On Balance | Coronavirus or not, Donald Trump is pressing ahead with his war on multilateralism
- While some aspects of Trump’s trade war with China have merit, pushing an isolationist agenda at a time when the world needs to come together to fight a pandemic is misguided
Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, provided a note of optimism amid an unending torrent of bleak news last week when he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that a turning point in the Covid-19 pandemic would arrive sooner for the US than we expect.
But if we’ve learned anything in the past few months, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the assessments of accomplished scientists, given that many of them had been warning us for years that what the world is experiencing now was a matter of when, not if.
So Americans should know that the social distancing most have been practising for the past two weeks is not likely to last for many months on end. However, they should be prepared for a battle over how isolated the country will be from its friends, on a more geopolitical level, once the initial wave of this pandemic recedes.
