ArgumentThe Limits of the World Health Organization

President Trump has characteristically tried to divert public attention from his botched response to the coronavirus pandemic by blaming others—Democrats, governors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China. Eric A. Posner writes in Lawfare that in the World Health Organization (WHO), however, he has found the ideal piñata.

The WHO combines all the elements of the populist bestiary—an international organization, staffed mostly by foreigners, whose authority rests on the technical expertise of an elite cadre of specialists. And by portraying the WHO as a puppet of China, Trump has cast the organization as a threat to American security. But the impulse to dismiss Trump’s attacks as narrowly political is a mistake. The WHO is such an appealing target for reasons that go beyond Trump. It’s a casualty of our unraveling international system and was on life support even before Trump was elected.

It is tempting to blame the WHO itself for its problems—its notoriously complex bureaucracy, its decentralized structure, its “culture” or the persons who run it. But, Posner writers,

all of those things are a result of the political constraints it operates under, as many reform-minded critics have observed. Big bureaucracies are established to guard against errors. In this context, this means staying away from actions that will offend member states whose support (financial or otherwise) is necessary for WHO’s operations. The sorts of bureaucratic reform that WHO insiders and sympathetic critics have called for over many decades would not protect the WHO from leaders like Trump.

Posner concludes that “The WHO can endure and serve a useful function but only if it has less autonomy and a narrower mission, with its reins firmly in the hands of the most powerful countries.”