The foreign policy debate of today would sound remarkably familiar to anyone working in Washington DC 20 years ago. The main topic of conversation was China’s rise and how the United States should respond to it. Then came 9/11. Working in Washington at the time, it seemed that the world had changed for ever, that there would be no going back to the old debates. Suddenly, great power competition was regarded as something from a bygone era. The threat was now terrorists and rogue states, not China or Russia.
Nothing better summed up this changed mood than the Bush national security strategy of 2002. An administration that had come to office describing China as a “strategic competitor” and with a Sovietologist, Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, was now declaring that “the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war”. The argument was that 9/11 had “fundamentally changed the context for relations between the United States and other main centres of global power” and that they found themselves “on the same side — united by the common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos”.
Yet 20 years on, the US is more worried by the Chinese threat than it has ever been. A new book by Rush Doshi, the China director on Joe Biden’s national security council, makes this very clear. The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order sets out how Beijing is seeking to replace America as the global hegemon.
Doshi warns that “China now poses a challenge unlike any the United States has ever faced”. He points out that for more than a century US dominance has been based on its economic might. In the Second World War, Germany and Japan combined did not reach 60 per cent of US GDP, nor did the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But China passed that figure seven years ago.
One of the striking things about his analysis is how peripheral 9/11 and the subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to it. It is almost as if world events have resumed the course people would have expected them to take in August 2001. Indeed, the return of rogue states and terrorists to where they were on the threat matrix before 9/11 can be seen in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. US and Nato forces are leaving despite, as William Hague warned so eloquently on these pages on Tuesday, the fact that this will almost certainly leave the Taliban in control of — at the very least — large parts of the country again.
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The fact that 20 years on 9/11 and its aftermath looks like a detour from history rather than the defining event of the 21st century should make us think about other events that we imagine will change life for ever. Take Covid, for example. After more than a year of restrictions, it is easy to imagine a permanently changed world post-Covid. One secretary of state observed to me the other day that there is now a “once in a lifetime opportunity for a total reset”.
One area of potential change is the role of the city. With more and more professionals able to work from home, is the urban era over? Some 43 per cent of the London workforce worked from home at points during the pandemic, the highest rate in the country. This number was driven by the kind of jobs that Londoners do; more than half of workers in professional and financial services WFHed during the pandemic.
If a large fraction of them, because of their own or their employers’ desires, carry on doing so post-Covid then that will have a profound impact on the city. If you can do your job from anywhere, why do it from the capital when you could have more space elsewhere? A survey by the London Assembly’s housing committee suggests that one in seven Londoners want to leave the city as a result of Covid.
If London’s working population were to fall like this, it would have a huge effect on public transport. The decline in the number of journeys would throw Transport for London’s finances into further disarray and lead to big price hikes, making living in the capital far less attractive. A similar theme would play out in the other big cities, here and abroad.
At the moment, London feels a shadow of its pre-Covid self. Tube use is just 44 per cent of what it was this time two years ago. But there are reasons to doubt that cities will be permanently hollowed out.
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Those who mainly worked from home were less than half as likely to be promoted as other employees between 2012 and 2017, even when controlling for other factors, according to the Office for National Statistics. It is hard to believe that the better home-working technology that Covid has ushered in will change this dynamic entirely.
One of the reasons why the government isn’t actively pushing a return to the office is an assumption that it will happen organically. There is a view that the attractions of in-person working will become clear in time for both employees and employers. One minister musing on the changes that Covid might bring says “In a year’s time it could just be that everyone who gets a flu shot gets a Covid vaccine and that’s it”.
The fact that the government is pushing on with connecting city centres through major infrastructure projects such as HS2 reflects its confidence that the changes to working patterns brought about by Covid won’t be permanent. To be sure, not everything will go back to the status quo ante. In the same way that airport security is still far stricter than it was before 9/11, offices will check people’s temperatures before they go into work and turning up with a cough will be frowned on. International business travel will struggle to recover as more people Zoom into meetings. But the fundamentals will change much less than people currently expect.
As Ed Glaeser, the chairman of the Harvard economics department, argues, Covid has not removed the economic benefits of clustering or changed the fact that we are a social species who benefit from being around other people. For these reasons, office life may come back into fashion sooner than anyone expects.
The city of 20 years’ time may well look and feel much as we would have expected it to back in 2019. If so, Covid will have been another diversion from history rather than a truly epoch-making event.
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James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator