Turns Out COVID-19 Didn’t Reshape Geopolitics

In his analytical, non-fiction article “Turns Out COVID-19 Didn’t Reshape Geopolitics,” Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics, challenges the prevailing narrative that the pandemic represented a transformative rupture in international relations. Writing in retrospect and in dialogue with his own 2020 essay, Drezner reasserts his original claim that COVID-19, like the Spanish Flu, would amount to “a temporary shock without much of a lasting effect” (Drezner). He begins by situating the pandemic in a historical arc shaped by advancements in sanitation and medicine, arguing that modern health infrastructure reduces the capacity of disease to alter global politics fundamentally. The pandemic was disruptive, he concedes, but its rapid containment through vaccine development limited its systemic geopolitical consequences. Rather than reshuffling power dynamics, COVID-19, in Drezner’s view, largely confirmed and reinforced existing international hierarchies. The geopolitical roles of major powers—especially the U.S. and China—were not upended but clarified.

Drezner’s piece participates in the broader contest over how COVID-19 will be remembered and narrativized, particularly in geopolitical discourse. Against widespread portrayals of the pandemic as a defining rupture, he offers a counternarrative of continuity and acceleration. While acknowledging real policy shifts—especially a renewed emphasis on national economic self-sufficiency in response to exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains—he suggests these trends were already underway. The story he tells is not one of transformation, but of revelation: the pandemic exposed rather than altered the underlying logics of global power. His argument reframes COVID-19 not as an inflection point, but as a clarifying event, one that revealed rather than rewrote the rules of international politics.