Why the EU is Wrong about US Criticism of the W.H.O.

 May 20, 2020

This week’s World Health Assembly videoconference did nothing but provide an opportunity for China to take center stage in the debate about the handling of the coronavirus pandemic and for the United States to be paraded as the villain of the piece. As matters now stand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the proposed “review” shifting the responsibility for the spread of the virus from the country that should have contained it in the first place, namely China, to the many nations who were caught by surprise and seriously destabilised by it.

I understand EU diplomats’ commitment to multilateralism. But this time they went too far in giving a platform to a communist regime and a Marxist WHO boss to attack the US, which until now have contributed 75 percent of the organisation’s budget and had created practically all multilateral institutions, including the United Nations after WWII.

Now more than ever, there is a great need for Western solidarity in dealing with the issue of WHO reform if further pandemics are to be avoided. Siding with China and the WHO against US criticism is therefore a losing approach to actually solving matters. No Western diplomat should endorse WHO attacks against the US Administration, since the agency’s largest financial contributor is entitled to freely criticise it when it performs poorly.

This is not to say that the US tendency of withdrawing de facto from most UN key positions in recent years is a good strategy. The latter has created an opportunity for China and its supporters in developing countries to grab the key posts at the FAO, the WHO and other UN agencies, thus rendering these otherwise important UN bodies ineffective (the WHO management of alerts during the current pandemic is a case in point). These days it seems that to get a top job at any UN agency, it is more important how well-connected the candidate is in Beijing than how competent the person really is.

Whilst I agree that the WHO needs to rapidly get rid of Tedros and his team before any meaningful review can take place, permanently cutting the organisation’s funding and abandoning it altogether would be highly counterproductive for the US and for the world as a whole.

Instead, the US can make its crucial financial contribution to the WHO conditional upon approving who gets to be its next directors, as long as the selection is made from trustworthy countries such as Australia, South Korea or Greece, since they have proven their credentials in managing the response to the current pandemic.

EU Diplomacy's Munich 2.0 Moment

 

May 9, 2020

European diplomatic traditions, which are some of the most illustrious in the world, have not prevented the External Action Service from writing one of the most inept letters I have ever read. After months of China’s diplomatic bullying, aimed at changing the pandemic narrative in its favour, is this ill-conceived message addressed to the Chinese leadership all that the best diplomatic experts within the EU have been able to come up with ? To add insult to injury, the EU officials have even accepted the letter to be censored by Beijing before its publication, deleting any reference to the fact that the pandemic started in China.

Diplomatic intimidation was not invented by the Chinese. The Nazis used it before them. Just before the start of the second world war, this type of bullying made Neville Chamberlain bow to Hitler’s demands in order to achieve – in his view – “peace with honour”.

Pushing back against Chinese bullying, however, is the only reasonable course of action of any country and self-respecting diplomatic establishment. From my personal experience working for Chinese bosses, I also happen to know that taking a firm stand against their bullying is the only way to deal with the representatives of a nation that has recently achieved economic success, but is still haunted by a huge inferiority complex. Trying to appease Chinese bullying or to ignore it will not make it go away, but will only lead to more serious bullying in the future.

To give but one example, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for an international inquiry into the origins and handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His initiative has prompted a furious attack by the Chinese ambassador to Canberra, who by now is used to treating Australia like a de-facto Chinese colony. He used the media to threaten that Chinese consumers could stop importing Australian beef and wine. This type of threat echoes the Davos speech of a Chinese official this year, who claimed that the United States will not do anything to counter China’s recent belligerence because his country is the biggest market for American hamburgers outside the USA.

“If you give China an inch, they will take a mile. And if you succumb to bullying and intimidation, you can expect only one more thing: more bullying and intimidation. It’s going to be a question not simply of what is Australia saying about what’s happening in China: it’s about China trying to dictate what’s happening in Australia.” (Dr Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the UN Security Council, in Financial Review, November 2019)

The Chinese amhassador’s assertion that his country’s consumers might decide not to buy Australian beef in the future is also directed against the Chinese middle class. These are the biggest consumers of beef in the country, and if the communist party decides for some reason to stop importing it, they will have to revert to a more traditional, pork-based diet. In other words, the communist party seems as displeased with Australia as they are with the restless Chinese middle class, who have nevertheless made the fatal error of putting their future prosperity into the hands of the communist officials.

The EU , on the other hand, is China’s biggest export market and this fact alone gives it a lot of clout, a temporary disruption in supply chains notwithstanding.

This is why appeasing China’s offensive diplomatic behaviour makes so little sense.

Instead, EU diplomats should intensify calls for an independent inquiry into the handling of the pandemic and declare at least a few Chinese diplomats in Europe persona non grata after their unwarranted offensive behaviour in Paris or Stockholm. Anything else will be construed by the communst regime in Beijing as proof of Western democracies’ inherent weakness. Indeed, like the Nazis before them, their entire propaganda machinery rests on proving to the population how strong China’s communist government is and how weak Western democratic governments are by comparison.

Naturally, no European country wishes to confront China, which is fair enough. However, by appeasing its diplomats’ bullying and ignoring its shameless propaganda, the EU is making a huge error, one which is already being put to good use by the continent’s “ideological competitor”.

Chinese Diplomacy and the Wuhan Virus

 March 31, 2020

“The geography of infectious disease is important because, as living organisms, pathogens—that is, the bacteria, viruses, and other microparasitic entities that cause disease—all have histories linked to time and place. Every widely distributed disease originated as a local outbreak.” (Monica H. Green, “Climate and Diseases in Medieval Eurasia”, 2018)
 

 

One of the most sickening aspects of the current pandemic is the way Chinese diplomats are trying to bully everyone into not calling the Covid-19 the “Wuhan virus”. From a scientific point of view, asigning to Covid-19 a geographical location for its place of origin makes a lot of sense. The Ebola virus, for instance, was thus named from the river in Congo where the epidemic started. For scientists and for the public, knowing where a viral outbreak or pandemic originated is essential for identifying and combating its root causes. This is the reason why I side on this issue with Mike Pompeo and not with the die-hard Marxists in China or in the West.

My professional intuition also leads me to suspect that the few weeks’ delay in anouncing the new epidemic and in taking adequate measures to contain it did not occur as a result of incompetence on the part of Chinese communist authorities, as initially believed. After all, if they had really wanted to nip the outbreak in the bud, they would have immediately followed international protocol and called the WHO or the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The latter was instrumental in insulating the world against the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa a few years ago (2014) and in containing it within the first week when it was spreading to Nigeria. But at that time, the Nigerians called the CDC within the crucial first days of their Ebola outbreak.

In hindsight, it looks to me as if high-ranking communist party officials saw in this outbreak the perfect opportunity to spread it around the globe via the Chinese tourists travelling abroad in their millions in early January. For a Stalinist like President Xi, the possibility of provoking the general crisis of capitalism – a veritable obssession for devout Marxists – was probably too hard to resist. He and others in his party also knew perfectly well that the West would be caught quite unprepared for a pandemic, as most of its medical supplies are still manufactured in China.

Unfortunately for the Chinese communist leadership, the resolve of mainly conservative Western governments to spend big money in order to help their people and businesses survive the pandemic was something it did not count on. The Great Depression from the inter-war period had been made worse by Western nations’ unwillingness to pump money into their broken economies. That error gave Stalin an enormous propaganda advantage, and Marxists in the West opportunities to massively infiltrate governments and media organizations.

This time around, despite their recently acquired economic clout, the Chinese communists blew it miserably. Instead of falsely blaming the Americans for the outbreak, they should admit that their population’s diet has something in common with that of the Congolese. Indeed, the Ebola and the Covid-19 zoonotic viruses are a direct result of their people’s fondness for eating roasted monkeys, fried bats, pangolin meat and the like.

The EU is today the most heavily-affected continent outside China, with Italy and Spain registering an unbelievably high 10 percent mortality rate. Chinese tourists’ fascination with Spain and Italy prompted many of them to visit in their thousands, spreading the virus as they did so. As the EU had never been dependent for its prosperity on Chinese tourists, however, this pandemic will make European officials think twice about granting visas to such potential disease-carrying guests in future.

The way the outbreak was handled in the first instance by the Chinese communist authorities has all but ruined China’s standing and international reputation. As neither Italian, Spanish or British families can bring the victims back to life, there is nothing Chinese diplomats can do to ever make the world trust them again.