“THE U.S. IS THE LAUGHINGTOCK OF THE WORLD” ON CORONAVIRUS

A Taiwanese friend recently posted an observation on Facebook that really caught my eye: “In terms of Covid19 containment, USA has drastically failed and is the laughing stock of the world. Very sad.” He added that the Taiwanese media was filled with similar comments.

There are few more pro-US countries in the world than Taiwan, which relies on us for protection against China. It is very sad is that things have come to that.

According to data from the Johns Hopkins coronavirus dashboard reported by Vox, the curve of new coronavirus cases plotted by time in the US is far steeper than in other European and Asian countries. The curve in Europe is also bending far more steeply than in the US, where it has yet to bend at all.

The Administration has tried to put the blame on China for the coronavirus. And indeed the response in China at the beginning of the pandemic involved hiding the virus and silencing medical whistleblowers. But fairly quickly China did acknowledge the problem and move aggressively against it. The gap in China between awareness of the problem and action against it was far shorter than in the US, though we had far more time to act before cases came here. What characterized the other countries that have had successful coronavirus responses — South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand — is that they moved quickly.

That’s what we did not so. The first US coronavirus case was reported January 20. There were still very few cases here when Trump announced a partial travel ban to China in late February. During the next month, Trump did nothing to encourage states to act to limit exposure. After earlier referring to Democratic worries about the virus as “a hoax,” after the China travel ban he stated, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” A few days later he stated, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

During the few weeks after the travel ban, cases spiked, and the rest is history. We were slower than others.

For quite a while, well before the coronavirus, there has been a lot of talk about the rise of Asia and the decline of the US. Sadly the Chinese narrative that their system can respond aggressively to a crisis such as this while the US is paralyzed is not so absurd that no reasonable people will buy it — though of course the other major countries that have successfully combatted the virus are all democracies.

But the coronavirus could be the tipping point for a perception in the world that the US is in decline. I don’t think there is any opinion polling on how people outside the U.S. regard our government’s response. But beyond the one comment by my Taiwanese friend, The Irish Times, from another country very friendly to the US, has editorialized, “The United States has stirred many feelings around the world: love, hatred, fear, envy. But we have never felt pity for the US before, until now.”

Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singaporean ambassador to the UN and high-profile advocate of the rise of Asia, has written in The Economist that the coronavirus crisis marks the “dawn of the Asian century” — “the West’s incompetent response to the pandemic will hasten the power-shift to the east.” The “post-covid-19 world will be one in which other countries look to East Asia as a role model, not only for how to handle a pandemic but how to govern more generally.”

This could be Donald Trump’s most-unfortunate legacy. The man who talked about making America great again may have made us into an also-ran.