Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Quick Take: Trump pulls out of the WHO, moves toward Cold War with China
Trump promised a statement about China. Today's announcement was not about China. Most significant was about the World Health Organization, which is a distraction for Trump because it's weaker. They're reliant on the US, have no ability to hit back. But announcing they're pulling all funding and pulling out of the World Health Organization, the international governmental organization tasked with responding to pandemics, in the middle of a pandemic, is one of the stupidest foreign policy decisions that President Trump could make.
I'm not saying it's up there with spending trillions of dollars on the failed war in Iraq, but with over 110 vaccines, the World Health Organization, the EU, Bill Gates, working together to try to make them global - the world's largest economy is going to say, actually, I don't want to be a part of that. While China does want to be a part, they're going to spend more money and they're working to have more access and influence. That's a stupid thing.
The World Health Organization is hardly a perfect organization. They make mistakes. They are weak. They do the bidding of all of their member states. They do not criticize the Chinese government. They will not say that they should work proactively with Taiwan in ways that would offend China. They did certify China's data when they shouldn't have in the middle of January. Not because the W.H.O. had competing data. But they had no access, and if one of their funders says, "here's what we have," they pass it along. World Health Organization never criticizes the United States, either. That's a mistake. It would have been great to have a W.H.O. publicly saying, "your tests don't work. Use these tests. It's an embarrassment. People are going to die because you don't have enough test kits." They didn't say anything. I want a stronger World Health Organization, but our governments don't. Leaving is really inane and doesn't give Trump very much. Except he wanted something big to say, "I'm hitting the Chinese," and that was his big announcement.
What didn't he say? He didn't say he was going to pull the United States out of the special trade agreement with Hong Kong. He could have. He'd be within his rights. They're losing their special status. It's no longer going to have political autonomy enshrined by law. That was the agreement after 1997 and the handover. And instead, he said, "we're going to work on and we're going to look at all of their autonomy, with only few exceptions." In other words, the big American companies that make money out of working in Hong Kong aren't going to be punished. Instead, they'll sanction some Chinese officials, they'll go after some Hong Kong export authority. Unlike the W.H.O., I think that's the smart move for Trump. It would not make sense to unravel and unwind the Hong Kong autonomy, such as it is, even as the Chinese are taking that escalatory step, because we don't need yet another major hit to American companies and economic interests in the midst of a depression. As our economy is contracting six to eight percent this year.
That's another thing Trump didn't say. He didn't talk about the phase one trade deal. With the Chinese as our major enemy - they're the ones responsible for 100,000 dead in the US, Trump has a press conference only about China. He wasn't talking about Minneapolis. He wasn't taking questions about riots in the United States. He wasn't talking about the mayor who he has criticized there and the black guy that was killed by the police officer who's now been arrested and charged with third degree manslaughter, four days after this explosion of violence in Minneapolis. He didn't talk about that. You'd think he would have talked about the phase one trade deal, which is the signature accomplishment of Trump with the Chinese. That's because he doesn't want yet to unravel it.
Why not? Because it's going to cost the US markets and American taxpayers. This was a calculated escalation by Trump, moving towards Cold War, incredibly heated rhetoric, blame the Chinese, but let's not do anything that could really hurt me because unlike other countries I hit, even when I kill Soleimani, the head of the Iranian military, I know those guys can't do anything to me. If I go after the Chinese, they can, so I'm going to be more careful.
Ian Bremmer: Trump vs the WHO & Political Distractions from Effective Crisis Response
The big news has been the Americans getting into a fight with the World Health Organization, with the Chinese for the original cover up, complicity. We don't want to be beating up on the World Health Organization. They are there to fight a pandemic. As Rumsfeld said about war, you don't fight a pandemic with the W.H.O. you want. You fight a pandemic with the W.H.O. you have. This is the W.H.O. we have.
And are they as capable as I'd like? No. Do they have strong leadership that I'd like and independent? No. Overly bureaucratic, willing to defer to power, covering up for the Chinese, refusing to even talk to the Taiwanese. All bad, right? Would I defund them right now, when we really need their frontline capacity, especially on the ground in the poorest countries that don't have access to the health care and doctors that we do here in New York City? Yes, we absolutely need them. Trump picking a fight, withholding funding in the middle of this pandemic is unconscionable and will undermine American leadership with a lot of those countries. But then again, we. I really care about a lot of those countries. And that's true of Americans at-large. And it's obviously true of Trump, who's our president.
This is not a surprise. It's disappointing. Trump has been on the back foot in terms of investigations and hearings for years. From the Mueller investigations, to the impeachment proceedings, all of the hearings have been against Trump. He doesn't like that. With the elections coming up, we're going to have hearings against the World Health Organization, China. They'll talk about how maybe, not only was there a cover up, but maybe coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan. Not engineered, zoonotically from bats and pangolins, but they didn't have suitable security constraints in this lab, and it escaped.
It's not inconceivable. There is no hard evidence. But the possibility is one more thing that can be used politically to divert attention away from the Trump administration and the 60,000 or more deaths that we'll see in the United States on the back of coronavirus. The 15 to 20 percent unemployment. I understand why the politics of attacking the W.H.O. and China in an election cycle is a valuable, even vital thing for President Trump to do.
We see this with the early campaign ads against Biden, calling him Beijing Biden. Same playbook. Is that a reasonable thing to do? Is it useful for the country? Is it useful for US-China? Absolutely not. Is that the concern? No. If we weren't playing politics, both inside the United States as well as other democracies and China and globally, we could respond much more effectively to this crisis. We would have fewer deaths on our hands. We would have less economic dislocation. The politics are maximally dysfunctional, in part because of a very divisive leadership in the US, in part because it's an election cycle, in part because of the disenfranchisement and anti-establishment sentiments across both sides of the political spectrum in the US and among advanced industrial democracies and in emerging market democracies, and because the Chinese have no trust for the Americans, the Americans have no trust for the Chinese, and they don't want an American led global system, they promote state capitalism and authoritarianism - the political dysfunctionality in responding to the coronavirus crisis is massive.
It's going to cause a lot more hardship. We could be in such better shape if we could get the politics out. It's hard. We're in a GZero world, I don't want to be the GZero world. That's where I think we are. How do we get out of it? My answer is, we're not going to get out of it in the near term. It's going to intensify because inequality and mistrust is going to intensify. The lack of interdependence between the US and China in particular, is going to intensify. That does lead to much more political dysfunction domestically and globally.
I am deeply grateful that we are getting through this in terms of human cost of the virus directly in the United States and in Europe. I'm deeply grateful that the health care system isn't falling apart. But the economic impact, which is also real human impact that we're going to experience for a very long time, everywhere, is going be a lot greater.
Is coronavirus under control in Europe?
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, provides his perspective:
Will countries like Italy and Spain now, and others in Europe now, gradually open up?
It's got to be very, very gradual. And it's going to be different in different European countries, although there's an attempt to sort of coordinate somewhat from the European Union point of view. What you've seen in Italy, to take the worst hit country, is opening up a couple of shops, some bookstores and some shops for children's clothes, in addition to pharmacies and food stores. But I think most restrictions will be fairly firmly in place in most of Europe for weeks to come.
What's the EU's reaction to the United States suspending payments to the World Health Organization?
Well, sheer disbelief at the near lunacy of cutting funding to the only international agency we have fighting the coronavirus, particularly around other countries. I mean, there will be a sort of a reckoning after this crisis, which international organizations or which governments mishandled things in the beginning. And the W.H.O. might have something to answer for then, but that's for then. To cut funding now, I mean, there is sheer disbelief in Europe. And quite a number of countries are going to step up, you know, to compensate for the funding that the US is depriving the world health body of.