At a virtual Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference, a discussion of COVID-19 and its ramifications

On the first day of the Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference in April 2021, the attendees – college students from around the world – were privy to an address that few would have cared about two years ago, but many would now would pay to see. The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and he spoke about things he might not mention on CNN. 

“Having one of the students at the Naval Academy ask the questions, adding the student perspective, our perspective, I thought that was a really cool way to shape the conversation,” said Arjun Ramachandran, a junior at Carnegie Mellon University who is majoring in International Relations and Politics.

“It was nice to be able to hear directly from the source, his perspective on [the COVID-19 pandemic], especially as we’re hopefully coming out the other side of things with the vaccine,” said Audrey Pederson, a fellow junior IRP major at Carnegie Mellon. “It was interesting hearing his perspective on COVID in the context of foreign affairs over a much longer period of time.”

Audrey Pederson

Ramachandran and Pederson represented CMU’s Institute for Politics and Strategy at this year’s Forum, the sixty-first of its kind, which was held virtually last month. With the theme of “Resilience: The Global COVID-19 response,” the Forum used panels and simulations to examine the long-term fallout from the pandemic and the need to address it as an international community.

A talk from Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, illustrated that point.

“He was talking about how this pandemic is not going to be a full sentence,” Ramachandran said. “It’s not going to be a full chapter. It’s going to be an exclamation point, and what’s going to be the sentence in our book is going to be the next pandemic, the next global situation that we have to deal with as a coalition. We can’t be dealing with things individually.”

Arjun Ramachandran

To display the challenges in such a strategy, the students were split into small groups for a pandemic response simulation. Awarded resources based on the GDP of the countries they were playing, they grappled with vaccine rollout, a coup in Myanmar, and a dispute in the South China Sea. Ramachandran’s group wrestled with international versus domestic vaccine distribution. Pederson’s group distributed too many vaccine doses to the suburbs, and there were riots in the city streets by the third day.

“It was extremely difficult,” Pederson said. “Our senior advisors were mentioning, at some point you only have forty minutes to make these decisions because sometimes that’s also reality.”

The Forum fostered discussions about the role the vaccine could or should play as a carrot to countries with rampant human rights abuse and the juxtaposition between the ways in which autocracies and democracies handled the pandemic.

“It helps, or it could help, but what helps truly create resilience is societal trust and international cooperation,” Pederson said. “I thought that was a true testament to the world as a whole.”