“Strong” and “powerful” are US President Trump’s favorite words, but the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been anything but.
The grim statistics speak for themselves.
As of April 15, the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 1.97 million worldwide, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. The number of people who have died as a result of COVID-19 has reached a staggering 126,539.
Of these totals, the United States accounted for 608,377 cases, representing about 30 percent of all confirmed infections, far greater than China (83,321) where the new coronavirus was first detected, and Spain (174,060), Italy (162,488), Germany (132,210), France (131,361) and the United Kingdom (94,845), where the virus has spread rapidly.
A total of 21,662 Americans have lost their lives to the disease, accounting for 17 percent of the global total. This was more than Italy (21,067), Spain (18,056), France (15,729) or the United Kingdom (12,107).
In a piece written for Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, observed that the Trump administration’s “self-centered, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to COVID-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths…. But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from making ‘America great again,’ this epic policy failure will further tarnish the United States’ reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”
For more than a century, Walt notes, the United States’ outside influence rested on three pillars: The combination of economic and military strength; support from an array of allies; and broad confidence in US competence.
This reputation had been built up over many decades, but Trump’s inept, dishonest and self-aggrandizing handling of the COVID-19 pandemic—which he infamously dismissed as a hoax in the early days when he could have taken more effective measures to stop the spread of the virus—has shaken that third pillar to the core. There is no doubt that thousands of deaths could have been prevented, had Americans lived up to their reputation of competence.
Now, in the midst of a pandemic, the US president has seen fit to suspend funding to the World Health Organization, which he accuses of political bias in favor of China. Regardless of how valid those accusations are, Trump’s latest move to punish a UN agency in the middle of a global health crisis can only batter his country’s already tarnished reputation.
The French lawyer, diplomat and writer Joseph de Maistre observed that every nation gets the government it deserves. The disastrous consequences of the terrible choice Americans made in 2016 have come home to roost in what the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the worst crisis since World War II.
