My Take | China has won PR war against US over Covid-19
- Both countries are spinning tales full of falsehoods, but what is undeniable is that one side has the disease under control while the other is still waiting, in horror, for it to peak
Wars are won by the side that makes fewer fatal mistakes. As Leo Tolstoy has argued in War and Peace, to the eternal chagrin of armchair strategists and military buffs, even the best-laid military plan goes up in smoke the minute the first shot is fired. All you have left is a cascade of failures, misunderstanding and incompetence leading to ultimate collapse. In other words, the victor wins by default, not by design.
It certainly does not mean China has a superior political system. What we are seeing, rather, is the systemic failure of the US under the Trump White House at a fundamental institutional level.
But what everyone can see is that on the one side, the number of new cases has been declining steadily while the other is well on its way to become the worst-hit of all similarly developed countries, even though it is the richest and most powerful. Results speak for themselves. Blaming China won’t save American lives. It may, however, deflect responsibility.
But, to begin with, both sides were almost deliberately unprepared. Among others, respected researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention had warned their respective governments for years that a coming “plague” of global proportion was a matter of time.