How Will a Hantavirus Pandemic Affect the World at War?

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Hey, did you hear? The world may be coming to an end. And because 2026 loves to throw us curveballs, it is not for the reason that we all thought that it would come to an end. No. No. Now we are potentially looking at a throwback to 2020, which is by far and away the greatest year in the history of mankind.

[00:00:24]So today on the geopolitics helpline, the question no one wants to think about will now be answered. How would a haunt virus pandemic affect the world at war?

[00:00:35]Hey, I like that. A short and sweet question. Well, I need to preface this by saying that I am a doctor in Pittsburgh, but not that kind of doctor in Pittsburgh, and you are watching my personal video rather than an award-winning drama on HBO Max. I am not an expert on medical science, but at least my self-respecting alter ego pretends to be an expert on human behavior, especially at the political military level. So, let's focus on those topics. And broadly, we can split the conversation into one, how this will affect day-to-day operations of countries at war, not like there is a shortage of them, and two, how this will affect the outbreak and termination of war. I want to begin with the operational part and by zooming in on human behavior. One of the weirdest problems with COVID was that it was not particularly deadly and the mitigation behaviors to prevent infection were mostly in the hands and sinuses of the infected. Take masking as an example.

[00:01:44]Bear in mind that obtaining good estimates on this is difficult, but only about 1/3 of the aerosol stopping power of a cloth mask went to the wearer. The other 2/3 went to those around the wearer. You see, it is easier to stop particles when they are in concentrated droplets coming out of one's own nose or mouth. Masks were not as helpful for protecting the user as dispersed particles more easily snuck in, especially along exposed sides of the mask. And of course, all of the discomfort went to the wearer, which thus led to spotty masking. Basically, this was a classic example of negative externalities.

[00:02:24]more people got sick because individuals did not fully internalize the damage that they passed on to others. It is the same reason why cars produce more pollution than is socially optimal. You can even connect this to the straight of Hormuz closure which the United States can only prolong because the cost of higher oil prices is spread out to the entire world not fully absorbed by US citizens.

[00:02:48]Back to the pandemic, remember that CO itself did not have that high of a mortality rate. Combined, these factors created an environment that encouraged individuals to act in a cavalier manner.

[00:03:00]The joys of negative externalities.

[00:03:03]Again, I am not that kind of doctor, but my understanding is that the haunt virus is far more dangerous if you catch it, but it is not nearly as contagious.

[00:03:14]From the CDC, the spread is usually limited to people who have close contact with a sick person. This includes direct physical contact, prolonged time spent in close or enclosed spaces, and exposure to the sick person's bodily fluids. I should add a caveat to that website, which is only a few days old, but already possibly outdated. There are some concerns that the current strain has gone airborne, so keep that in mind.

[00:03:40]But at least the haunt virus classic does not have the same sort of social problem that co had. you are much more likely to transmit the virus to someone you know and therefore presumably care about than some randos on the street. So there is some cause for optimism.

[00:03:57]Perhaps mitigation procedures will work much better this time around. Militarily though, yikes. Look again at the CDC's warning about primary transmission vectors. Direct physical contact and prolonged time spent in close or enclosed spaces. It now makes perfect sense why a cruise ship was the start of the saga. And come to think of it, I know a bunch of military setups that seem very similar. So, personally, if I had a war ongoing, I would start having some task forces investigating preliminary steps and outlining crisis procedures should it come to that. But, as I like to remind people, war is just a costly process by which two parties resolve a political dispute. Movies like to depict the cost part in terms of soldiers shooting at each other, but two competing armies fighting to better mitigate an epidemic is still a war. We are just changing how we assign a winner and how we assign a loser. The other half of the question is regarding how the outbreak of a virus affects the outbreak of a war and termination thereof. And I want to start here with a general social science point, one that you probably already appreciate after having heard me yap for four years. I can remember at the start of the co thing a bunch of academics panicking that international relations scholars had spent little time studying pandemics.

[00:05:23]Now that was true in an explicit sense.

[00:05:26]You could not fill a bookshelf with monographs on the politics of global health crisis. But that also should not be surprising. There aren't exactly many cases to go off of. The best I suppose you could find would be the Spanish flu, particularly because it over overlapped with World War I. But a single case does not exactly support a booklength treatment on the generalities of pandemics. That critique also missed the entire point of modeling behavior in a general manner. Over the years, we have discussed how military power, state resolve, and the cost of war shape negotiated settlements. We have also seen how shifting power, asymmetric information, and private benefits lead to bargaining breakdown. I do not wish to say that we have a complete understanding of the causes of war. But I think at this point we have a pretty good shell that tells us about 3/4s of what we need to know, about 3/4s of the cases out there. That is the entire reason why we do research on general mechanics of war between state A and state B rather than why specifically the Kremlin struggled to ascertain good information prior to the Russia Ukraine war. The latter is a special case of the former. So we can do the bulk of the work all at once if we get comfortable with generalized labels. In other words, we can think about how pandemic logistics affects the standard crisis bargaining model and use that as a springboard to get into the nitty-gritty as necessary.

[00:06:57]Actually, I did this in a video during the first year of the COVID pandemic. It does not have the same type of polish that I have in videos that I produce today, but arguably it is the first video that I have ever produced in this current style. And it got checks notes 1,800 views.

[00:07:16]Times have changed. Anyway, let me briefly explain some of the concerns that might arise here. One, we all know that asymmetric information can lead to a rational miscalculation by one of the parties. If one country does not know how easily another country can mitigate the military effects of the pandemic, you have circumstances that could lead to a war.

[00:07:39]Two, regarding existing information problems, pandemics restrict travel and can limit intelligence gathering operations that has a straightforward effect of preventing states from mitigating information asymmetries.

[00:07:53]But note that intelligence can sometimes convey overly optimistic information that can in turn cause war. So the true effect here depends on whether default beliefs would have led to an aggressive or a conservative demand at the bargaining table. Three, if one party is hit hard by the pandemic and put into a position where its military is temporarily disabled, then its opponent may see a window of opportunity to fight under favorable circumstances. It is the classic recipe of preventive war due to shifting power. Four, you might imagine situations where a government does a terrible job mitigating the pandemic.

[00:08:32]The country eventually recovers, but the polling numbers look bad for the incumbent leader or party. Boom. You have a situation that encourages a fabricated crisis to spark a rally round the flag effect. And five, on a broader level, pandemics make peacekeeping efforts more expensive for third party states to operate. Peacekeepers do not go to exotic locations around the world for fun. They deploy there because their absence encourages two previously waring parties to get back to their guns. And they might just do that if the pandemic causes the peacekeepers to withdraw. And there you have it. A gigantic mess of possibilities. I would say too much of a mess, but this is 2026, so it actually seems right on brand. As for now, you can go back and watch that co era video if you want some old school lines on maps. It expands on the same answers that I gave today, and it is broadly still relevant as long as you substitute COVID with haunt virus. Hey, maybe we'll get above 2,000 views 6 years after the fact. And if you enjoyed today's video, then please like, share, and subscribe.

[00:09:45]And I will see you next time. Take care.