As the nations of the world continue to confront the COVID-19 pandemic in ways both responsible and irresponsible, I am reminded of a moment from US President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 address to the United Nations General Assembly. While mimicking the appearance of a thoughtful grandfather, Reagan ruminated on a hypothetical scenario pulled straight from science fiction pulp novels, last popular when Reagan was an actor in the 1950s. If the planet faced an alien threat, an invasion from outside this world, could we as diverse peoples and nations, with competing interests and desires, come together and defeat the threat as a singular force?
“I occasionally think of how quickly our differences world wide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world,” said Reagan to the U.N. General Assembly in the Fall of 1987.
Reagan was using this fictional scenario to find common ground with other world leaders, in the hope of eliminating the very real threat of global nuclear war. Six years later the United States and its chief geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union (in the process of becoming its successor, the Russian Federation) would sign the first in a series of agreements drastically reducing the global stockpile of nuclear warheads. Instead of the fear of nuclear holocaust, could the COVID-19 pandemic be the world encompassing event that unites the human race; akin to an alien invasion of Earth?
Bevacqua 