OpinionWith China and the US on the warpath, the world is heading for a fate worse than the coronavirus crisis, and that’s madness

Pointing the finger at China or anyone else misses the point: a pandemic takes widespread ineptitude across all ideologies to scale up to a murderous leviathan

Both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump could have dealt better with the crisis

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Published: 3:00am, 5 May 2020Updated: 3:02am, 5 May 2020

This is no time to be polite: the US relationship with China is deteriorating in a most disgraceful and unnecessary manner amid the global health and economic crisis. As relations continue to sour, the world could be heading for a catastrophe worse than Covid-19: nuclear war.

The cold front in Washington towards China began surfacing under president Barack Obama, who felt his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had been too tolerant of Beijing’s insincerities, evasions and perceived lies. Beijing didn’t help its cause (if it cared) by plunging forward arrogantly – as if it wanted the whole world to notice what a big shot it had become.

After China’s formal induction into the global economic order via the World Trade Organisation in 2001, Beijing went on a big-time ego trip which was anything but unusual for a rising, muscle-flexing power, and which culminated in the showy 2008 Olympics.

But not all the games Beijing played were such fun for the West to watch, especially when viewed (wrongly or rightly) as intellectual theft, currency gamesmanship, espionage and empty sloganeering.

This rise in ambition and stretch of reach gave restless elements in the US good reason to raise red flags that lure Americans into a new Cold War. This was sad.

For a time – during the second Clinton administration especially – it seemed to me that the US had worked out a good-enough formula: live with the reality of China (pluses and minuses), just as China has to live with the US, and; not be diverted by some ideological dream about changing China.