- 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.
Levitt's prediction was difficult to believe as the confirmed case count and death toll surged in the US and many other countries, and stay-at-home orders became increasingly strict.
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.
In one of his daily White House coronavirus task force briefings last week, US President Donald Trump tipped us off about where things might be headed at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel.
"Both parties must unite to ensure the United States is truly an independent nation in every sense of the word," he intoned, noting that the US is "energy independent" and must focus on "manufacturing independence, economic independence and territorial independence enforced by strong, sovereign borders".
The language was almost certainly provided by the group of isolationists that Trump has had at his side since he took office, led by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.
The next day " again, at the daily briefing meant to inform America about the state of play in the fight against Covid-19 " Trump found another enemy to berate: Europe.
"And let me tell you, some of the people that took the biggest advantage of us: our allies," he said, veering off into one of his characteristic rhetorical tangents that require a crack team of psycholinguists to decipher.
"They took advantage of us in many ways, but financially as well as even militarily … if you look at Nato, the abuse that was given to our country by Nato," he said before concluding his thought with: "We've been treated very, very unfairly by the European Union."
How did all of this get into an update on Covid-19 in the US? The administration's push to undercut multilateralism remains an underpinning ideology for many in Trump's inner circle, and therefore seeps out at every opportunity.
For the time being, Trump isn't banging the same drum when it comes to China because of his greatest weakness: an all-consuming admiration for autocratic leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping, who, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, must take great delight in hearing Trump bash Washington's traditional allies and the rules-based international order that the United States spent decades building up.
After all, Xi and Putin are on the same page when it comes to multilateral global governance.
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This isn't to say that Navarro had it all wrong. The US spent too many years waiting for Beijing to budge on giving foreign companies intellectual property protection and access to China's burgeoning market. America's laissez-faire regulatory approach to business also allowed too many strategic materials and products to be completely controlled by Chinese manufacturers.
These issues must be addressed when the current crisis abates. We need to acknowledge that Trump's trade war with China started to push things in the right direction.
But using the coronavirus crisis to push a broader agenda of isolationism is not only over a line, it is dangerous considering that international cooperation will be necessary to avoid the runaway spread of a disease that humanity is now trying to beat back.
Sars-Cov-2 won't be the last coronavirus to threaten humanity.
The sharing of epidemiological data and the international pooling of efforts to find therapeutics and vaccines, facilitated by multilateral bodies like the World Health Organisation, is the only way the world can halt the spread of the next virus before it starts causing chaos.
Robert Delaney is the Post's North America bureau chief
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