On 1 August 2020, about 30,000 people gathered in Berlin to protest against Covid-19 lockdown measures. Although the event, organised by the Stuttgart-based Querdenker movement, defied a ban on public gatherings, it was ultimately a relatively peaceful affair. That was not the case with the next anti-lockdown demonstration in the capital, on 29 August.

Most of the 38,000 participants in the 29 August rally—which took place after an administrative court in Berlin overturned a police ban on the demonstration—did behave peacefully. But a splinter group of 450–500 protesters, many from the far right, attempted to storm the Reichstag. The assault was neither as violent nor as well planned as the one on the US Capitol that would take place on 6 January 2021—fuelled by America’s own ‘Q’, QAnon—but it was the first time since the Nazi era that the building had been violated. This does not bode well for Germany.

Fast forward to 1 August 2021. The Querdenker had applied for permission to stage a demonstration involving about 25,000 people, which the city declined on the grounds that the movement had repeatedly violated pandemic requirements. The organisers went to court and lost. However, a motorcade was allowed.

But the motorcade turned out to be a ruse. Instead, groups of Querdenker sympathisers started to march from different parts of the city with the alleged aim of congregating at the Brandenburg Gate and in front of the Reichstag. A rather surreal scene ensued. The 7,000 Querdenker, maskless and disregarding hygiene measures, enjoyed playing cat and mouse with the police, who had seemingly underestimated the likelihood and scale of the illegal rally, and the potential for violence.

A play on words, ‘Querdenker’ connotes contrariness on one hand and lateral thinking on the other. The movement was launched in April 2020 by a Stuttgart-based software engineer, Michael Ballweg, to promote one cause: the end of Covid-19 lockdowns.

According to Ballweg and his followers, public-health measures during the pandemic violate the German people’s constitutional rights, including that of free assembly. This is not untrue. But the government’s position—which reflects extensive deliberation in parliament and the courts—is that these temporary violations are warranted, given the severity of the Covid-19 threat.

The Querdenker are unconvinced. They accuse the government of using the pandemic as a pretext to establish a dictatorship. Their favorite slogan, chanted at many a lockdown protest, is ‘Peace, freedom, no dictatorship.’

Following the events of August 2020, the ‘peace’ part of that slogan is increasingly being called into question. So is the Querdenker movement’s focus on constitutional rights during Covid-19 lockdowns. As the movement has grown—there are now local chapters in 59 German cities—it has expanded the scope of its argument.

A recent Querdenker press release claims that the government has used the pandemic to create a ‘state of permanent surveillance’ and grant new powers to police and border guards, ‘in order to further restrict human rights across Europe’. Moreover, the movement asserts, the government has forced people to ‘lose their jobs … work overtime, forego wages, and ruin their health’, and destroyed young people’s future prospects by restricting education. Germany is now facing ‘the greatest redistribution from the bottom up, and a wave of expropriations of historic proportions’, and Querdenker will not ‘turn a blind eye’ to it.

By linking its main concern to issues like state surveillance and economic inequality, the Querdenker movement has drastically expanded its potential support base. Anti-vaxxers, anarchists, libertarians, right-wingers and esoteric groups of all stripes have joined the cause. This is not unusual for a social movement of this kind, but it doesn’t do much for the Querdenkers’ credibility.

Ballweg denies Querdenker’s proximity to—let alone association with—extremists, claiming that such perceptions are the result of misleading and biased media reporting. But the most comprehensive study of the Querdenker movement, conducted by the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey and his team at Switzerland’s University of Basel, suggests otherwise.

The study covered pandemic-related protests in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It found that movements were heterogeneous, comprising several, often disparate social groups. What united them was a sense of alienation from political institutions, established parties and the mainstream media.

This alienation, the study suggests, makes these movements vulnerable to conspiracy theories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Querdenker demonstrations increasingly display anti-Semitic tendencies, though the movement is neither particularly xenophobic nor Islamophobic.

Querdenker is, Nachtwey and his team note, profoundly libertarian, and its followers tend to espouse beliefs in alternative medicine and holistic and spiritual thinking—a perspective closely linked to a distrust of modern medicine and science more broadly. Ultimately, they tend to share three key personality characteristics: fact resistance (typical of conspiracy theorists), a strong belief in their own version of the truth, and a self-righteousness bordering on arrogance.

A rightward shift is amplifying these tendencies. While Querdenker cannot be considered a right-wing movement, Nachtwey and his colleagues warn that the potential for radicalisation is rising. The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has already voiced its support for the cause, and members of the Reichsbürger, a right-wing fringe group that denies the legal existence of the federal republic and seeks to reinstate some version of the pre-1918 German empire, have often participated in its rallies.

The question now is how Germany should respond. Some have called for Querdenker to be outlawed and its 59 chapters declared illegal. But the government has little appetite for such a drastic move, which could backfire, inciting more—and more violent—illegal demonstrations. One might also hope that, as the pandemic recedes, so will the Querdenker.

Yet, even if the movement fades, the alienation and distrust of authorities that have fed it are unlikely to go away. These same forces fuelled the Islamophobic Pegida movement, which held weekly rallies in Germany in 2015, but eventually dissipated, leaving behind a relatively small group of right-wingers. And they may well power the rise of another such faction after the next controversial political development.

It is these underlying drivers that the German government—and others, as this is hardly a uniquely German phenomenon—should be aiming to address. Profound transformation fuels anxiety and can make people feel, in the words of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, like ‘strangers in their own land’. Political ‘entrepreneurs’ like Ballweg—or, in the United States, former president Donald Trump—draw on these feelings to win support for themselves or their causes.

The lesson is as simple as it is challenging: governments must listen carefully, understand people’s anxieties, and identify actual and potential protest leaders before they engage, debate or try to convince the public of some crazed conspiracy theory. Over time, this approach can reduce the likelihood that destabilising extremist and populist movements will emerge, or at least lessen the risk of violence. In the meantime, these groups will remain a menace to society—and to democracy.

In Paradise Lost, the English poet John Milton encapsulates a fundamental truth about the struggle to end a violent conflict and establish a sustainable peace:

Who overcomes by force,

Hath overcome but half his foe.

This insight was crucial to my own understanding of how to chart a way to end Colombia’s long and costly civil war, and it is acutely relevant to our shared global challenges today.

To build peace, leaders need to foster hope and anchor policies in empathy, solidarity and a long-term vision of the common good. This is precisely the approach we must take now to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic and build a more resilient world that can better withstand shocks and crises.

Humanity’s collective experience of Covid-19 has reminded us all how precious, fragile and intertwined life can be. Each person’s existence on this planet is inextricably connected with that of our brothers, sisters and neighbours, as well as with our forebears and unborn generations. As we begin to map a post-pandemic recovery, recognising our shared destiny makes it critical that we draw inspiration from the legacy of previous successful leaders.

In this regard, there’s no better model than Nelson Mandela, a man of infinite courage and determination who defied a particularly evil system of racial oppression and became the greatest peacemaker of his generation. Mandela endured nearly three decades of imprisonment, led his people to freedom and built a resilient, multiracial democracy in South Africa that endures to this day.

Mandela’s abiding humility and his iron faith in democracy helped lay the foundations of modern South Africa. These qualities also resonated globally, because Mandela always placed the African National Congress’s liberation struggle in the context of the wider international fight against colonialism, racism and discrimination.

This affirmation of our common humanity lay at the heart of Mandela’s decision to found The Elders, the group of independent global leaders of which I’m a member. In his speech at the organisation’s launch in Johannesburg in July 2007, Mandela charged the group with a specific mandate: ‘Support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict, and inspire hope where there is despair.’

Today more than ever, we must recommit to this approach in the face of the pandemic, as well as even greater existential threats such as climate change and nuclear weapons. We urgently need an explicit recognition by global leaders that solidarity matters, and that they must act decisively to defend and rejuvenate multilateralism.

This ambition and sense of hope is essential. One sobering example of its absence is the underwhelming collective reaction to the March 2020 call by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for a ‘global ceasefire’ in response to Covid-19. True, Guterres’s appeal was compelling, and the UN estimated that warring parties in 11 countries had heeded it by early April last year. But the UN Security Council took more than three months to pass a resolution endorsing it. And too many conflicts continued unabated throughout 2020 and still rage today.

The toll on human life, particularly among unarmed civilians, has been devastating. By mid-2020, violent conflicts had contributed to a rise in the number of forcibly displaced people, to nearly 80 million. And by the end of the year, almost 100 million people faced severe food insecurity as a result of conflict—up from 77 million in 2019.

This is a damning indictment of collective failure, especially by the Security Council’s five permanent members. But we must understand the council’s near-paralysis in the wider context of the many global leadership failures laid bare by Covid-19. These include insufficient coordination and information-sharing to contain the pandemic, inadequate collaboration by the G20 to protect the global economy, a dearth of financial assistance to support the global south, and the moral catastrophe of ‘vaccine apartheid’.

Contemplating this litany of challenges and disappointments, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by pessimism. But resigning ourselves to failure is not only an indulgence of the world’s privileged, who do not have to endure the pain and loss of war, but also a betrayal of its victims. Hope persists, and so must our determination.

As for me, I’m hopeful and determined that we will recover from the pandemic in a way that affirms the words of my compatriot, the great writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez: ‘Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.’ In that spirit, we must then get on with the life-affirming task of building peace.

A century ago, an influenza pandemic killed more people than died in World War I. Today, the Covid-19 pandemic has killed more Americans than died in all US wars since 1945. A big difference, however, is that science didn’t have a vaccine for the influenza virus back then, but now several companies and countries have created vaccines for Covid-19.

A number of wealthy democracies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, have vaccinated over half their adult populations and seen a dramatic reduction in the number of new cases and deaths. Other places, such as India, Brazil and parts of Africa, have low vaccination rates and high rates of new cases and deaths. The Economist estimates that the pandemic’s true global death toll may be something like 10 million people, or more than three times the official number reported by national authorities.

Given these grim statistics, should leaders of wealthy countries export vaccines and help vaccinate foreigners before they finish the job at home? When President Donald Trump proclaimed ‘America first’, he was being consistent with democratic theory, according to which leaders are entrusted with defending and advancing the interests of the people who elected them. But as I argue in my book Do morals matter? the key question is how leaders define the national interest. There’s a major moral difference between a myopic transactional definition, like that of Trump, and a broader, far-sighted definition.

Consider President Harry Truman’s espousal of the Marshall Plan after World War II. Rather than narrowly insisting that America’s European allies repay their war loans, as the US had demanded after World War I, Truman dedicated more than 2% of America’s GDP to aiding Europe’s economic recovery. The process allowed Europeans to share in planning the continent’s reconstruction and produced a result that was good for them, but that also served America’s national interest in preventing communist control of Western Europe.

There are four major reasons why a Marshall Plan–like effort to vaccinate people in poor countries is in the US national interest. First, it is in Americans’ medical interest. Viruses don’t care about the nationality of the humans they kill. They simply seek a host to allow them to reproduce, and large populations of unvaccinated humans allow them to mutate and evolve new variants that can evade the protections our vaccines produce. Given modern travel, it’s only a matter of time before variants cross national borders. If a new variant arose that was capable of bypassing our best vaccines, we would have to develop a booster targeted at the new variant and vaccinate again, which could lead to more fatalities and more strain on the US medical system, as well as further lockdowns and economic damage.

Our values provide the second reason that a vaccine Marshall Plan is in America’s national interest. Some foreign policy experts contrast values with interests, but that is a false dichotomy. Our values are among our most important interests, because they tell us who we are as a people. Like most people, Americans care more about their co-nationals than about foreigners, but that doesn’t mean they’re indifferent to the suffering of others. Few would ignore a cry for help from a drowning person because she calls out in a foreign language. And while leaders are constrained by public opinion in a democracy, they often have considerable leeway to shape policy—and considerable resources to influence public sentiment.

A third national interest, related to the second, is soft power—the ability to influence others through attraction rather than coercion or payment. American values can be a source of soft power when others see our policies as benign and legitimate.

Most foreign policies combine hard and soft power. The Marshall Plan, for example, relied on hard economic resources and payments, but it also created a reputation for benignity and far-sightedness that attracted Europeans. As the Norwegian political scientist Geir Lundestad has argued, the American role in post-war Europe may have resembled an empire, but it was ‘an empire by invitation’. A policy of helping poor countries by providing vaccines, as well as aiding the development of their own healthcare systems’ capacities, would increase US soft power.

Finally, there is geopolitical competition. China quickly recognised that its soft power suffered from the origin story of Covid-19 in Wuhan. Not only was there a lack of clarity about how the virus originated, but in the early stages of the crisis, Chinese censorship and denial made the crisis worse than necessary before its authoritarian lockdown proved successful. Since then, China has assiduously pursued Covid-19 diplomacy in many parts of the world.

By donating medical equipment and vaccines to other countries, China has been working to change the international narrative from one of fault to one of attraction. The Biden administration has been playing catch-up, announcing that it will release 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, as well as 20 million additional doses of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. In addition, the administration has pledged US$4 billion in funding for the World Health Organization’s COVAX facility to help poor countries purchase vaccines and has supported a temporary waiver of intellectual property to help poor countries develop capacity.

In short, for four good reasons consistent with America’s history, values and self-interest, the US should lead a group of rich countries in a plan to vaccinate the rest of the world now, even before the job is finished at home.

It’s been a year and a half since we started living with—and too often dying from—Covid-19. Although the pandemic is by no means over, it’s not too soon to take a step back and draw some preliminary conclusions from the experience.

One conclusion that has turned out to be especially tentative concerns the source of the pandemic. Initially, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 was widely believed to have spread from a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan after it jumped from an animal (probably a bat) to humans through an intermediary host. But a growing number of scientists and experts now believe it is at least as likely (if not more so) that the virus emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

There are many reasons to suspect an accidental leak: the institute’s location and known work with coronaviruses; the outbreak’s distance from bat populations; the inability to identify an intermediary host or any early clusters of cases outside Hubei province; some physical features of the virus; and China’s cover-up of evidence and refusal to cooperate fully with international investigators. All are fuelling speculation and greater attention from US intelligence agencies, which have now been ordered by President Joe Biden to increase their efforts to identify the origins of Covid-19. If the ‘lab leak’ narrative comes to be widely accepted, it will severely damage China’s standing worldwide and could pose a serious political problem for its leadership at home.

Looking around the world and comparing national performances in addressing the pandemic, what turns out to matter most is not the nature of the political system so much as the quality of political leadership. Russia, Brazil, Mexico and the US under former president Donald Trump all failed, while Taiwan, New Zealand, Vietnam and the US under Biden have all done relatively well. More than anything, this record suggests that populist leaders perform the worst, possibly because they tend to dismiss inconvenient facts and resist introducing necessary measures that might cost them public support in the short term.

Many countries in East Asia and Europe seemed to have had the virus under control but are now experiencing difficulties. Testing, social distancing and contact tracing are necessary but insufficient tools. Effective vaccines that can be produced and administered in large numbers are essential.

That fact is evident from the dramatic turnaround in the US, for which the Biden administration deserves considerable credit. The Trump administration, though, should be applauded for making decisions that shortened the time normally needed to develop and produce effective vaccines. The approval of several in little more than a year shows that governments matter, and that cooperation between the public and private sectors can be a formula for success.

The pandemic has also shown that health security is no less essential than physical security for economic growth. Where the pandemic is being beaten back, as in the US and China, economic revival has quickly followed.

Technology has proven invaluable in at least two ways. Aside from rapid development of a new generation of safe vaccines, technology has helped us manage our personal lives and business affairs much better than we could have done as recently as three decades ago, before the arrival of high-speed internet and computing power that allows remote work.

The actual death toll of the pandemic is likely to be two or even three times higher than official estimates of 3–4 million, given the number of deaths over the past year compared to the number in previous years. Many ‘excess’ deaths have not been attributed to the pandemic, because governments either are unwilling to admit the truth (Russia comes to mind) or are unable to provide an accurate accounting, especially when deaths occur outside of hospitals (which may account for some of the gap in India’s reporting).

For all the talk about the ‘international community’, the pandemic has exposed the absence of one. The failure to produce and equitably distribute a sufficient number of vaccines worldwide is a scandal. The demand is there; what remains is the will to match it with the necessary supply. The Biden administration’s resistance to significant vaccine exports is short-sighted and disappointing, especially as the US supply of vaccines far exceeds domestic demand.

There’s no reason to think Covid-19 will be the last pandemic. There almost certainly will be others, be they novel coronaviruses or something else. As tragic as this pandemic has proven to be, its costs will be compounded unless governments begin to build the national and international institutions (including a much-reformed World Health Organization) that will help us manage the next challenge of this sort.

One final point: It does not appear that the pandemic will be a turning point in history. Many of the trends that were visible two years ago—growing great-power rivalry, a warming planet, ageing populations, failing states, democratic backsliding, cyber insecurity, nuclear proliferation and terrorism—remain acute. The pandemic will weaken and distract us for a time, but the moment is fast arriving when other challenges must again be given the priority they require.

Economic nationalism is already threatening to derail the headline commitment of last weekend’s Quad leaders’ summit to manufacture and distribute 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines to poorer nations, which is intended to counter China’s ‘vaccine diplomacy’.

US President Joe Biden has extended his predecessor’s use of the Defense Production Act to block exports of key Covid vaccine raw materials, bringing complaints from both India and the European Union.

Channelling St Augustine’s promise of chastity, but not yet, Biden has vowed to help ease the global shortage of Covid vaccines, but only once the US has looked after itself.

‘If we have a surplus, we’re going to share it with the rest of the world,’ Biden said last week. ‘We’re going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first, but we’re then going to try and help the rest of the world.’

He said his administration would continue to invoke the Defense Production Act to expedite critical materials in vaccine production.

The US has used the act to block the sale of key ingredients to India, which manufactures 60% of the world’s vaccines. The chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, Adar Poonwalla, told a World Bank forum last week: ‘We are talking about having free global access to vaccines, but if we can’t get the raw materials out of the US—that’s going to be a serious limiting factor.’

He warned that his institute’s licensed production of the Novavax and AstraZeneca vaccines would be slowed unless the US lifted its restrictions on exports of key inputs. The Serum Institute is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer.

The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, has also complained about what he described as ‘outright bans’ on exports of vaccines and key vaccine ingredients by the US and the UK, which he contrasted with the limited export controls the EU has used to block the export of 250,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Australia.

A new World Bank study explores whether the mutual dependence of the key vaccine-producing countries on raw material supplies from each other will act as a constraint on ‘vaccine nationalism’. ‘The government of a nation where final vaccines are manufactured might fear retaliation from those governments where it sources … final vaccines or the ingredients for those vaccines,’ it says.

It tied this hypothesis to the economic theory that ‘the presence of extensive cross-border value chains shifts the political calculus away from beggar-thy-neighbor policies’. However, there is little evidence of this effect so far.

Around 20 different ingredients are needed to manufacture and distribute Covid vaccines, and all producing countries are dependent on imports for at least some of them.

The study found that most of the ingredients required to manufacture and distribute Covid vaccines come from other vaccine-producing nations, so any inhibition on protectionism wouldn’t extend beyond the small group of vaccine producers.

The study counts 13 nations in what it calls the Covid vaccine producers’ club: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

It cites EU data showing that Australia is one of only three club members that doesn’t also export vaccine ingredients; the others are Canada and Brazil. The EU therefore faces little fear of retaliation from Australia.

As with much of its manufacturing, Australia is exclusively an importer of key inputs. It gets 47% of the ingredients it needs to manufacture vaccines from the US, 25% from the EU, 6% from the UK, 5% from China and 17% from the rest of the world.

The essential problem is that supplies of the various vaccines are running far short of demand. The World Bank says that between 3.2 billion and 4.1 billion people need to be vaccinated to defeat the virus, translating to a need for between 6 and 8 billion doses.

However, the members of the vaccine club, including Australia, have ordered many times their actual requirements, greatly inflating global demand, and there’s only been mixed success so far in meeting the manufacturing challenge of such a massive ramp-up in production.

Just seven club members—Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, South Korea, the UK and the US—have collectively ordered 4.3 billion vaccine doses, or more than three times their total population. Australia has made advance purchases of 140 million doses, which is at least three times as much as it needs.

The EU imposed its export restrictions after vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca encountered difficulty filling contracted advance orders. It ruled on 30 January that an export could be prohibited if it threatened the EU’s prior advance-purchase agreements.

Other major vaccine producers are imposing less formal restrictions. Turkey has complained that China delivered only 3 million of 10 million contracted doses of its Sinovac vaccine. China’s foreign ministry explained that domestic demand for vaccines was huge, and that it could only provide support to poorer nations ‘within our capacity, according to their needs’.

India’s Serum Institute is subject to the same pressures. Poonwalla admitted that he had been ‘directed to prioritise the huge needs of India, and along with that, balance the needs of the rest of the world’, urging that foreign governments be ‘patient’.

The UK health minister, Matt Hancock, has used language similar to that of the Chinese, saying, ‘We will protect UK supply and we’ll play our part to ensure the whole world can get the job’, but with the government’s advance-purchase agreements from UK-based manufacturers requiring exclusive supply.

Australia is attempting to push back against the European export ban through a World Trade Organization forum focused on securing medical supply chains. The forum was established last year by a group of 13 members—half of them vaccine producers—with a commitment to exercising ‘restraint in the imposition of any new export restrictions, including export taxes, on essential medical goods and on any prospective vaccine or vaccine materials’.

Trade Minister Dan Tehan has reminded the EU that it was a signatory, and complained that the European restrictions will prevent Australia from exporting vaccines into the wider Pacific region. ‘The more we can put collective pressure on them, the more they will realise what they are doing is wrong,’ he said. There has been no public response so far.