Chapter 16: China’s Diplomatic Offensive and Rivalry with the US in Response to COVID-19

In the good old days, America would have taken a leadership and teamed up with its allies and multilateral institutions to coordinate the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the United States under president Trump’s “America First” in effect abandoned global leadership. Parroting the talking points that the virus was under control and predicting a magically good ending for the United States, the Trump administration was unprepared and ill-equipped, bringing the United States to the global epic-center of the pandemic. Doing a worse job of protecting its citizens than many other countries, the administration focused the bulk of its efforts on blaming the WHO and China rather than coordinating with its allies and international organizations to fight the common enemy. The US contradictory and incoherent response to the pandemic led to the comment that the Trump administration’s belated, self-centered, haphazard, and tone-deaf response to the pandemic marked the death of American competence, “shaking bedrock assumptions about U.S. exceptionalism” (Bennhold, 2020; Walt, 2020).