Follow us on social

49583862131_60c09f073c_k-1024x525-1

Blaming China for COVID-19 needlessly cripples multilateralism at a time when we need it most

Multilateralism provides the connective tissue that knits countries together precisely when they are most likely to go their own way. 

Analysis | Asia-Pacific

As the reality of the Trump administration set in, policy makers begrudgingly started to acknowledge that much of what had made globalization sustainable in general, and the U.S.-China relationship specifically, needed to be fundamentally reworked. Parts of this should have required a long overdue revisiting of the social contract in developed economies to ensure more resiliency in the face of massive structural changes to the world’s economy, and parts would have required reforms to how global multilateral institutions worked, to capture the realities of China’s ongoing nationalist economic policies, and the emergence of high technology sectors whose demands were poorly matched to trade policies written decades ago.

But these reforms stood little chance at a moment in time where discarding, versus reforming, much that had proven to build a largely peaceful and prosperous world over the last 30 years had become Washington’s rhetorical currency. The Trump administration’s moves towards de-coupling with China would have been troubling enough in the midst of the economic and political realities always at play in an uncertain world, but with the emergence of a global pandemic that began in China and has now spread across the globe, we have the perfect cocktail for something that could get truly out of hand: feckless political leaders in both the U.S. and China, deliberate seeding of fake news by nationalistic media sources, and now threats of recrimination.

Last week, Sen. Tom Cotton said of the U.S. response to COVID-19 that, “we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world.”  What Sen. Cotton inferred, the administration this week made explicit when President Trump referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called it “the Wuhan virus.”

The emerging conspiracy that COVID-19 was designed in a Chinese lab and released to the public — whether by accident or design — would not be the first such conspiracy to be latched onto by this administration. This conspiracy could have much more serious implications, the sort of which make near-peer conflict on the heels of a collapse in economic activity and political crisis a non-trivial possibility.

And on Tuesday, in a moment of historically bad timing and judgment (the sort of intemperance that should remind us all that China is absolutely not ready to lead, and that the very best of American leadership is desperately called for now more than ever), the Chinese government expelled journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. It would be a tragic failure of imagination to not conceive of how this could spin out of control.

Some would have us mark the president’s reference to COVID-19 as a “Chinese” virus an accidental slip of the tongue (or thumb, as Twitter enabled diplomacy now works), or to others yet another eye-rolling example of political correctness gone amuck.

But in the midst of a global pandemic and economic crisis, when every phrase must be chosen with deliberation and intention, where leaders’ words can speak to strike fear or calm anxieties, to direct blame or encourage caution, it was an unnecessary provocation, and in that becomes yet another strike against reasonable hope of multilateral collaboration at this time of great need.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare problems that are not going to go away once the virus has receded, problems that no single nation can solve on its own. The great tragedy may not only be the lives lost and economies damaged as a result of this crisis, but also the further acceleration of a spectacularly dysfunctional de-coupling in the U.S.-China relationship, and the ongoing destruction of global public health, trade, and other institutional capacity precisely when it is most sorely needed.

Multilateralism exists to ensure that at times of great crisis such as the one we are now in, countries can work together at global scale. While multilateralism may be a fiction for some, it is the very best kind, the sort that calls us to our most noble ideals largely because its authors can imagine a world where countries beset by their own mounting problems are prone to bad decisions whose repercussions have no respect for borders.

Leaders in these moments can obfuscate, which is exactly what the Chinese — who had good reason not to trust its emerging problem with American policy makers given the events of the last three years — chose to do. Or, leaders can pursue cheap answers to very expensive questions — which today would be a lit match in a world flush with kindling.  Multilateralism provides the connective tissue that knits countries together precisely when they are most likely to go their own way.

Is China to blame for the COVID-19 crisis? Without doubt, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) political ideology and its disgraceful stifling of front line physicians who knew something was wrong and were prevented from notifying the appropriate authorities of the emerging crisis, made the spread of the disease in early days much worse than it had to be. There is every reason to blame China for this part of the problem, and to use it as evidence in discussions with Chinese leadership of the problems in their political model, and the concerns these blind spots raise with their global partners.

But for that to occur, China would have to believe that the U.S. has China’s best interests in mind, and that we have technocrats capable of imagining a world where an emerging China can co-exist with the United States. Perhaps more critically, as casting blame goes, American responses to COVID-19 have thus far not been bright and shining examples of the right sort of American exceptionalism. We are all in this together, or we are all on our own. Few crises like those unique to global public health make this abundantly clear.

The last several years have given rise to a more bellicose China, one comfortable with asserting that it should be seen as a global leader, and throwing the occasional elbow to make its point.  China’s actions in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak do not support its desire to be seen as such a leader, and the United States government should be specific in articulating to China why. Specifically, for China to play such a global role, it must understand how its domestic politics — in particular its inexcusable stifling of dissenting voices — make the country’s leadership impossible to be trusted at the very global stage China so badly wants to be seen as a leader of. But this standard also hold to the United States: while our system has not suffocated our canaries in the public health mine, it has eviscerated trust through repeated dishonesties. Unlike China, where reforms of its political system are difficult and largely outside the control of average citizens, the U.S. is capable of deep structural reform.  We have done it before, and we must do it again now.

The American opportunity to rise above this moment and provide an answer to these challenges is much clearer than China’s opportunity to do the same, in large part because the American political system has the best-established mechanism in place for political change. In November, assuming elections are held (an unknown which should make anyone who has ever had suspicions about the current president’s authoritarian impulses shudder), Americans will have a choice not just between parties, but between policies and competencies. This choice will come on the heels of a stark reminder that certain historical crises are why competent government and well administered multilateralism are the best bulwark against panic, conflict, and war. We must choose wisely.


Photo credit: U.S. State Department
Analysis | Asia-Pacific
Lockheed Martin
Top image credit: kiuikson via shutterstock.com

Wear the war machine with Lockheed Martin merch

Military Industrial Complex

I wrote a book about Lockheed Martin — the world’s largest arms-making conglomerate. But even I was surprised to learn that for a number of years now, they have also been involved in the fashion industry.

The revelation came in a recent New York Times piece on Kodak, which has had a minor resurgence, not by selling its own products, but by selling its name for use on a range of consumer products, produced by other firms, from luggage to eyewear to hoodies and t-shirts.

keep readingShow less
Kim Jong Un
Top photo credit: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits the construction site of the Ragwon County Offshore Farm, North Korea July 13, 2025. KCNA via REUTERS

Kim Jong Un is nuking up and playing hard to get

Asia-Pacific

President Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a series of “shock and awe” campaigns both at home and abroad. But so far has left North Korea untouched even as it arms for the future.

The president dramatically broke with precedent during his first term, holding two summits as well as a brief meeting at the Demilitarized Zone with the North’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Unfortunately, engagement crashed and burned in Hanoi. The DPRK then pulled back, essentially severing contact with both the U.S. and South Korea.

keep readingShow less
Why new CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper is as wrong as the old one
Top photo credit: U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper speaks to guests at the IISS Manama Dialogue in Manama, Bahrain, November 17, 2023. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

Why new CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper is as wrong as the old one

Middle East

If accounts of President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities this past month are to be believed, the president’s initial impulse to stay out of the Israel-Iran conflict failed to survive the prodding of hawkish advisers, chiefly U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Michael Kurilla.

With Kurilla, an Iran hawk and staunch ally of both the Israeli government and erstwhile national security adviser Mike Waltz, set to leave office this summer, advocates of a more restrained foreign policy may understandably feel like they are out of the woods.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.