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Post by KTJ on May 21, 2020 9:18:59 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…The post-American world is now on full displayThe United States has left behind any ambition of global leadership and any function as a global inspiration.By CARL BILDT | 4:22PM EDT — Tuesday, May 19, 2020 The World Health Assembly, conducted mostly virtually, in Geneva on Tuesday. — Photograph: Christopher Black/WHO/via Reuters.THE annual meeting of the World Health Assembly — the general assembly of the World Health Organization — is normally not something that attracts major attention outside the circle of those directly concerned.
But the meeting this week was very different. Here, the post-American world was on full display as it has seldom been seen before. It is not that the United States has ceased to exist — far from it. But it has left behind any ambition of global leadership and any function as a global inspiration.
And that is very new. Tragically so.
The first prominent speaker on the virtual meeting, with audience members throughout the world, was Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was a polished, confident and probably effective performance. His speech contained four messages: China has mastered the crisis and has put it behind itself; China is ready to help the rest of the world, notably Africa; China stands for transparency, including a review on what happened once we all have put the crisis begin us; and a vaccine has to be seen as a global public good available to all.
Then, from Europe, there was France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Angela Merkel with messages of strong support for global cooperation in fighting the virus, notably through the WHO. They also spoke about the vaccine that everyone is hoping for as a global public good.
And it was the European Union that carefully maneuvered the diplomatic work needed to get a global consensus around a resolution calling for a comprehensive review into the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Its draft evolved in such a way that it was co-sponsored by a large number of other nations.
The idea of some sort of review of what really happened in China — and elsewhere — as the virus first appeared was first aired by Australia some weeks ago and, at the time, led to an angry response from Beijing.
But the E.U. managed to get language on such a review into the resolution, and it was then co-sponsored by Australia. The language, obviously somewhat more diplomatic than the campaign rhetoric we hear from the White House, evidently satisfied the original Australian wish.
China knew where things were heading. Keen to show itself as a responsible stakeholder in the landscape of global health cooperation, it folded on the objections it might have had and accepted the review requirements of the resolution.
It took four hours or so of speeches by ministers from around the world before the United States made its presence felt. Until then, the United States hadn't even been mentioned. But the U.S. tone, via a speech by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, was markedly different from the other speeches, and only fueled the impression that the United States was far more interested in fighting China than fighting the virus. On the issue of Taiwan's participation in the assembly, it has a point — and support from countries that were once often referred to as its allies. But there was an understanding among others that shared this opinion that the issue could be deferred.
Simultaneously, outside the World Health Assembly, the Trump administration launched a barrage of accusations against China and the WHO, culminating with the president's threat to leave the organization entirely within a month. That would be a true tragedy for everyone concerned. But it has to be said that, for anyone following the discussions at the World Health Assembly, it sounded as though it had already happened.
This was the post-American world on display: China assertive and confident. Europe trying to save what can be saved of global cooperation. And the Trump administration mostly outside firing its heavy artillery in all directions, but with limited actual results.
In the end, the United States had to accept that the resolution drafted under E.U. leadership was adopted by consensus. Rarely has the United States been as marginalized at a major diplomatic gathering. A world used to American leadership — for good, according to many, for bad, according to some — had to move on with the urgent issues of fighting the virus.__________________________________________________________________________ • Carl Bildt is a former prime minister of Sweden and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic • The Washington Post's View: China agreed to a global WHO review. Where was Trump? • Dana Milbank: Trump's attempt to frame the WHO only shows his failure to act • Michael Merson: Cutting U.S. funding to the WHO is unjustified and dangerous • John Pomfret: Taiwan must join the WHO. Global health is too important to play politics. • Carl Bildt: The coronavirus is another test for Europe. Working together will be key.www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/19/post-american-world-is-now-full-display
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Post by KTJ on Jul 27, 2020 17:16:50 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…America's global standing is at a low point. The pandemic made it worse.Under Trump, the United States retreats from collaborative leadership at a time of global crisis.By DAN BATZ | Sunday, July 26, 2020 President Donald J. Trump walks to the Marine One helicopter for a departure from the South Lawn of the White House on July 15, 2020.
— Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.AMERICA's standing in the world is at a low ebb. Once described as the indispensable nation, the United States is now seen as withdrawn and inward-looking, a reluctant and unreliable partner at a dangerous moment for the world. The coronavirus pandemic has only made things worse.
President Trump shattered a 70-year consensus among U.S. presidents of both political parties that was grounded in the principle of robust American leadership in the world through alliances and multilateral institutions. For decades, this approach was seen at home and abroad as good for the world and good for the United States.
In its place, Trump has substituted his America First doctrine and what his critics say is a zero-sum-game sensibility about international relationships. America First has been described variously as nationalistic, populistic, isolationist and unilateralist. The president has demeaned allies and emboldened adversaries such as China and Russia.
At home, Trump's handling of the pandemic has created division and confusion rather than an effective national strategy. The rest of the world sees the United States not as a leader in dealing with the coronavirus but as the country with the highest number of coronavirus infections and covid-19 deaths, and with the disease far from under control. European nations have responded with the unprecedented step of blocking Americans from entering their countries.
From abroad, the United States is seen as having lost confidence in itself as it grapples not only with the pandemic but also with long-standing political divisions and a racial reckoning over the treatment of black Americans. The perceived loss of confidence among Americans in turn has led others to question the United States’ appetite or capacity for a collaborative leadership role at a time when the health and economic crises call out for committed global cooperation.
Before the pandemic, the president took a number of steps that signaled a retreat from collective involvement abroad, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. He raised doubts about the U.S. commitment to NATO. After a long-running quarrel with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he has called for the withdrawal of more than a quarter of the 34,500 U.S. troops stationed in Germany. President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks on “Operation Legend: Combating Violent Crime in American Cities” at the White House on July 22.
— Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.Since the pandemic struck, Trump has continued to pull back. When other nations' leaders gathered by video to rally behind and provide funding for the development of a coronavirus vaccine, the United States skipped the meeting. When many world leaders participated in a World Health Organization assembly on the pandemic, the president was absent. Trump's anger with China over the virus ultimately prompted him to withdraw the United States from the WHO.
“People are stunned about the effect of incapable leadership, or of polarizing leadership, of not being able to unify and get the forces aligned so you can address the problem [of the coronavirus],” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a vice president of the German Marshall Fund and director of its Berlin office. “And that, of course, results in a nosedive in how you view [the United States]. What you're seeing is a collapse of soft power of America.”
“I think the U.S. is seen from my perspective as being involved in its own internal reckoning — like the rest of the world doesn't really exist,” said Robin Niblett, director and chief executive of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “It's America trying to battle with historical and contemporary demons that as much as anything are a result of its own internal contradictions and tensions and strengths and weaknesses. And it's not all bad. I'm just saying it is like really seeing somebody's psychological flaws exposed at a moment of stress.”
Trump gets credit, even if sometimes grudgingly, for asking uncomfortable questions and challenging old assumptions. He has forced other nations to take a tougher approach to China and to reappraise the costs of globalization. His badgering of NATO allies to spend more on defense, however irritating to the allies, produced results that had eluded previous presidents.
“If you look at the world, it is an alliance of liberty coming around to face the existential threat of our time, which is the totalitarian dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Stephen K. Bannon, who served as chief strategist in the White House early in the Trump administration and has long been a proponent of a nationalistic foreign policy. “The axis and the allies here are very well defined.”
But despite acknowledgments that Trump has at times raised legitimate questions, overall assessments of the effect of his approach to the world are harsh — with fears that the pandemic will do further damage over time.
“It hurts our brand. It hurts the status of our institutions. It's going to weaken our economy and our economic power and soft power as a consequence,” said Stephen J. Hadley, who was a national security adviser to President George W. Bush. “It's potentially a real setback.” Protesters rally in London's Parliament Square on February 20, 2017, against Trump's proposed state visit to Britain. — Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images.By the numbers, a loss of confidence in U.S. leadershipThis is not the first time the world has held America in low esteem. The U.S. invasion of Iraq cost the country dearly, in lives and in prestige. George W. Bush left office highly unpopular, especially in Europe. Earlier, America's image was tarnished by the red-baiting of then-Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican-Wisconsin) in the 1950s, the bloody civil rights clashes of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's resignation in the 1970s and the Iran hostage crisis later that decade.
Still, by the numbers, Trump had an immediate and negative impact. A Gallup survey of impressions of world leadership after the first year of Trump's presidency saw the rating of U.S. leadership plummet by 20 points — lower than Bush's worst rating.
The following year, approval of U.S. leadership remained similarly low, and disapproval was higher than for the leadership in Germany, China and Russia. “In this climate, China's leadership has gained a larger advantage in the ‘great power competition’, and the other player, Russia, is now on a more even level with the U.S.,” the Gallup report said.
The Pew Research Center issued a report in January on international attitudes toward the United States and found 64 percent of people across 32 countries saying they had no confidence in Trump as the U.S. leader, though impressions of the U.S. as a whole remained positive. Trump's ratings were slightly better than the previous year. Pew analysts said that was because of increased support from those on the right in other nations, including those who support right-wing populist parties in their countries.
The same phenomenon showed up in an annual Gallup survey of satisfaction among Americans with the U.S. position in the world. The 2020 survey found that category of satisfaction at 53 percent, up from 32 percent in early 2017. The difference was attributable in large part to a big shift among Republicans. Coming out of the Obama years in 2017, 47 percent of Republicans said they were satisfied with the U.S. position in the world. After three years under Trump, that had risen to 85 percent.
A report issued last month by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Institut Montaigne found that, in Germany, France and the United States, America was seen as the world's most influential country both before and during the pandemic, but the report noted that “China's influence has risen significantly.”
A recent poll asked Germans how their perceptions of other countries have changed as a result of the pandemic. More than 7 in 10 said their impressions of the United States have deteriorated. Only 5 percent said their impressions had improved. China, which Trump has criticized sharply for its handling of the pandemic, did not come off well, either, but in comparison, far less badly than the United States.
When Pew asked Americans in May to rate the performance of various countries with respect to the coronavirus, the United States was rated lower than three other countries — South Korea, Germany and Britain. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, second from left, and President Donald J. Trump, center, at a meeting on reform of the United Nations
at U.N. headquarters in New York on September 18, 2017. — Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.The discontinuity of Trump's foreign policyOn September 2, 1987, Trump, at the time a New York real estate developer toying with a run for president, bought a full-page ad in three major newspapers to publish an open letter to the American people outlining his views on foreign and defense policy. It was a view of the world and America's place in it that he would carry largely unchanged into the White House almost 30 years later.
He did not use the words “America First” but that was the essence of his message. For decades, he argued, “other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” He said the world “is laughing at America’s politicians” for doing work beneficial to others at the expense of those at home. He said the United States was absorbing the costs of protecting other nations that could and should pay more.
At the time, Japan and Saudi Arabia were among his principal targets. In office, it has become China and the nations of NATO, which together make up the United States' most important military alliance. But if the targets are different, the philosophy has changed little. America has been played for a sucker, and it's time to call a halt.
The elements of his America First world-view include a focus on trade, with tariffs as a weapon; a more restrictive immigration policy; pressing others to pay more of the cost of mutual defense; and a reliance on bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations. His style is transactional and highly personal, and while he has been critical of the leaders of democratic countries such as Germany and France, and Britain earlier, he has been reluctant to criticize authoritarian leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping (the latter at least until recently).
In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019, Trump said: “If you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. And if you want peace, love your nation. Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first. The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.” President Donald J. Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 24, 2019. — Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation's President's Club last October, said the administration was approaching the world realistically. “We've recognized that we can't be all things to everywhere, all the time,” he said. “No nation has the capacity to deliver that. And that means not that you abandon the field but that you calibrate your resources to effectively address the relative risks…. I am confident that the next administrations will come into office and they'll see these issues the same way because they're right.”
On their face, those words are not particularly discordant. But analysts who have served presidents of both parties come to a different conclusion. They say Trump's presidency has marked the greatest discontinuity in American foreign policy since World War II.
“President Trump is acting as no administration acted since the 1920s,” said Nicholas Burns, a career Foreign Service officer and former U.S. ambassador to NATO now teaching at Harvard's Kennedy School. “Those presidents were engaged in the world. President Trump isn't. He's almost at war with the world.”
Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and U.S. ambassador to NATO during the administration of President Barack Obama, said of Trump, “He doesn't believe in alliances, open markets, promotion of freedom and human rights — the three pillars of [American] foreign policy. On the essential concept of the United States as the global leader of the international order, Donald Trump has thrown that all out the window.”
“What Donald Trump is doing is badly damaging the belief by people outside the United States that we still understand that that system [of alliances] is in our best interests, as well as the interest of other countries,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, who served in the administration of George W. Bush. “We act like treaties and participation in international organizations is some kind of big favor we are doing everyone else.”
Senator Mitt Romney (Republican-Utah) said Trump's benign treatment of authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Xi and North Korea's Kim Jong Un has produced no obvious positive results or benefits for the United States. “He would argue this is part of his grand strategy to get them to be better neighbors,” Romney said. “The disproof of that is the lack of pudding.”
Romney pointed to Trump's decision to withdraw from the WHO to argue that going it alone is the wrong strategy. “It's a very symbolic decision to say the WHO is too influenced by China and we're going to get out of it so it can be completely dominated by China, instead of saying we're going to flex our muscle and make sure the WHO gets in line,” he said.
Across the political spectrum of national security analysts, including some who give the president credit in specific areas of foreign policy, there is agreement that the pandemic underscores the damage caused by the president.
Tom Donilon, who was a national security adviser to Obama, said: “By almost every measure, America's standing and influence in the world has been damaged over the last three-and-a-half years…. You see it during a crisis. This is the first global crisis probably since World War II where the United States has not been in the lead. It's kind of a stunning thing to see a transnational challenge like this without U.S. leadership.” Through a smashed wall, a view of a devastated street in the Salaheddine district of the Syrian city of Aleppo on August 22, 2013.
— Photograph: Louai Abo Al-Jod/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.Trump disrupts, but is there an effective strategy?In the years after the end of the Cold War, the United States was the world's lone superpower. But it never was quite the indispensable nation as those words began to be used in the late 1990s.
Defenders say the description was employed by officials in President Bill Clinton's administration in part to encourage Americans to resist isolationist impulses and to remain involved in the world after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As the world changed, the role of the United States changed, too. Other nations rose to power. China's economic prowess gave it standing it had lacked, and then Xi turned his country in a sharply anti-democratic direction. Russia under Putin became a global nemesis. India's power expanded. The United States became bogged down in two wars in the Middle East that cost thousands of lives, stretched its military thin and sapped the appetite among the public for foreign adventures.
Anecdotally, a shift in perceptions about America's desire for global leadership began before Trump was elected. One moment that many abroad cite is when Obama failed to follow through on his threat to retaliate militarily after Syria crossed his “red line” by using chemical weapons against its own people. Obama's decision sent a damaging signal to allies.
Before Trump, opposition to globalism was growing. The most conspicuous example of how the politics were changing came when Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state had advocated for the negotiation of a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, refused to endorse the agreement as a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016.
Others cited the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 as another moment when others, particularly China, fed perceptions of U.S. decline. Efforts to extract the country's military from Iraq and Afghanistan added to the idea of the United States pulling back.
Both Obama and Trump campaigned against endless wars in the Middle East, and analysts argue that both presidents thought the United States needed to right-size itself globally — though the two leaders approached that mission in radically different ways. Obama still sought engagement in the world through allied institutions. Trump has preferred that America go it alone.
“I think this has been coming,” Chatham House's Niblett said. “Trump is a rude awakening, maybe a necessarily rude awakening, to a shift that's been happening for at least the last 15 or 20 years, since the end of the Cold War.”
If Trump's style draws near-universal criticism, not every policy of his does, whether it is helping to arm Ukraine and moving an armored brigade into Poland as a counter to Russian aggression, or pushing back on China's moves in the South China Sea. In this interpretation, Trump's policies recall an old line about the composer Richard Wagner, of whom it was said that his music was better than it sounded.
Bannon said that Trump has been far ahead of the American foreign policy elites on China and has “boxed in the globalists” and the campaign of former vice president Joe Biden with his hawkish approach. He pointed to statements by senior administration officials this summer that have laid out the case against the Chinese in aggressive terms.
Bannon called it “nonsense” to suggest that Trump is not leading the world on what he described as the major issue of the day. He argued that the president has spoken with the same kind of force and clarity on China that marked President Ronald Reagan's posture and rhetoric toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s. “The world is coming together [on China],” he said. “Those are the facts.” Chinese and U.S. flags are positioned for a meeting between Chinese Transport Minister Li Xiaopeng and U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao
at the Chinese Ministry of Transport in Beijing on April 27, 2018. — Photograph: Jason Lee/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.Others see Trump as a problem identifier without policies to solve the problems he identifies. They see his China policy as one-dimensional, focused principally on trade, and ask what is the relationship with China that he is seeking and how would he try to make it happen. “The Trump administration can't say what’s the point we're aiming for,” said Schake, the AEI policy director. “What's the China we want? That makes it harder to get everybody organized.”
Romney argued that Trump would have been “far better served to have collaborated with our allies around the world and have confronted China not just as the United States but as an entire world community.”
Kiron Skinner served as the State Department’s director of policy planning from 2018 to 2019 and now is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She described Trump's foreign policy strategy as based on four pillars:
First, that nation states, rather than international institutions, are the principal players and that nation states “should put their nation state first.” Second, that there should be greater reciprocity in international agreements. Third, that there should be increased burden-sharing by America's allies. Fourth, that America should extricate itself from endless wars.
Skinner said the president operates on instincts and hunches that add up to a theory of the world. “It's counterintuitive because he's not a foreign policy expert. But he's really trying to do grand strategy,” she said.
She argued that Trump is recognizing a new reality internationally faster than some of the foreign policy elites. “They're not theorizing fast enough,” she added. “They're reacting to what is being said by one person, namely Donald Trump, instead of saying, ‘Is there something here?’ I think there’s a way that they're discounting that there could be an argument underneath the rhetoric.”
Daalder countered by saying that even if some of Trump's instincts were correct, he has not shown he has a strategy to get things done. “Constructive disruption might well have been useful,” he said. “It clearly is the case that the system has been stultified, that some of the verities that the foreign policy elite in Washington have taken as acts of faith need to be questioned. But disruption for its own sake becomes destruction. The absence of a strategy and a clear goal of getting from point A to point B undermines the values of disruption and left us all worse off.”
Schake said the administration treats diplomacy as something performative, arguing that the administration “appears to be operating under the belief that strident reiteration of our maximal demands counts as diplomacy…. They keep saying over and over what we expect of North Korea, what we expect of Iran, what we expect of the Europeans, and it doesn't appear to move anybody, and so it's a failing diplomatic strategy.” A voter wearing a protective mask carries a ballot at a polling site in Brooklyn on June 23. — Photograph: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg News.A challenging future, no matter the outcome in NovemberWhat the next four years hold obviously depends considerably on the outcome of the November election, but few who study or practice in the areas of foreign policy and national security see an easy path ahead, whatever the result.
“Over the long term, I still have confidence in our institutions, our entrepreneurial traditions, our universities, our values, our young people and all the rest,” said Hadley, the former national security adviser. “But our margin for error is small. The challenges are great and we’re not doing what we need to do to avoid the doomsday scenario.”
“I think this is the most dangerous moment the United States has faced in decades,” said the former Obama adviser Donilon. “We obviously are in the midst of multiple crises. Economic. Health. A serious societal upheaval. We have an election system that is vulnerable to outside interference…. We have the lowest point in our relationships with Russia and China in decades. I think democracy is under the most pressure in the world since the '30s.”
Burns, a foreign policy adviser to the Biden campaign, said he thinks the former vice president, as president, would “quickly return the United States to a position of leadership” and that other governments would respond positively to that. “But I worry that it will take longer with the publics of these countries,” he added. “The memory of Donald Trump will not fade easily.”
But for those for whom electing Biden solves everything, Daalder offered a cautionary note. “It's not enough to just change tone,” he said. “People will say it's great that Joe Biden loves us, but what are we going to do? It will take an extraordinary effort to reengage and rebuild a set of relationships and a set of tools that have been ignored for far too long.”
Few believe a new president can flip a switch and return the situation to that of a previous era. “There is no status quo ante,” said the German Marshall Fund's Kleine-Brockhoff. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, center, arrives at a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 14.
— Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press.Nor will the choices be easy for allies of the United States, particularly in Europe, even if Biden becomes the next president. “Europeans can dismiss a lot of what the Trump administration tells Europe because it's Trump telling us,” Niblett said, “because we don't trust him personally, because as Europeans, we think he's making it up as he goes along. But if Biden were to come, there'd be no hiding. Europeans would have to make choices” — starting with their relationship with China.
Whoever is the next president will face what some analysts see as the most daunting national security inheritance of any president in living memory — and the mere change of administrations might not be enough to reassure other nations, which now fear that a significant portion of the U.S. population embraces Trump’s approach to the world and will continue to do so, even if he is no longer president.
“Now that they've seen Trump, they fear a whipsawing back and forth between something they recognize in the historical tradition and something that's a throwback to neo-isolationism,” said Michèle Flournoy, who served as under-secretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration. “Until they see a second election that validates an engaged United States that is willing to lead in concert with allies and partners, they won't be assured.”
The prestige of the United States ebbs and flows with events, but the country remains the one to which others still look in times of crisis. Expectations of this country are always higher than for other powers that do not have its long track record of leadership. But the last time this country's standing was in decline, it was because of fears that the United States would exercise its vast powers excessively and unilaterally. That is not the issue today. Instead, it is a worry that the United States is no longer prepared or willing to use the powers it still has for the good of the world.__________________________________________________________________________ • Dan Balz is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 1978 and has been involved in political coverage as a reporter or editor throughout his career. Before coming to The Washington Post, he worked at National Journal magazine as a reporter and an editor and at the Philadelphia Inquirer. At The Washington Post, he has reported on 10 presidential campaigns. The first political convention he covered was the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. He is the author of several books, including two bestsellers. He was born in Freeport, Illinois, and served in the U.S. Army. He is a regular panelist on PBS's “ Washington Week” and is a frequent guest on the Sunday morning talk shows and other public affairs programs. Dan Balz was educated at the University of Illinois, where he was awarded a B.S. and a M.S. in communications. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • Biden leads by double digits as coronavirus takes a toll on the president, Washington Post-ABC poll finds • Trump faces rising disapproval and widespread distrust on coronavirus, Washington Post-ABC poll findswww.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/reckoning-america-world-standing-low-point/
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Post by pim on Aug 15, 2020 12:13:57 GMT 10
The Unraveling of AmericaAnthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American erawww.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/ Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book, “Magdalena: River of Dreams,” is published by Knopf.Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science. In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger. Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions. Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years. The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes. COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation. To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival. Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America. In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world. For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century. No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America. In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy. When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich. In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism. But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century. As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations. More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes. With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.  Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio on April 3rd, 1944. When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industryOnly half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place. But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor. For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees. Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall. With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history. COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand. As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make. As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot dictatorship, the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, chastised America for “maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights.” North Korean newspapers objected to “police brutality” in America. Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khamenei gloated, “America has begun the process of its own destruction.” Trump’s performance and America’s crisis deflected attention from China’s own mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to mention its move to crush democracy in Hong Kong. When an American official raised the issue of human rights on Twitter, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, invoking the killing of George Floyd, responded with one short phrase, “I can’t breathe.” These politically motivated remarks may be easy to dismiss. But Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as a person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”. The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none. Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds. The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness. How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully. Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients. When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood Safeway. In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge. In Canada, the experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers, certainly as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very simple. The checkout person may not share your level of affluence, but they know that you know that they are getting a living wage because of the unions. And they know that you know that their kids and yours most probably go to the same neighborhood public school. Third, and most essential, they know that you know that if their children get sick, they will get exactly the same level of medical care not only of your children but of those of the prime minister. These three strands woven together become the fabric of Canadian social democracy. Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada performed well during the COVID crisis because of our social contract, the bonds of community, the trust for each other and our institutions, our health care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property. The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose. This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less. They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return they get free health care, free education from pre-school through university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated more respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that of the United States. American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job was his willingness to give voice to their hatreds, validate their anger, and target their enemies, real or imagined. One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power. But even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time. The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of international peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age beyond all conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United States, together with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and gave hope to millions. If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus, but, as others have said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.
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