US President Donald Trump’s recent verbal attacks on the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring his economic war by cutting off his funding to the US is the culmination of President Trump’s international isolationism policy and summed up behind his campaign slogan “America First.”
The US President believes that the WHO knowingly and intentionally did not inform the US when it should and should have been able to spread the Covid-19 pandemic swiftly by providing cover to China’s controversial pandemic handling.
By T.C.
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The policy of international isolationism in the US
The successful or non-confrontation of the Covid-19 pandemic has turned into another field of confrontation between the US and China.
It had preceded the previous three years a kind of hybrid trade war between the US and China, with China primarily having excluded from its market of digital technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. and the President of the United States then trying to narrow the huge US trade deficit with China.
At the same time, this tension has increased further in 2019 with the exclusion of the digital rise of Chinese multinationals in the US market such as Huawei.
So, to a certain extent, an international problem such as the Covid-19 pandemic initiated by China would sooner or later turn into a US-China confrontation. But this controversy is also fueled by the US President’s campaign doctrine “America First”.
At the same time this doctrine means that the US does not need support from its Western allies and that they are doing it on its own. Because of this superiority as a superpower, the US is simultaneously opening multiple fronts with both China and the EU.
In other words, a clear choice of the American system weakens the international system led by the USA, which after World War II was the ones that created and developed it.
This international isolationism of the US, which does not consider the well-meaning interests of their Western allies, is demonstrated both by the ban on transatlantic flights to and from the EU, without prior consultation with the Europeans.
At the same time, during the pandemic, the US is trying in every way to obtain exclusive rights to the vaccine against Covid-19 from German companies without regard to EU interests.
There have certainly been other “solitary” US options, such as withdrawing from the agreement with Iran not to acquire a nuclear arsenal and imposing exterminating economic sanctions at the same time.
The U.S. war with the WHO
Certainly, the WHO has made mistakes in its approach to the Covid-19 diaspora because its experts estimated at the end of January that there was no need for restrictions on travel and trade to deal with the pandemic. The next day, US President Donald Trump imposed a ban on travel and tourists from China.
The WHO tried to reduce US-China diplomatic frictions when it hastily named Coronavirus as Covid-19 at a time when President Trump called him a “China virus” or “Wuhan virus.”
When China’s annual funding to the WHO is $40m, and the U.S. equivalent is $500m. (which shows who the superpower is), then US President Donald Trump, depriving WHO of that funding, throws the entire organization into control of China, which for reasons of prestige can replace U.S. funding.
US President Donald Trump is waged this war against the WHO because he believes the WHO has entered political games against him.
The fact that the WHO is funded by both China, the EU, and the private foundation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which are either rivals or support political opponents of Donald Trump who are advocates for globalisation, leads the US President to believe that both he and the US have been driven belatedly and intentionally by the wrong WHO instructions in a lockdown to then accuse President Trump of failing and not leading the management of the pandemic by creating a crisis and trouble in his re-election effort.
President Donald Trump is in a hurry to lift the lockdown in the US because he knows that extending the lockdown weakens the US’ global economic, political and military leadership, creating armies of the unemployed when the booming US economy and at the same time economic and stock market performance will renew for a further four years his stay in the White House.
The road to the American elections in November will be littered with pitfalls for President Trump, when he has so far proven that he always manages to overcome all the pitfalls.
