Andrew Sullivan: Time For Conscious Uncoupling With China

On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It s as if they said to themselves, Well, we re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us. This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor. Trump s ban on Chinese travel was better than nothing, but it did not prevent over 400,000 non-Chinese from arriving in the U.S. from China as COVID-19 was gaining momentum. It s fair to say, I think, that after the immediate, unforgivable cover-up in China, a global pandemic was inevitable.

I m not excusing Trump for his delusions, denial, and dithering he is very much at fault but the core source of the destruction was and is Beijing. Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off. I remember the old debate from the 1990s about how to engage China, and the persuasiveness of those who believed that economic prosperity would lead to greater democracy. COVID-19 is the final reminder of how wrong they actually were.

via nymag.com