I never know what to make of the set of public conversations that center on whether a particular claim about an important international event or controversy can be established as true or not. Both because in most of those cases there is absolutely zero chance of high confidence in any conclusion and because there’s nothing that can be done even if there were. In most of these cases, if there’s valid international public policy to be made, it can and should be made regardless of the truth of a particular incident. The fact that we spend time talking about the incident is a sign that there is no interest in making policy.
Take two examples that have come up in the last week or so. First, the question of who sabotaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline; second, the question of whether there was a lab leak involved in the initial spread of covid-19.
There’s a new story that the pipeline sabotage may have involved a pro-Ukrainian group rather than the military or intelligence service of a specific nation-state. There’s another story by Seymour Hersh, who seems bent on ruining his reputation for investigative probity, that the US government ordered the sabotage. There have been no shortage of other theories and other suspects since the news of the explosion first broke.
If by some chance whomever did it ends up in a court of law in a liberal democracy where there are high standards for evidence and judicial fairness, then at that point I’d be willing to hazard a view about whether the accused did it or not. Barring that, there is no reason to think that the sources who are speaking off-the-record to mainstream journalists are providing the kind of information that ordinary people can evaluate. The thing of it is that there can’t possibly be a substantial number of people capable of carrying out the sabotage: this is not something that some fly-by-night terrorist group could do.
When you read about the fact that substantial numbers of ships in the area where the sabotage took place had turned off their transponders—apparently something that has become relatively routine worldwide for many civilian as well as military vessels—you realize that no matter who did it or what happened exactly, there are likely some powerful interests that will not allow a full or complete international investigation, perhaps even some which had nothing to do with the sabotage per se but who have other secrets at stake. Whatever happened was covert and in those cases, only time—and usually not even that—produces any meaningful information at all about what actually happened and who did it for a wider public. In the meantime, I’m guessing that there are quite a few people within more restricted circles who have fairly confirmed knowledge of who did it and why.
So there’s not much point in talking about the case itself. And there’s not much to say about the kinds of policy that you might want adopted in response to it. “No sabotaging global-scale infrastructure even if you have a security concern”. Sure, sure, let’s go ahead and get that treaty up and signed, I’m sure it will work. “No turning off transponders on ships!” There’s about as much international political will for enforcing that possible norm as there is for restricting access to tax havens. Who cares who did it? Nothing can come of knowing at this moment in world history, and no knowledge is going to be trustworthy anyway.
The question of a lab leak with covid-19 seems less pointless in the sense that it’s not part of an actual war that has global implications and it seems like there are real policy responses worth considering. It’s plain that the Chinese government will never allow anything like a thorough investigation of what happened (while it seems equally plain that they themselves may know exactly what occurred) but you could argue, as some have, that even suspecting that there could have been a lab accident that involved systematic breaches in agreed-upon safety protocols governing experimentation with pathogens is enough to catalyze a global conversation about improving lab safety.
E.g., argue that we don’t need to know absolutely what happened, just that we know that all the possible scenarios demand some form of coordinated global response to reduce future dangers. The threat of zoonosis from underregulated wet markets is such that there should be concerted international efforts to ban or control such markets. The threat of careless scientific gathering of contaminated or pathogenic biological materials like bat guano—or other intrusions by human beings into locales with such contaminants—is sufficient to promote strong restrictions on entry into wild environments of that kind. The possibility that existing safety regulations on experimentation were breached through carelessness or coordinated disregard is reason to revisit the enforcement of those regulations.
Sure, that all sounds completely sagacious and I suppose it’s better than nothing. But it’s not much better because most sovereign states lack the capacity and will to enforce any such constraints. Most sub-Saharan African states couldn’t even begin to enforce restrictions on entry into potentially dangerous habitats or meaningfully prevent unregulated sale of “bush meat” even if they wanted to. They simply don’t have the capacity as it stands, and the rest of the world isn’t willing to provide the level of subsidy that this kind of enforcement would require. (Not to mention that an enforcement model is maybe not the most effective thing to begin with: even rich states struggle to protect wildlife habitats or prevent illicit trade in animals that pose a zoonotic risk.)
Reinforcing laboratory safety protocols runs into the problem that if there was—or even could have been—a lab leak it’s because there are labs which were ignoring those protocols in some substantial way without fear of government sanction or international pressure. If you can’t change those conditions, reinforcing protocols only applies to labs that already follow those protocols in a world where going around restrictions on medical procedures and laboratory work is a big line of international business.
There are international concerns where individual nation-states can adopt stringent constraints that protect the safety and welfare of their own citizens or their own territories regardless of what other countries do or think. But something like “lab safety” or “safeguarding habitats that have potential zoonotic pathogens in them” is global or nothing. Even if you could provide support to states that don’t have the capacity to act, you’d have to find some other leverage with states that talk one way in global conversations and persistently act another way within their own sovereign boundaries. About the only leverage the rest of the world has against a wealthy and powerful state like China on an issue like “lab safety” is a credible threat to cut off all access to scientific and commercial collaborations unless all labs everywhere are available for regular inspection by international teams. (I suspect that more than a few large pharmaceutical companies in the US and EU would balk at that requirement.) That’s not happening.
So again, it almost doesn’t matter whether or not there was a lab leak. The possibility is enough that it should spur international reform, but the world we live in is one where no such reforms are presently possible. If we’re going to bother talking at all about such cases, we should really be talking about the powerlessness of both global institutions and nation-states in the face of these kinds of problems, about what it would take to have institutions that could genuinely enforce regulations or impose real consequences—even during wartime—for breaches of international laws and norms. Absent that discussion, specific cases are just a way to distract ourselves from our inability to do much of anything about these kinds of problems.
Image credit: "Biohazard" by DaugaardDK is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
I agree that the knowledge about what exactly happened in these cases won't change much. But your pessimism about solutions here seems totally off base and not backed up by any evidence, except in the case of sub-Saharan Africa. China can (and has) substantially limit wet markets. Rules about gain of function research are hotly debated because they make a real difference in what science is done, and what science is funded. Lab Bio-safety levels make a real difference in how research is conducted, what research is conducted, and how likely leaks are. Researchers in China are much more connected to global scientific networks and likely to follow proposed protocols than you suggest (research at the WIV was funded by the NIH!).