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I have some experience with coalition building, having helped build one of the world’s largest to confront the Islamic State. Only five years ago, ISIS controlled 8 million people, and had attracted 40,000 recruits from more than 100 countries, established affiliates on three continents, and organized attacks across the globe. While Donald Trump touts the coalition’s military campaign, its diplomatic initiatives—United Nations mandates to stop foreign fighters; counter-messaging programs; cooperation with the private sector to remove extremist content online; delivering humanitarian resources; and rapid information sharing between partnered intelligence and law-enforcement agencies—also reduced collective risk and saved countless lives.

President Trump still heralds the success of this coalition, one of the few diplomatic initiatives he carried forward from his predecessor. Now including more than 80 international partners, it was built through what used to be the awesome power of American diplomacy, combined with the desire around the world for steady American leadership to confront shared challenges.

The model is not unique to the security field. Even through the height of the Cold War, the United States led the world and cooperated with the Soviet Union to mass produce a polio vaccine and eradicate naturally recurring smallpox. President George W. Bush established a global coalition to address the crisis of AIDS in Africa, mobilizing more than 50 countries and raising over $80 billion to fight the epidemic. President Barack Obama created a partnership to combat Ebola in West Africa, rallying more than 60 countries and allotting billions of dollars to contain and halt its spread. These two recent initiatives together saved millions of lives thanks to American leadership, initiative, and painstaking diplomacy to activate the world and confront a challenge head-on. President Bush’s initiative alone saved 17 million people.

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It’s not too late for Trump to build on these past models, but he needs to act now. He should immediately appoint a senior coordinator to direct an American-led international response. This coordinator should report to the president and be involved in task forces created to manage our domestic response. This person’s objective is to establish a coalition of countries and international organizations as soon as possible to convene virtually daily. This contact group should then coordinate with affected countries, experts from the WHO and UN, and private-sector entities. Many existing structures can offer a foundation for this initiative, including the G7 and G20, as can relevant public-health entities, such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA). This new organization would be separate from those, keeping its focus solely on containing the coronavirus pandemic, similar to how the Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State included the European Union, INTERPOL, and NATO but had a fixed and narrow mission.