt much of Western Europe and blunted Soviet Communism in France, Greece, Italy and Turkey. President Truman tapped CED’s founder, Paul Hoffman (CEO of carmaker Studebaker), to be The Marshall Plan’s first administrator.
While the American homeland was not attacked in World War II (excepting Pearl Harbor), some 405,000 American soldiers died over four years. Today, our homeland faces attack from an invisible, lethal virus. Our economy has been shuttered, and projections indicate as many as 240,000 Americans could die from the virus in under four months.
Abroad, Marxist-Communist regimes (China and Russia) are touting their brand of authoritarianism or totalitarianism as a better economic and social governing model. Their efforts today resemble the Soviets’ 1945 mischief.
We need a focused, nonpartisan approach to defining and addressing our future national and international needs and priorities. That approach should involve the public and private sectors, plus civil society. The effort should not be focused on more congressional spending: it’s about reforms first, not massive new spending.
The president, governors, and congressional leaders should establish a “Commission on 21st Century U.S. National and Global Preparedness.” The Commission should embrace three broad goals: preparedness at home, engagement abroad, and shared prosperity.
The context has to be not only “America first” but “America engaged”: globalism and nationalism will co-exist in our immediate future. Whatever you think today, globalism isn’t going away, neither are nation states.
How we manage globalism (its benefits and its shortcomings) affects every American. Globalism has communitywide issues extending beyond trade and commerce and national borders. For example, financial and Internet regulation, global communications (including AI and 5G), currency flows, climate change, cyber security and health pandemics.
Nation states won’t fade either: we should consider how best to reconcile national sovereignty and national needs in a global environment without lapsing into “One Worldism.” This means smarter and effective, not necessarily bigger, government. Public health issues transcend boundaries: markets, individuals and nations acting alone can’t produce effective outcomes.
Here are a few priorities for the Commission to consider:
What does our healthcare infrastructure need? What critical devices and medicines must be made domestically and stockpiled? How can we contain potential pandemics more rapidly and effectively?
How can we restructure our outsized financial services sector to avoid creating bubble-prone markets and restore its role as an efficient allocator of investment capital?
How can we maintain our recent hard-won energy independence and remain a major energy exporter?
What critical manufacturing needs must be nurtured domestically rather than outsourced?
How can we manage the Internet, new surveillance technologies and space exploration to ensure democratic freedoms and individual privacy?
How can we best project American values internationally? Let’s rethink our foreign-assistance policies and spending in more strategic ways to blunt Chinese and Russian efforts. Let’s also strengthen relations with key allies abroad. Is our defense spending cost-effective, targeted and pork-free?
How can we restore sound fiscal and monetary policies given our unsustainable national debt and artificially low interest rates?
America has always been an open, transparent society that embraces freedom, creativity and dynamism. Today, these fundamental values are being challenged in ways not seen for decades.
We need bold, creative and energetic leaders to guide us through these remarkably turbulent times. Who are they?
Charles Kolb served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy from 1990-1992 in the George H.W. Bush White House