Recent US failures

On May 26, President Joe Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to produce "analysis of the origins of Covid-19" within 90 days. This move followed weeks of speculation surrounding the claim that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory, usually identified as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Having rightly rejected this claim for more than a year as a Trumpian conspiracy theory, centrist and liberal commentators in the West have breathed new life into the "lab leak" hypothesis, taking cues from allegations and claims made by US state leaders and corporate media.

Meanwhile, Facebook and other social-media giants reversed their censorship of lab-leak disinformation almost overnight, impelled by a tawdry mix of insinuations from unnamed US intelligence sources and vague allegations of impropriety relating to the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of the pandemic earlier this year.

Right on schedule, America's finest intelligence analysts delivered their report to the White House on August 24 and released an unclassified summary three days later. The once hotly anticipated story landed like a damp squib and was buried by the regular news cycle in less than a day. In part, this was due to the inconclusive nature of the findings.

Four intelligence community (IC) elements and the National Intelligence Council assessed "with low confidence" that SARSCoV-2 emerged from "natural exposure," another IC element leaned "with moderate confidence" toward a lab leak, and three others did not commit either way, though they naturally all agreed that "Beijing … continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States."

But what really doomed the report to oblivion was a signal failure of US intelligence - and the entire imperial apparatus - on a far grander scale: the utter rout of the United States' puppet regime in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who in 10 days captured every provincial capital (save one), including Kabul.

Multilateralism, Biden style

One underexplored throughline linking the two events is Biden's fraught though largely earnest attempts to restore the traditionally multilateral basis of the US empire, drawing a sharp distinction from his predecessor Donald Trump.

While Trump dramatically withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization at the height of a global pandemic in 2020, alleging an entirely illusory proChina bias, one of Biden's first acts in office was to rejoin the organization.

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus duly celebrated the restoration of US funding by contradicting the WHO mission's own assessment, as part of a joint study with China, that "introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway."

Biden's penchant for pursuing a new cold war through multilateral channels has continued in his engagement with the Group of Seven and North Atlantic Treatyy Organization. Trump famously denigrated both forums and delighted in alienating the United States' subimperial vassals. Biden has, meanwhile, used these summits to great effect as ostensibly internationalist window dressing for the military encirclement of China.

In June, a NATO Brussels Summit Communiqué for the first time identified "China's stated ambitions and assertive behavior" as "systemic challenges to the rulesbased international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security."

In the months since, Britain, France and even Germany have launched performative naval incursions into the South China Sea - almost the antipodal opposite of the alliance's ostensible remit in the North Atlantic.

Flawed anti-racism

Biden's and the Democrats' response to the domestic surge in anti-Asian racism, in effect delinking it rhetorically from their imperial aggression against China, has followed a similar logic.

Gone are the days of presidential bombast over the "China virus" and the "Kung Flu.