‘America First’ no Covid-19 remedy

US President Donald Trump has made good — or bad — on his campaign promise to put “America First”, which often means “America alone”. He has undermined US influence at the UN, questioned the foundations of Nato and made the country less secure and less influential by repudiating global agreements.

This is old news. What is new is that Trump’s insular approach to foreign policy — coupled with his early attempts to minimise the Covid-19 threat — is undermining US leadership in rallying the world to deal co-operatively with the pandemic. Such global co-ordination is vitally necessary to replace the current patchwork of national and regional efforts, some of them sorely inadequate.

Obviously, any US president’s first duty during this public health crisis is to protect the people of the US. Noone is suggesting that Trump embrace a sentimental oneworldism. But because of the global nature of this menace, US lives are threatened by a failure of this administration to galvanise international support for a strategy to control a pandemic that knows no borders.

US influence in the world arguably had been ebbing even before Trump was elected, but he has dramatically increased the estrangement with allies by calling Nato “obsolete” (a characterisation he later withdrew) and deciding to pull the US out of the Paris accord on climate change and the international agreement designed to forestall Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

Given his cranky aversion to internationalism, it’s no surprise that the administration hasn’t made maximum use of the UN to tackle the pandemic. Adoption of a Security Council resolution similar to 2014’s on Ebola would require co-operation. But it’s not clear that he’s willing to join hands with China on an international approach to deal with the outbreak. That, rather than contesting it for pre-eminence, should be the goal.

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