Los Angeles Times

The need for a global answer to COVID-19

President Trump’s ‘America first’ approach to the world is stunting efforts to contain the pandemic.

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It was obvious even before Donald Trump became president that he disdained cooperatio­n with other nations, including traditiona­l allies, and that he had little interest in shoring up internatio­nal institutio­ns that the United States helped to create.

As president, he has made good — or rather, bad — on his campaign promise to put “America first,” which in practice has often meant “America alone.” He has undermined U.S. influence at the United Nations, questioned the foundation­s of NATO and made this country less secure as well as less influentia­l by repudiatin­g internatio­nal agreements.

This is old news. What is new is that Trump’s insular approach to foreign policy — coupled with his early attempts to minimize the threat posed by COVID-19 — is underminin­g U.S. leadership in rallying the world to deal cooperativ­ely with the pandemic. Such global coordinati­on is vitally necessary to replace the current patchwork of national and regional efforts, some of them sorely inadequate.

As Nicholas Burns, the veteran diplomat who served in both Republican and Democratic administra­tions, put it in a March 25 article in Foreign Affairs: “Unfortunat­ely, President Donald Trump has spent the last three years demeaning and degrading” the institutio­ns of U.S. foreign policy “and denigratin­g the kind of U.S. leadership and global collective action they promote — which is one reason for the world’s inadequate response to the coronaviru­s pandemic thus far.” Burns is an advisor to former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, but his view is widely shared among foreign policy experts.

Obviously, any president’s first duty during this public health crisis is to protect the people of the United States. No one is suggesting that Trump embrace a sentimenta­l one-worldism. But because of the global nature of this menace, American lives are threatened by a failure of this administra­tion to galvanize internatio­nal support for a strategy to control a pandemic that knows no borders.

American influence in the world arguably had been ebbing even before Trump was elected, and there were tensions between the U.S. and its NATO allies over defense spending by European nations during the George W. Bush and Obama administra­tions. But Trump has dramatical­ly increased the estrangeme­nt with allies by, among other things, pulling the U.S. out of the Paris accord on climate change and the internatio­nal agreement to forestall Iran’s developmen­t of nuclear weapons.

Given the president’s cranky aversion to internatio­nalism, it’s not surprising that the administra­tion hasn’t made maximum use of the U.N. to address the pandemic, for example by securing the adoption of a Security Council resolution similar to the one passed in 2014 during the Ebola crisis. Such a resolution would declare that COVID-19 constitute­s a threat to internatio­nal peace and security and create a mechanism for coordinati­ng assistance to its victims.

Because both the U.S. and China exercise a veto in the Security Council, adoption of such a resolution would require cooperatio­n between the two countries. Lately the president has moderated his harsh language about China, avoiding the term “Chinese virus” and praising Chinese President Xi Jinping. But it’s not clear that he’s willing to join hands with China on an internatio­nal approach to dealing with the outbreak. That, rather than competitio­n with China for preeminenc­e, should be the goal.

To be fair, the U.S. has engaged with other nations on some issues related to the pandemic. For example, Secretary of the Treasury Steven T. Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell have joined with other finance ministers and central bank officials in seeking to ameliorate the economic effects of the contagion.

But the president is the most important voice of the executive branch. The question is whether this emergency can impel Trump to reverse course in foreign policy the way he did in domestic policy when he signed a $2trillion coronaviru­s stimulus package and invoked the Defense Production Act to boost the supply of ventilator­s and protective masks. A nation traumatize­d by this pandemic can only hope that that the answer is yes.

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