February 13, 2025
COVID-19 shows the dangers that the Western world ignored when it embraced the CCP imperial dynasty
The coronavirus crisis constitutes a “strategic surprise.” It exposes a horrendous blind spot in our China policy and highlights its unintended consequences. The COVID-19 explosion was a “made in China” export: distinctive handiwork of the CCP. It is quite impossible to imagine such a disaster being authored by an open, accountable polity — for example, Taiwan.
The coronavirus crisis constitutes a “strategic surprise.” It exposes a horrendous blind spot in our China policy and highlights its unintended consequences. The COVID-19 explosion was a “made in China” export: distinctive handiwork of the CCP. It is quite impossible to imagine such a disaster being authored by an open, accountable polity — for example, Taiwan.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the single greatest global peacetime catastrophe that humanity has suffered since the end of the Second World War. Barely months into what promises to be a multiyear disaster, the pandemic has already cost America alone over 100,000 lives, tens of millions of jobs, and trillions of dollars in lost output, income, and wealth. The ultimate toll for the world as a whole from this pandemic — both the direct and the indirect consequences — may still lie beyond imagining.

How did such a terrible calamity befall humanity? This grave question is not only an epidemiological puzzle. It is also a political one.

As is increasingly understood in the United States and abroad, the Chinese government and its agents bear a terrible and immediate responsibility for conduct that turned a localized contagion into a global pandemic. But the COVID-19 disaster could not have devastated America and the world as it is now doing if China were still an impoverished, isolated Maoist outpost, with scant global contact, involvement, or influence. The world is suffering a planetary plague because China today is deeply integrated into the world economy, and into the institutions of global governance as well — even though it is ruled by a dictatorship whose values, priorities, and objectives are fundamentally incompatible with those of the liberal international order.

It was not by accident or happenstance that China became a major player in the world economy and, more broadly, in the liberal international order that the United States was instrumental in fashioning. That outcome, rather, is largely a result of concerted American policy.

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