What Trump praising China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak says about US foreign policy
- The US president lauded China’s ‘efforts and transparency’ in tackling the coronavirus even as his secretary of state highlighted the threat China poses to the world
- In the run-up to the presidential election, Trump will avoid rocking the boat further with China
As editors waited for the WHO’s widely expected decision to declare a global emergency, WHO managing director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus prefaced the verdict with a lengthy paean to China for its alacrity and transparency in dealing with the deadly contagion.
Even discounting the possibility that politics blocked an earlier response that might have kept the new contagion in check, we need to question why so much time was spent lavishing praise on a government for doing what is so obviously in its own, and the world’s, best interests.
And while Tedros’ preface sounded as though it was drafted by Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the explanation for the emergency that was eventually announced aligned with Beijing’s messaging on another level.
Countries with “weaker health systems” than China’s, we were told by WHO officials, were what the global health authority was looking to protect.
In other words, everything is under control in China owing to its extraordinary wisdom and efficiency, but the less-developed countries beyond China’s borders do not have it as good.
This is a prime example of the grotesque deformation of American foreign policy under Trump.
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Suddenly, the American government is less a system of checks and balances and more of a bureaucracy subject to the inclinations of a powerful executive branch.
Trump and his Republican Party have engineered this shift, and they will control the impeachment narrative, characterising it as a failed coup attempt, until the US general election in November. The impeachment will bolster Trump’s determination to win so he can claim that he is vindicated. That requires a strong economy, and he knows that a re-escalation of the US-China trade war would undercut growth.
This will keep the Trump-Xi alliance intact for at least the next nine months, if not for the next 4½ years.
With authoritarians in control of the world’s two largest economies, we can look forward to more flowery odes to Beijing and Washington from the likes of the WHO and the many other multilateral institutions beholden to the G2.
Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief