Monday, December 28, 2020

America’s COVID Detractors Owe the U.S.A. an Apology

By Cameron Hilditch

Monday, December 28, 2020

 

At the beginning of June, Aris Roussinos, a contributing editor at Unherd, wrote a piece arguing that “Covid has exposed America as a failed state.” It was chock-full of the kind of tired and recycled clichés one often comes across in old-world screeds directed at the United States and its tenure as a global hegemon. I wrote a quick reply at the time because I’m a great admirer of Roussinos’s writings and I felt then (and still do) that his hatred for American foreign policy won out over and against his higher critical faculties when he wrote that piece. The notion that the United States had been dealt its civilizational death blow by this virus seemed facially absurd at the time.

 

Six months later, I can’t help but notice that the first two coronavirus vaccines out of the gates have been produced by Pfizer and Moderna, two American companies. The vast majority of those citizens of the world who have been inoculated up to this point are direct beneficiaries of Uncle Sam’s latest feat of dizzying ingenuity.

 

It’s a story that shouldn’t surprise anyone with a passing acquaintance with the history of the last hundred years. The U.S.A. has been ceaselessly written off in the past as a decadent, materialistic, soulless, and uncultured wasteland by preening Europeans. But when sh** hits the fan and the American people turn their energies towards a single great task, the story usually ends with men on the moon, life-saving medicines, or T14 tanks rolling over the gates of Dachau.

 

Mr. Roussinos and others who danced prematurely on America’s grave this year will be pleased to learn that the United States accepts apologies in both written and verbal form.

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