By Noah Rothman
Monday, May 24,
2021
“We’re
in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,”
President Joe Biden said in an April address to a joint session of Congress. It is a contest to
prove “the utility of democracies in the
21st century” against the model presented by “autocracies.” And to hear Biden
tell it, the biggest obstacle before those democracies has been the pandemic.
“We’re kind of at a place where the rest of the world is beginning to look to
China,” Biden told New York Times opinion writer David Brooks. He recalled how the head of Ireland’s
government confessed that the American model is no longer so inspiring. “‘Well,
America can’t lead,’” Ireland’s Taoiseach reportedly told the president. “They can’t
even get their arms around Covid.’”
That remark represents a prominent strain
of thought among foreign-policy practitioners that emerged at the outset of the
pandemic, and it seems impervious to contradictory evidence. As early as March 2020, economists, senior fellows, professors, and organizational presidents
in the West sang China’s praises. In strong contrast to the fractious and
uncoordinated ways in which the West’s democracies handled the pandemic, China
reacted with alacrity and produced immediate results. The People’s Republic
locked down the nation, contained the contagion, resumed normal life well
before the rest of the world, and began exporting an indigenously developed
vaccine while almost every other nation was still reeling. In the words of the
Council on Foreign Relations’ Edward Alden, it all served to “reinforce the
impression that the U.S. has nothing to teach the rest of the world.”
This was a dubious narrative at the time.
It is even more suspect now that evidence mounts disconfirming the instant
consensus among foreign-policy graybeards. China did not contain the virus;
it allowed it to
spread domestically and internationally. China didn’t prevent unnecessary deaths by welding people into their
homes and building sprawling hospitals from scratch in the space of a week; it
covered up its case rates and
deaths. And China didn’t save the developing
world through the speedy production of a COVID vaccine; it gave the world false
hope.
Experts within the World Health Organization
are slowly coming around to the notion that the efficacy data provided by
China’s state-owned drug maker Sinopharm involving its COVID-19 vaccine should
be met with “very low
confidence.” In places like Chile and the Seychelles, where immunization rates are high, COVID-19 infection rates have
nonetheless spiraled out of control, leaving experts to wonder whether China’s
vaccine really works. The news isn’t much better for China’s Sinovac vaccine.
In January, Brazilian
researchers found that it, too, was far less effective
than originally believed. China’s own chief disease control official admitted in April that the efficacy rates of its vaccines could be as low as 50
percent.
Both of China’s vaccines are still being
exported to and administered in countries around the globe. More than 240
million doses have already been shipped abroad, and the goodwill this campaign
would presumably generate for China in a post-pandemic world is still a serious
soft-power challenge to American dominance. Joe Biden has recognized this and
made the export of
U.S.-produced vaccines a
priority. But competing with China’s “vaccine diplomacy” cannot be done
passively. Western vaccines enjoy the competitive advantage of actually
working, but advertising that fact invites conflict with China and risks the
associated repercussions. The U.S. will have to be prepared to absorb them if
it is to make the most of another opportunity fate has dealt to Western
democracies.
The notion that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a
Chinese virology research lab is no longer a conspiracy theory voiced by fringe
cranks and nativist Know-Nothings. The “lab leak” theory is getting a serious
second look from public health experts, including Dr. Anthony
Fauci and former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb. We now know that staff at the Wuhan-based lab in question were
hospitalized with symptoms consistent
with COVID-19 as early as November 2019—well before China admitted to the
existence of this disease. We have not yet found any
viruses in the wild that would indicate an
intermediate evolutionary link between an animal host and COVID-19. And as one
prominent virologist told the journalist
Nicholas Wade, the disease’s amino acid sequence
presents “a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin.”
This is a great gift to an American
president committed to countering and rolling back Chinese influence. Not only
has Beijing gifted the world a sham of a vaccine, it did so as part of a
campaign designed to trick the world into ignoring the conduct that unleashed
this plague upon us all. Through neglect, malfeasance, or simple authoritarian
sclerosis, China imposed the conditions on the world that
ground social and economic life to a halt. China did this to us.
Biden administration officials are going
to find that a hard case to make, but not because the evidence supporting it is
shoddy. It will require them to make a full about-face. They will have to
explain to their core supporters that the idea promulgated for a year that this
was just a once-in-a-century act of God was wrong. It will force them to admit
that, while America got a lot wrong in the last year of Trump’s administration,
America also got a lot right; chiefly, its vaccine production and distribution
regime.
The Biden administration will have to
adopt a confrontational posture toward China that will inflame tensions and
preclude possibilities for bilateral cooperation on issues central to its
agenda, like trade and the environment. It will have to make an example of
China in international forums, laying out the indictment with as much
prosecutorial precision as possible. And it must prepare to be able to fill the
vacuum that will be left if its efforts are successful and the developing world
rejects China’s castles in the sky.
If the Biden administration is as
comfortable with conflict as it claims, making the most of this gift shouldn’t
be that difficult. If it cannot enthusiastically advance U.S. interests,
America will need a new administration that can.
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