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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