Enigma of the US: deathly ill and still the world’s medic

Writing in these pages a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, former Business Day editor Ken Owen painted an arresting image.

He wrote of FBI agents combing the rubble in downtown New York, one broken piece of masonry after the other, literally leaving no stone unturned. Do not mess with the US, was the message of his column. It has the resources, the determination and the sheer bloodymindedness to come after you wherever you are.

Owen, in fact, had it exactly wrong. Precisely because the US was so immense, its domains of influence so scattered, it was prone to use its powerful machinery imprudently and to overreach.

Two years later, it occupied Iraq on the most spurious of grounds; those who had its president’s ear imagined the mere presence of its troops in the Middle East would inspire uprisings throughout the region, sweeping its enemies from office. Never before had the US so dramatically misread the sources and limitations of its own power. Not in generations was it left with its influence so diminished.

Now, in hindsight, the US’s incompetent response to 9/11 must surely rank as a curtainraiser to Covid-19.

This great victor of the 20th century’s struggles, the richest and most advanced society on earth, has been left flailing. As it stumbles out of lockdown, conservative estimates are that it needs to test 3-million people a day to sustain a successful epidemiological response to the virus.

Currently it is testing 300,000 people on a good day. The irony is that it has the technology and the resources to ramp up its testing tenfold. But its federal government has not the wherewithal or the will to put such a plan in place.

Instead, its states fight it out among themselves for vital supplies and equipment while its president punts bleach, sunlight and untested medication; and that is on days when he is not touting a conspiracy theory on where the virus began.

Yet the woeful story of the federal executive is just one part of the story. Alongside staggering US incompetence there is also extraordinary US prowess.

When the history of the pandemic is written the US Federal Reserve will be remembered as one of the institutions that steered humanity’s course. When debt markets threatened to collapse across much of the world in mid-March it decided in a flash to extend dollar swap lines to 14 central banks; simultaneously, at home, it bought up swathes of sovereign and corporate bonds.

As in the 2008 crash, it responded to an unheralded global crisis by becoming, overnight, a global institution, making up doctrine on the hoof, for there existed no instruction manual on what to do.

The pandemic will surely produce another story of US prowess, that of its technology companies. There is little question that they will come out richer, more powerful and with greater reach than before.

Exploiting the opportunities the crisis presents they will most likely own significant stakes in elite higher education, in the infrastructure of the vast virtual offices that will emerge in every sector of the economy, in the logistical networks that put food on our tables.

In the midst of carnage in the real economy, Alphabet’s share price is almost back at its February high, a sure sign of the role it and its kind will play in the world that emerges from the pandemic.

Writing the story of the US in this crisis is a formidably complex task. It is such a strange and hybrid beast. Swathes of its public institutions are ruined and useless; millions of its citizens are in poor health, its vast health system unable to help them.

And yet it is also the site of institutions that have responded to the crisis on a global scale with a swiftness and an agility that dazzles. American greatness is not over.

Even as it festers and rots, it glows with abundant health.