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Robert Delaney
SCMP Columnist
Robert Delaney
Robert Delaney

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
China might be reeling from the new coronavirus outbreak, but Beijing should know that it can look forward to a strengthened position on the world stage once the pathogen is brought under control.
The World Health Organisation’s special press conference last week gave us a taste of what’s to come.

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.

This despite evidence that Chinese researchers may have known that human-to-human transmission was occurring in Wuhan a month before it was announced publicly, and that political factors further delayed a response.

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.

The official Chinese media went into overdrive amplifying Tedros’ words, no doubt straining the capacity of a propaganda machine that was, at the same time, trying to delete a tide of complaints about the lack of medical resources in Hubei.
Medical staff from Union Hospital affiliated to Tongji Medical College, of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, attend a ceremony to form a “assault team” in the fight against the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei province, on January 22. Photo: Xinhua
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump weighed in, because these days he never misses a chance to stump for his “good friend” Chinese President Xi Jinping. Before the US had a president so enamoured with authoritarian leaders, Washington might have just expressed support for Beijing in its current circumstance. Instead, he thanked Xi “on behalf of all Americans” for the Chinese leader’s “efforts and transparency”.

This is a prime example of the grotesque deformation of American foreign policy under Trump.

As White House enters survival mode, foreign policy is anyone’s guess

Soon after Trump’s latest pro-Xi tweet, his own top diplomat Mike Pompeo, speaking in London, called China the “central threat of our times” as a reaction to Britain’s decision not to completely block Huawei from its 5G network. He took this message on a tour that ended up in the capital of China’s neighbour Kazakhstan.

Fortunately for Trump and Beijing, American voters do not pay much attention to foreign policy.

Trump will eventually rein in Pompeo and continue his praise for Xi because of the kinship and respect he feels for the world’s strongmen and political systems that are antithetical to America’s, even as various power centres in the US government work to contain Huawei.

How Trump’s example has emboldened Asia’s strongmen leaders

In Trump’s impeachment trial, which is barrelling towards an acquittal on Wednesday, his defence team asserted that whatever the US president does in pursuit of re-election is inherently in the public’s interest. The US Senate accepted that argument, and so it will stand.

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.

A demonstrator holds up a sign of protest outside the White House in Washington on December 19, following the US House of Representatives’ vote to impeach President Donald Trump the previous day. Photo: Reuters

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

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