How they see us: A superpower in ill health
“Will American prestige ever recover” from Donald Trump’s catastrophic handling of the coronavirus? asked Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times (Ireland). The U.S. president has squandered America’s vast power “willfully, malevolently, vindictively,” and now his country is the epicenter of the pandemic, with more than 58,000 dead. Rather than protecting Americans, Trump spent weeks denying there was a threat, then blamed state governors for failing to prepare, then confiscated the very supplies they needed to keep their citizens alive. People around the world watch his “freak show” press conferences agape as he suggests treating infected patients with bleach and UV rays. We are witness to the “grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives.” Of course, America’s collapse does not belong to Trump alone: The Republican Party, which wants states to reopen no matter the death toll, and Fox News, which mocks science and expertise, are also “vectors of the pestilence.” Over the past 240 years, the U.S. “has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger.” Today, for the first time, it evokes only pity.
The U.S. is utterly absent from the global fight against the pandemic, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian (U.K.). First, Trump condemned the leaders of the World Health Organization “as subordinates of the Chinese Communist Party” and suspended U.S. funding for the United Nations body. Now, in a sign of America’s “increasing isolation on the global stage,” his administration is refusing to join WHO’s new initiative—spearheaded by French President Emmanuel Macron—to accelerate cooperation on a coronavirus vaccine and to share research, treatment, and medicines among all countries, rich and poor alike. Trump cares nothing for people suffering in other nations, even if they’re allies of America, said CGTN.com (China) in an editorial. The U.S. has engaged in “modern piracy,” snatching hundreds of thousands of face masks as they were being shipped to Germany and France. It even tried to buy a German biotech firm that is working on a promising vaccine. While Beijing sends supplies and aid to hard-hit countries, “Washington is only looking after itself at the expense of everyone else.”
Trump came to power promising to push back against the rising might of China, said Tony Burman in the Toronto Star (Canada). But the president’s inept foreign policy over the past three years—he has seesawed between attacking and acting nice with China, while expressing indifference and outright hostility to traditional U.S. allies—has only played to Beijing’s advantage. The next president will have to “reassert enlightened and unselfish American leadership in a divided and demoralized world that has largely lost faith in it.” If he cannot, the global center of gravity will permanently shift from Washington to Beijing.