Damien Cave and Isabella Kwai, China Is Defensive. The U.S. Is Absent. Can the Rest of the World Fill the Void? The New York Times, May 11, 2020:
Confronting a once-in-a-generation crisis, the world’s middle powers are urgently trying to revive the old norms of can-do multilateralism.
Countries in Europe and Asia are forging new bonds on issues like public health and trade, planning for a future built on what they see as the pandemic’s biggest lessons: that the risks of China’s authoritarian government can no longer be denied, and that the United States cannot be relied on to lead when it’s struggling to keep people alive and working, and its foreign policy is increasingly “America first.”
The middle-power dynamic may last only as long as the virus. But if it continues, it could offer an alternative to the decrees and demands of the world’s two superpowers. Beyond the bluster of Washington and Beijing, a fluid working group has emerged, with a rotating cast of leaders that has the potential to challenge the bullying of China, fill the vacuums left by America, and do what no lesser power could do on its own.
“Australia is resetting the terms of engagement so we have more strategic freedom of action, and in order to do that, you need to build a coalition of like-minded nations,” said Andrew Hastie, a backbencher in the Australian Parliament who leads its Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.
“To act on the global stage as a middle power, you need to do it from a position of strength — that includes strength in numbers,” Mr. Hastie said.
China unmasked:
Peter Jennings, a former defense official and the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that Covid-19 had stripped away the last illusions of a benign China — the idea that a country could do business with China without worrying much about how it was governed.
By suppressing information about the virus when it appeared in Wuhan, China’s government put on full display the dangers of its authoritarian system, not just for its own people but for the world. And instead of acknowledging its missteps, it has doubled down — spreading conspiracy theories, insisting that its response be celebrated, and stridently attacking anyone who suggests otherwise.
America too:
Much of the world views with disappointment and sadness an America laid low by the virus and Mr. Trump’s erratic response.
The president has shown little interest in working with any other country. He has said his administration is conducting its own investigation of China, but that move is widely seen as an effort to shift blame away from his own botched handling of the pandemic.
Mr. Trump has also said he is temporarily halting funding to the W.H.O., and the United States did not contribute to a recent fund-raising effort led by the European Union for research into vaccines.
Further undermining U.S. credibility, Mr. Trump has floated outlandish treatments like disinfectants, while pushing an unsubstantiated theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab — a claim that Australian intelligence officials discounted as unlikely.
“Normally, however imperfectly, America would also have mobilized the world,” Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister, wrote in a recent essay. “This time, in America’s absence, nobody did.”
First movers unite!
On Thursday night, Mr. Morrison joined a call with leaders from nations that are calling themselves “the first movers” — countries that acted quickly against the pandemic and have flattened their curves of infection, including Austria, Denmark, Greece, Israel, Singapore and New Zealand.
Australian officials have also been part of a weekly dialogue on the post-pandemic future with a group of countries that includes India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. The United States is also involved, but notably as a participant, not the group’s leader, said Rory Medcalf, a former diplomat and the head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.
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