We Are Stronger Than We Think To combat the coronavirus, the state has grown more powerful. What does that mean for liberty and the democratic norms that protect us? by TOM MCTAGUE

Our first doctor appointment this year came before the lockdown; the latest, after the world changed. I was there for the first, alongside my wife and little boy. For the last, I had to wait outside in the car, keeping my son occupied, while my wife went in alone.

I wasn’t explicitly told to stay away; we had to guess the right thing to do. Should I have gone in, and risked exposing myself and our child to the coronavirus? Might, in fact, one of us have had it—what if we exposed others? Unsure, we stayed apart. Ours is just one experience of many that have, over these past few weeks under lockdown, illustrated changes in people’s lives both small and large: operations canceled, business orders put on hold, companies bankrupted, staff furloughed, loved ones lost.

We can already see the bargain that societies are willing to strike for a return to normality changing. What used to be unthinkable is now anything but; the illiberal policies of yesterday are repackaged as the liberating innovations of tomorrow. Immunity certificates, mass testing, government surveillance, and a volunteer army of contract-tracing officials are no longer the policies of a police state, but ones to restore basic freedoms. Would I now approve of being scanned, tested, and having my prior movements and contacts traced if it meant I could go into the doctor’s office with my wife? Of course. How would I have responded to the suggestion before the pandemic hit? With incredulity.

In Britain, across Europe, and in parts of the United States, as we consider how to ease out of our collective states of emergency and prevent further spikes of infection, much of the policy focus has centered on the trade-offs between public health and the economy. Less attention, however, has been paid to what we risk permanently losing, whichever way we exit. Not only might the economy atrophy, but also the norms that hold our societies together: the expectation that we all enjoy the same basic freedoms, rights, and obligations that underpin the way we interact with one another—and, ultimately, with the authorities. What are we free to do by right? Who gets to decide? What private information do I have to share? And with whom?

The British government is already significantly more powerful than it was just weeks ago, having won extraordinary new tools to deal with the threat—the police, for example, patrol parks and roads, imposing new social-distancing rules. The government enacted a set of sweeping regulations more invasive in scale and scope than anything attempted in modern peacetime, banning everyone from leaving their home without a “reasonable excuse” (though these measures were relaxed slightly this week). And it did so without a vote in Parliament. In 1215, the Magna Carta established the right to travel freely without fear of arbitrary detention. Yet, in these regulations, that right appeared to have been taken away. House detention was the presumed starting point; the freedom to leave one’s home a privilege awarded on the basis of epidemiological calculation—whether you are fit, healthy, or young enough to do so safely.

Freedom and the norms of behavior that bind us are too easily thought to be either protected or felled in one go. In fact, they are far more likely to be lost in events, swallowed gradually, like trees in ivy. This process can happen voluntarily and temporarily, in response to threats and emergencies when liberty is sacrificed. But it can also happen through decay, as old freedoms, privileges, or norms fail to adapt, and lose public consent, their costs seen as too high to maintain.

The challenge ahead is to adjust to the new world that COVID-19 is creating, to address our physical vulnerability in ways that carry public support. We don’t yet know whether the liberal democratic system is strong enough to meet this challenge. Even old oaks can be hollowed out. History, though, suggests that it is more robust than assumed, its norms of behavior stronger, more deeply rooted, and enduring than appearances suggest. We are stronger than we think.

Norms—the rules and assumptions underlying interactions among individual citizens, and between citizens and the state—are the oil in the engine of a nation. No country is entirely governed by a written constitution, not even a nation with such a foundationally significant document as the United States. In Britain, which has no singular written constitution, the importance of these norms is foundational. For example, no document sets out the line of succession if a British prime minister is incapacitated, as Boris Johnson was in April. Indeed, the very role of the prime minister exists in its current form only because of convention, yet it is so deeply rooted that it is among the most powerful executive positions in the world.

The British state itself is similarly veiled in convention and ceremony, its power and legitimacy ultimately rooted in public consent rather than force. This is Britain’s grand bargain: authorities only as powerful as their legitimacy—very powerful at times, very weak at others. Consent is a measure that naturally ebbs and flows with events and the government’s handling of them. It can produce the force and certainty of Margaret Thatcher, and the calamitous vacuum of Theresa May.

The very ties that bind the state’s power, though, also reinforce it. When public consent for its authority exists, expressed with a solid majority in the House of Commons, there are few limits on the British executive; its power is constrained only by politics and convention, a liberal political culture, and established, albeit comparatively weaker, institutions. And while customs, conventions, and norms are traditionally seen as guarantors of stability, they can also be used as tools of change. The historian Peter Ackroyd writes in Foundation, a history of England, that custom is the “essential feature” of the country. Instead of fighting customs, skillful rulers in British history have used them to advance new ends. “Any institutional or administrative change, introduced by the king and council, had to be explained as a return to some long-lost tradition,” Ackroyd writes. “Any innovation that had endured for twenty or thirty years then in turn became part of ancient custom.” Thus, the British constitution weaves back through time, each knot connected to something before, but always changing. The Bill of Rights of 1689, establishing the supremacy of Parliament, is connected to the Magna Carta, which itself, Ackroyd writes, is linked to a “haphazard collection of principles” that existed before that. Change is veiled in continuity.

Today, new norms are being established, executive powers exercised, and police guidance issued. In time, case law will develop, legislation will be passed, political pledges made, and national stories told. Changes, adaptations, and innovations will imprint themselves on our collective consciousness. Many of these powers and ways of working will outlast the current moment and apply to the next in ways we cannot foresee.

Through the course of this lockdown, then, innovations risk stealthily becoming part of our established way of life because we have become used to them and have (temporarily) consented to their introduction: digital surveillance, perhaps, or police drones. At their most fundamental, these changes might also mean the normalization of freedom being enjoyed by some and not others for reasons of biology rather than behavior.

“The risk in situations like this is, you get used to it,” David Davis, a libertarian and former Conservative cabinet minister, told me. “When we get to the end of this pandemic, [the authorities] will talk about the next pandemic and will be unwilling to get rid of the powers they’ve now got. Whenever you get into one of these situations, there’s a danger of an involuntary reset—a reset of our constitutional standards, in which some norms get wiped.”

We are only just beginning to see the array of trade-offs and choices we may soon be forced to make, in order to ensure we are tolerably free and tolerably safe. How is a society to ensure that new classes are not created—the sick and healthy, vulnerable and invulnerable, old and young, salaried and self-employed? How can we ensure that freedom guaranteed equally under the law is not abandoned in the race to reestablish a sense of normality for the majority? What if there is no vaccine? How do we ensure that established patterns of emergency behavior do not become normalized powers left in the statute book, free to be abused in an unrelated crisis?

The danger is that the national story of ancient English freedom built on public consent provides false security, not real protection—a Maginot Line that doesn’t meet the challenges of modern-day pandemics and technology. Laws are easily unwound, but norms lost are harder to bring back, especially if the public itself has consented to their removal.

“We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of freeborn people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub,” Johnson declared as he reluctantly ordered a lockdown on his country. Britain’s leader, for his many faults, is not Viktor Orbán, or even Donald Trump. If anything, his critics argue, this is a government and a prime minister too wedded to freedom, too reluctant to impose the lockdown, and, ultimately, officials worried, facing a public too unwilling to give up its individual liberties for a collective national effort.

Britain’s lockdown, and the system to enforce it, is based in law, not arbitrary imposition, and has been enacted using conventional tools with safeguards: Lawmakers had to give their assent within 28 days, the government must review the restrictions every three weeks, and the emergency legislation contains sunset clauses. Certificates are not required to leave home, parks have largely remained open throughout, the public itself has been asked to use common sense in deciding what is a necessary excursion—and the authorities required to use the same in enforcement.

If this is the slippery slope to a police state, it appears to be a very British police state—mild, moderate, not very threatening, and one that promises to hand back its sword once the fighting is over.

What is striking about today’s national debate in Britain, as opposed to the United States, is the almost universal acceptance that the state will hand back its sword, or at least put it away once the crisis has passed. Britain has, after all, been here before—government power unsheathed then voluntarily put back in its cover. The 1939 Emergency Powers Act granted the wartime government extraordinary powers to rule by decree, acquire property, and detain without trial. Winston Churchill became prime minister without an election and was granted virtual dictatorial powers. Then, just after his greatest triumph, Churchill was removed from power, and the Emergency Powers Act that made him the most powerful prime minister in history was repealed (the latter not until 1959, though).

Johnson has not been empowered to the same extent as Churchill was, nor is today’s threat as grave. The extent to which broad support exists for the lockdown and for government powers to track and surveil the population is revealed in the bipartisan support these measures have received. Shami Chakrabarti, the former director of Liberty, a British civil-rights group that fought a long-running battle against a previous government’s attempts to introduce new anti-terrorism powers, told me she was “not remotely as fearful” for individual freedoms now as she had been just after September 11, when Western governments began more actively snooping on their citizens. “The danger of something like a war on terror was we were told there was this existential threat, for which we needed to give up our privacy, and other values, wholesale until the war was over, without ever being able to verify when that would be,” Chakrabarti, now a member of the House of Lords, said. The problem was that terrorism had long been a threat, and would continue to be a threat, so such a war would always exist, creating a new normal. The difference with the pandemic, she said, is that whether the tactics are working, and when the coronavirus is defeated, will likely be clear.

Tracking and tracing individuals infected with COVID-19 would be reasonable, given the risk, even necessary, Chakrabarti said—personal information is already gathered and used to collect taxes or fight crime, so the same is justified in this crisis. “People will [accept] it if they think it’s necessary and proportionate, that it is not being abused for a raft of unrelated purposes,” she told me. “In the language of human rights, they want interference with qualified rights to be necessary and proportionate.” People have not been staying in their homes just because they’ve been told to do so, Chakrarbarti said, “but because they think it’s justified.”

To put it another way, the public consents.

Given the foundational role of consent in Britain, the greater danger to civil liberties as the pandemic plays out might come not from the government, but from the public. Faced with an extraordinary threat to their security, might not the people be far more supportive of illiberalism than assumed, particularly if it is perceived to apply only to a minority—the sick or vulnerable, say?

Here we arrive at one of the defining realities of this challenge. Johnson, a reluctant draconian, is also the most powerful domestic politician since Thatcher and, because of the pandemic, has been granted powers over life and death, both literally and economically, by a public looking for protection. To an extraordinary degree, the decisions made by one man in the next few months will dominate British life for years, if not decades, to come. Cabinet-government and parliamentary scrutiny have not been removed, but Johnson’s personal dominance, as well as his personal experience of COVID-19, gives him unique authority in a unique moment.

Johnson is often said to be instinctively liberal, yet in practice, he is less obviously so—and perhaps more accurately described as a conservative libertarian. In choosing the authoritarian Priti Patel as his home secretary, for instance, he reveals his own long-standing approach to law and order, while other moves also reveal a less than liberal instinct: his proroguing of Parliament during Brexit, his government’s clashes with the civil service, and the question hanging over Britain’s continued commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.

“You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see this government’s impatience with traditional checks and balances,” David Anderson, a senior lawyer and a former head of the British terrorism-legislation watchdog, told me. “Belief in Boris Johnson’s liberal instincts has already allowed him to get away with decisions that from others would have seemed authoritarian. If those instincts are further surrendered or overridden, the path to illiberal democracy could prove shorter and easier than most of us think.” The danger is not specific, but general: the slow erosion of the norms that hold the system together, backed by a fearful public.

This challenge of enacting drastic new forms of social control to contain COVID-19 is testing the health of each society that faces it today—not only its formal capacity to do so, but the strength of its political culture along the way to bend and bow, without breaking.

It is not a new challenge. In the aftermath of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, Tony Blair’s government sought to introduce 90-day detention without trial and to make Britons carry identity cards (at the time, carrying identification documents was not required for anyone). Yet even when British society felt vulnerable, and an array of measures were being considered to combat terrorism, neither of those efforts—promoted by a government with a comfortable parliamentary majority—succeeded. Figures such as Davis and Chakrabarti, as well as many within Blair’s own Labour Party, fought them off.

Still, Charles Clarke, Blair’s home secretary, who tried to push both proposals, has argued that the scale of the pandemic may well shift the public debate this time “by raising to a much higher level the demand that rash individual behaviour should not inhibit our ability to protect the whole community.” Clarke maintains that public consciousness is too dominated by 1940s debates about totalitarianism and state power that no longer reflect the reality of modern problems. “Individual liberties are not adequately protected … not just from the state, but private companies as well,” he told me. The important thing, Clarke said, is to find a relationship between the individual and the state that is clear in law. The problem “with ad hoc, specific laws and time limits is that they presume it’s possible simply to go back to the state of affairs that existed before—that somehow a new crisis or threat will not exist immediately after. I just don’t think it’s right that we can somehow go back to ‘normal.’”

For Clarke, there has to be a new settlement, “a consistent process in legislation that sets out people’s rights.” That, he continued, was “the only way to go if we are going to build on the English tradition of consent.” On this point, at least, both Clarke and Chakrabarti agree, even if they disagree on what it takes to get there.

The tools required to protect collective security are not static but morph over time. Where once castle walls, and bows and arrows, did the job, today, cyber defenses and track-and-trace epidemiology are needed. And as the threat shifts, so too does the bargain between the state and the individual.

History is not a guide for everything, but it nevertheless suggests that, in this moment, this country’s norms, culture, and institutions are stronger than they are perceived. On paper, Johnson has few checks on his power; yet in reality, if he goes too far, or cannot meet people’s expectations to be protected and to be free, consent for his authority may quickly melt away.

Johnson’s challenge, having kept public confidence in his leadership so far, is to maintain his authority by protecting the public’s security, both physical and economic. Given the extraordinary nature of the coronavirus threat, the public is consenting to extraordinary impositions on its freedom. How Johnson exercises his power, the choices he makes, will reveal the nature of the man underneath—his priorities, core philosophy, and manner of working—in a way that is impossible to fully ascertain now.

What will also be revealed, however, is the extent to which the British public is prepared to give its consent to decisions that it is otherwise shielded from making: not only what value it places on freedom and life generally, but on whose freedom, and whose lives? Forced to decide which freedoms and norms it really values and which it can live without, what will it choose? The freedom to visit the pub, perhaps, is just as real as the freedom from being tracked and traced. And so too the freedom to join your wife in a doctor’s office.

The emerging challenge for Western democratic states is to devise a new social contract between the state and its citizenry. In Britain, which has no foundational document to set this out, it will be established piecemeal, hands out in the dark, feeling toward a compromise that has the public’s consent.

The pandemic is a test of a country’s health and the norms which hold it together. Don’t be surprised if they’re stronger than assumed.

How This Outbreak Might Reshape the Working Class This outbreak tends to sow more uncertainty than certainty, but it’s made one thing very clear: what constitutes essential work. by CAROLINE MIMBS NYCE

This outbreak tends to sow more uncertainty than certainty, but it’s made one thing very clear: what constitutes essential work. As my colleague Olga Khazan frankly put it: “It’s not the people who get paid to write tweets all day, but the people who keep the tweeters in chickpeas and Halo Top.”

Those kinds of workers tend to earn less. By and large, Americans seem grateful to them for putting their lives at risk. But could this pandemic reshape the country’s working class?

For starters, why do so many essential workers earn so little? Annie Lowrey posed this question to economists and labor experts and found the answer discomfiting. “They’ve been systematically devalued for years,” she writes. “But they don’t have to be.”

In the past, pandemics have triggered positive changes for workers. One study examined 15 major outbreaks, finding that they increased wages for three decades afterwards, my colleague Olga Khazan reported in her sweeping piece on how the coronavirus could trigger a populist movement (either liberal or conservative).

There are some early signs of political movement. “Though it’s garnered little notice, Congress has laid the groundwork for this potential new economic floor in its recent emergency legislation,” our staff writer Ronald Brownstein points out. “While these measures are all temporary, they represent the first openings in the previous resistance from congressional Republicans and the business community to such ideas.”

Further reading: Darcy Courteau, a writer, photographer, and meal-delivery courier, describes what it’s like to be classified as “essential” in this personal essay.

DENNIS BRESSER / BSR AGENCY / GETTY

One question, answered: In states that have reopened, can grandparents see their grandchildren?

Joe Pinsker, a staff writer for our Family section, asked a few experts. Here’s what they had to say:

The idea of children being physically close to an older person they don’t live with made the three experts uneasy. “I know grandparents and grandchildren want to cuddle,” [Linsey Marr, a civil- and environmental-engineering professor at Virginia Tech,] said, but “I know I would feel horrible if we visited with grandparents and it turns out my kids ended up getting them sick, and then they died.”

So the answers are “Maybe” and “Only really carefully.” It’d be prudent for grandparents to stay at least six feet away from grandkids, and for visits to take place outdoors. Making exceptions to those guidelines is riskier when older adults are involved than it is with people who aren’t especially vulnerable to COVID-19.

Coronavirus Q&A: What Is a Randomized-Controlled Trial? A health policy expert explains. by Zoe McLaren

A commonly used malaria drug was recently proposed as a treatment for COVID-19 during a White House press briefing, even though it hadn’t yet been properly evaluated in clinical trials or approved for this use. Does the urgency of the current pandemic give doctors a good reason to skip evaluation and rush an untested drug to patients?

The field of medicine considers randomized-controlled trials, also known as “clinical trials,” as the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of new treatments. These studies set up a fair test for treatments and enable researchers to rule out alternate explanations. Without randomized-controlled trial evidence to guide them, doctors risk wasting resources on ineffective treatments or causing harm to patients.

What is a randomized-controlled trial?

A controlled trial means that study participants are split into two groups: One group is given the treatment and the other (the control group) is not. The control group may be given a placebo that mimics the actual treatment, but does not contain the treatment being tested.

For example, a sugar pill or an injection of saline solution may be used instead of a dose of the drug. This ensures the only meaningful difference between the two groups is whether they received the treatment or not.

The control group helps researchers learn what would have happened to the treatment group if they hadn’t received the treatment. For example, some patients may recover on their own. Researchers need to know how often this happens, so they don’t attribute all recoveries to the effect of the treatment.

Study participants are randomly assigned to one group or the other, a process similar to a coin toss. Just as a coin toss is equally likely to end up heads or tails, study participants are equally likely to end up in the treatment or the control group. With enough study participants, this results in two groups that closely resemble each other. The only difference is that one group got “heads” while the other got “tails.”

The randomization of randomized-controlled trials with large enough samples ensures that all possible differences are accounted for, even those that may not be observed, such as genetic traits.

If the treatment and control groups are similar at the start of the study but end up with different outcomes, the treatment is the most likely cause. The randomized-controlled trial allows researchers to rule out alternative explanations.

What if patients aren’t randomly assigned?

If doctors were allowed to choose which patients received the treatment, it’s likely the treatment and control groups would not resemble each other, making it much harder to rule out different factors at play.

For example, malaria drugs aren’t approved for use against COVID-19, but may be prescribed to patients under the Food and Drug Administration’s “expanded access” program. It allows certain drugs to be used as a last resort to treat seriously ill patients when no other treatments are available.

These “last resort” patients are frailer than those who had a milder form of the disease or who responded well to other treatments. When you’re comparing very sick patients to healthier patients, the effect of the treatment is hard to see because it may be obscured by important differences such as age, diet, cigarette use, heart disease or obesity.

If frail patients on treatment fared significantly better than strong patients without it, researchers could conclude the treatment was effective. But this situation is extremely rare, which is why doctors generally can’t draw valid conclusions about a drug’s effectiveness in a “last resort” situation. Too many other factors are likely at play.

Some researchers may be able to use sophisticated statistics techniques to account for the differences between frail and strong patients. But there is a long list of potential differences between frail and strong patients, so it is hard to address them all. Gauging the quality of such statistical analysis is also difficult, so these studies should be viewed with skepticism.

Approving drugs prematurely

Without results from randomized-controlled trials, doctors can’t be sure whether a potential new treatment will help patients, harm them or prove ineffective.

The case of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19 underscores this concern. In an early wave of optimism, doctors prescribed and some even stockpiled so much hydroxychloroquine that pharmacies reported shortages of the drug. Within weeks however, randomized-controlled trials demonstrated that not only was this treatment ineffective against COVID-19, it also caused some patients to develop serious heart rhythm problems. Prematurely prescribing this treatment to all but the “last resort” cases instilled false hope, wasted medical resources and, most importantly, put patients at risk.

Is Brazil Ripe for Another Impeachment? As the coronavirus crisis wreaks havoc in Brazil, the president’s popularity continues to plummet. by Marcos da Rocha Carvalho

Maybe, if the Brazilian Congress manages to pull off yet another presidential impeachment, it would be the third in less than thirty years. Riding on a wave of promising zero-tolerance with corruption, better security, and much-needed economic liberalization, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro by a landslide in 2018. Bolsonaro is now reeling from recent accusations of unlawfully meddling in Brazil’s Federal Police, bending the rules in order to protect his sons suspected of being involved in criminal activities, in addition to botching the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. This may cost him his presidency. 

In the coming weeks, the Brazilian Congress will be evaluating four different requests for opening impeachment procedures against Bolsonaro. Impeachments usually pay off for the Brazilian economy. Fernando Collor de Mello was removed from office in 1992; the following year, the Brazilian GDP grew by 4.6 percent. In 2015, President Dilma Rousseff (who at this point enjoyed ample support from then-senator Collor de Mello) was impeached. Her political fall gave momentum to further investigations into high-level corruption. Brazil has since enjoyed four years of GDP growth. Far from being a destabilizing boogeyman, as impeachment skeptics like to paint it, both instances helped clear the way for necessary reforms, which translated into greater economic growth.

Yet how did Bolsonaro arrive at this low point? According to pollsters XP/Ipespe, in January the president was enjoying a relatively high approval rate, with 40 percent of respondents saying he was doing a “great or good” job and with only 20 percent of respondents evaluating his performance as “bad or awful.” Today, the positive impression has dropped to 35 percent while the negative reviews have spiked to an all-time high of 26 percent. 

So, what happened?

This week was a perfect storm of poor optics combined with gross incompetence and a general sense that the president has attempted a heavy-handed political maneuver to protect his sons from the investigation. The past week saw Bolsonaro participate in a rally (at the height of the coronavirus pandemic) where protesters were holding signs openly asking for a return to a military regime, an opinion from which the president had sought to distance himself during his electoral campaign. Bolsonaro then decided to appoint an officer from the Brazilian intelligence agency, who is a close friend of the Bolsonaro family, to head Brazil’s Federal Police. This brought him into loggerheads with the minister of justice, Sergio Moro who resigned in protest. In Brazil, the Federal Police falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice.

Prior to being appointed Minister of Justice, Segio Moro was the very popular judge responsible for investigating and arresting corrupt politicians (including former president Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva, and industrialist Marcello Oderbrecht) in the Lava Jato Operation (Operation Carwash). This was the greatest investigation into corruption in Brazilian history. Moro quit the government citing pressure from the president for attempting to obstruct justice which immediately split the president’s supporter base losing him thousands, maybe millions of potential voters. Bolsonaro’s pick for replacing Moro is André Mendonça, a lawyer who also has very close ties to the Bolsonaro family. The presidents’ sons have several accusations hanging over them. Most recently his son, Carlos, who is also a politician, is suspected of using taxpayers’ money to fund a social-media blitz to threaten and defame judges as well as politicians. Brazilian stocks tanked after the announcement of Moro’s departure.

And lastly, Bolsonaro has dropped the ball in the fight against the coronavirus. Although he did mobilize the Brazilian army to build several field hospitals across the country and to ramp up the production of ventilators, Bolsonaro gave an absurd speech calling the virus “a little flu.” When asked about the mounting death toll in Brazil, he said: “So what? I may be a Messiah (his middle name Messias means Messiah in Portuguese) but I can’t make miracles;” thus striking a particularly tone-deaf note in the ears of a population struggling to cope with the pandemic. A month before Moro’s resignation, Bolsonaro had already fired his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who had criticized the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

In Brazil, impeachment proceedings tend to succeed in toppling presidents, being hugely popular with the electorate. By alienating Sergio Moro and his admirers, Bolsonaro has squarely placed himself on the opposite end of his campaign promises to fight corruption. As the coronavirus crisis wreaks havoc in Brazil, the president’s popularity continues to plummet. The combination of these factors with the president’s propensity to put his foot in his mouth could spell an early end to his mandate.

Biden Is Weak on China Joe Biden was a driving force behind giving China “permanent normal trading status” in 2000, which helped Beijing win admission to the World Trade Organization. It is from this privileged vantage that China has pursued fundamentally unfair trade practices while hypocritically parroting language about free trade and inducing our elite to do the same. by Christian Whiton

President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, wrote what could ultimately form the perfect epitaph for former Vice President Biden: “Joe is simply impossible not to like. . .  . Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

This Cal Ripken-like streak of unbroken erroneousness is remarkable:

Biden thought the removal of the Shah of Iran amid the 1979 Islamic revolution was a step in the right direction for human rights.  

He opposed the Reagan defense buildup that helped the free world win the Cold War.  

He voted against the Gulf War, which was a great success.  

He voted for the Iraq War, which was not.

Biden also opposed the raid in which U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden—arguably the only solid foreign policy accomplishment of the eight-year administration of which he was nominally second in command.

However, some of Biden’s greatest strides toward being in the wrong center around China. This is topical, because his aides and supporters are eager to reconstruct him as tough on China given strong voter sentiment against the Chinese government amid the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

With his long tenure in Congress, Biden was present at the creation of the policies that exported U.S. manufacturing to China and set the stage for Beijing to rob us of technology and undertake a high-tech military buildup. Specifically, Biden was a driving force behind giving China “permanent normal trading status” in 2000, which helped Beijing win admission to the World Trade Organization. It is from this privileged vantage that China has pursued fundamentally unfair trade practices while hypocritically parroting language about free trade and inducing our elite to do the same.  

During the debate, Biden captured the essence of the soothing fiction for abetting China’s rise: “This growing prosperity for the Chinese people, in turn, has put China on a path toward ever-greater political and economic freedom.”  

Biden also said of the foremost alternative economic model to capitalism and free markets in the world: “They have been forced to acknowledge the failure of communism, and have conceded the irrefutable superiority of an open market economy.”

But most devastating—and ready-made for an anti-Biden campaign commercial—was his flippant dismissal of the economic carnage he was unleashing: “Nor do I see the collapse of the American manufacturing economy, as China, a nation with the impact on the world economy about the size of the Netherlands’, suddenly becomes our major economic competitor.”

Oops. As it turned out, the world’s most populous country, run by a despotic, kleptocratic, and belligerent government, was a more formidable threat than Holland.

Of course, the debates of the early twenty-first century might seem like ancient history to some voters. For them, Biden offers much fresher conduct on China to ponder.  

The Obama-Biden administration at varying points declared it would “pivot” our strategic focus and military power to Asia. This language was later modified to “rebalancing” to Asia, prompting some wags to proclaim a policy of “repivulance.” In reality, it was just a rhetorical cover for that administration’s attempt to withdraw rapidly from the Middle East, which proved a boon to ISIS and Iran, and yet somehow left us entangled in Iraq and Syria.  

While the Pentagon added forces in the Pacific that included part-time rotations of Marines to Australia and Littoral Combat Ships—the Navy’s Edsel—to Singapore, the Obama-Biden administration would leave a military posture in the Pacific in 2017 that was weaker than the one it inherited in 2009. 

Speaking in 2013, Biden told a foreign leader, “I want to make one thing absolutely clear: Obama’s decision to rebalance to the Pacific basin is not in question. The United States never says anything it does not do.” Unfortunately, no one believed this absurd statement, least of all the Chinese.  

More recently, on the campaign trail, Biden rambled of China: “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.” Meanwhile, Gallup revealed in March that only 33 percent of Americans held a favorable view of China, down from a recent high of 53 percent in 2018.  

Biden’s weak record on China contrasts negatively with that of President Donald Trump, who has successfully pursued a trade war against Beijing. This led to a deal earlier this year that left in place tariffs on more than half of Chinese imports—tariffs that Biden refuses to say he will continue if elected.

Trump and his aides have fought Huawei and other Chinese instruments of cyberwar that seek to dominate telecommunications and data, and he has begun the difficult process of extracting the U.S. military from playing cowboys and Indians in Middle East backwaters to deter strategic threats like China.  

Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Matt Pottinger, the deputy national security advisor, have talked up human-rights concerns in China and asked whether the Chinese people might like an accountable government with the rule of law. This robs Democrats of the human-rights issue they held dear from the Jimmy Carter administration until it was cashiered by Obama and Biden.  

As the coronavirus crisis passes, Americans are likely to turn to retribution and steps to end America’s vulnerability to China. Does Biden have a leg to stand on?

Why Coronavirus May Do More Damage to America’s Reputation Than to China’s The United States has defied many a declinist prognostication, and it may be able to do so again if it modernizes its social compact and commits itself anew to developing coalitions that can address present and future transnational emergencies. But it will likely have to work much harder than China to recover its pre-pandemic standing, assuming that the pervasive perception of an enfeebled and insular superpower has not already calcified. by Ali Wyne

Observers are intensely debating whether the coronavirus is likely to deal greater damage to America’s standing in the world or to China’s. One might make four observations—the first two, evaluative; the third, speculative; and the fourth, in admittedly immediate contradiction, cautionary.

First, albeit for different reasons, neither country has acquitted itself especially well; historians of the pandemic may be more likely to weigh which one’s reputation suffered less than which one’s improved more. The Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove succinctly summarizes the prevailing judgment that “smaller, more agile countries” have contained the spread of the virus within their borders more effectively than “the superpowers.”

Second, while the pandemic is unfolding amid—and sadly reinforcing—the erosion of strategic distrust between the United States and China, it does not lend itself to sweeping narratives about the contest between liberalism and authoritarianism. As Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes, both democracies and autocracies have mixed records thus far in slowing the transmission of the virus. In addition, she explains, our sample size is not yet sufficiently large to assess with much credibility the correlation between type of regime and efficacy of response: “The disease has not yet ravaged developing countries, making it impossible to include poorer autocracies and democracies in the comparison.” Pandemic postmortems will entail the further task of distinguishing how different varieties of democracies and autocracies responded. Surveying Asian powers that have won widespread plaudits for their responses to date—especially Taiwan and Singapore, but also Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea—the Lee Kuan Yew School’s James Crabtree offers a more prosaic explanation: “The thread uniting the countries that did well was that…they were strong, technocratically capable states, largely unhampered by partisan divisions. Public health drove politics, rather than the other way around.”

Third, while both the United States and China are likely to emerge from this pandemic having incurred significant reputational damage, the former may experience greater relative damage, for it has failed to fulfill the expectations that most observers have of the world’s lone superpower—expectations that they may not have of its putative replacement. Most would not have expected the country that accounts for a fourth of the global economy and commands an unrivaled capacity for force projection to run out of personal protective equipment for its doctors and nurses so quickly after the virus broached its borders. Nor, considering how often it has mobilized collective action to address global crises over the past three-quarters of a century, would they have expected it to be as inward-looking and as at loggerheads with longstanding allies and international institutions.

The headline of Katrin Bennhold’s recent article—“‘Sadness’ and Disbelief from a World Missing American Leadership”—reflects a widespread belief that the United States should—and perhaps an underlying hope that it ultimately will—provide that necessity. It is difficult to imagine a comparable headline about China: while other countries will, of course, welcome assistance that it provides as the world struggles to overcome the pandemic, few expect it to lead that response, even as Beijing seeks to depict itself as upholding a fraying architecture of cooperation that Washington is undermining.

Shortly after stepping down as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, Tom Malinowski observed that “in the refugee camps and war zones that I’ve visited, I’ve never met anyone who told me they were angry at China or France or Russia for failing to help them. Where people are desperate, it is still America they count on, whether they love or scorn it, and America they blame when aid does not come.” Fairly or not, then, the United States bears a unique burden: others’ hopes. The more severe a test the postwar order confronts, the more damage its reputation stands to suffer when its performance is incongruous with those expectations. Having taken close to three hundred thousand lives in just four and a half months, and threatening a global downturn more acute than the Great Depression, the coronavirus is about as dire a challenge as one can imagine.

Fourth, and finally, any and all predictions about a post-pandemic order should be made humbly and treated skeptically. The sobering likelihood is that we are only in the nascent stages of the pandemic; many observers believe that its human toll and economic costs are likely to continue growing rapidly until a vaccine is widely available. Narratives about America and China’s respective responses—domestic and global—are not fixed; they are likely to continue evolving over the coming months. Just consider how significantly storylines about China’s responses have changed. In mid-March it was common to read assessments that Beijing had swiftly contained the coronavirus in Wuhan and was playing a central role in facilitating the rest of the world’s recovery. In recent weeks, though, its standing has fallen considerably, with high-ranking government officials peddling conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, demanding that recipients of its medical equipment express their gratitude publicly, and dismissing the growing number of reports of defects in the medical equipment China has provisioned.

The United States has defied many a declinist prognostication, and it may be able to do so again if it modernizes its social compact and commits itself anew to developing coalitions that can address present and future transnational emergencies. But it will likely have to work much harder than China to recover its pre-pandemic standing, assuming that the pervasive perception of an enfeebled and insular superpower has not already calcified.

Coronavirus Relief Bill: North Korea Banned From Cannabis Industry The 1,815-page bill has a lot of unexpected provisions. by Matthew Petti

Congress’s latest coronavirus relief bill includes a provision making sure that “the Government of Iran, North Korea, Syria,” or any state sponsor of terrorism is not included in banking channels opened for the legal cannabis industry.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) proposed the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act as a fourth package of coronavirus relief funding this week, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) said that he would “hit pause” on further economic relief.

The $3 trillion bill comes out to 1,815 pages, and includes direct economic relief as well as national security measures to prevent another pandemic and provisions that Democrats say will indirectly help deal with the fallout of the novel coronavirus.

One of them is the Secure And Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would allow legal cannabis businesses to access the U.S. banking system—except for businesses that pose a “threat to national security.”

Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D–Col.) wrote in a statement that he had “been pushing for this” because the “crisis has only exacerbated the risk posed to cannabis businesses & their employees & they need relief just like any other legitimate business.”

The HEROES Act also includes other, more germane national security proposals related to pandemics.

The bill creates a new council of U.S. officials to implement the Global Health Security Agenda, a framework created in 2014 by the United States and several other countries.

It also requires the President to appoint a Coordinator for Global Health Security and joins the United States to an international vaccine development project called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

The bill also includes several priorities that Senate Democrats have said are necessary for coping with the coronavirus crisis, including expanded early voting and vote by mail, and financial relief to state and local governments.

But the leadership of the Republican Party, which controls the Senate, has signaled that it will oppose the relief bill.

McConnell said on Tuesday that the HEROES Act was not a bill that “deals with reality” but a collection of “pet priorities” for the Democratic Party.

He instead proposed “narrowly crafted liability protection” for businesses, something President Donald Trump has voiced his support for as well.

"We now have a debt the size of our economy," McConnell said. "So I've said, and the president has said as well, that we have to take a pause here and take a look at what we've done."

Democrats, however, contend that their legislation cannot wait.

“There are those who said, let’s just pause,” Pelosi said on Tuesday. “For the families who are suffering, though, hunger doesn’t take a pause. Rent doesn’t take a pause. Bills don’t take a pause."

Environmental Activist Leilani Münter Warns America Needs Better Pandemic Preparations How a former NASCAR driver and environmental activist believes we can help prevent the next global contagion. by Joseph Cirincione and Zack Brown

The coronavirus pandemic is not only a public health issue, said former NASCAR driver and environmental activist Leilani Münter. It’s also a showcase for the threats posed by the strain humanity is putting on the planet.  

Case in point: while we still don’t know the exact source of COVID-19, we do know that it originally leaped from an animal host. And that host may have been forced into contact with humans as habitat destruction continues to rise globally; some 31,000 square miles of forest are destroyed each year, an area roughly the size of South Carolina. 

Münter, who joined the national security podcast Press The Button, is no stranger to this issue. In 2015, she starred in Racing Extinction, a documentary which detailed the ongoing global mass extinction of plant and animal species caused by human activity. She said the film has gained renewed traction in recent months, in part because of scenes filmed in a wet market in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, a location similar to the Wuhan wet market near which COVID-19 is thought to have originated.

Back then, the United States was still running a program called PREDICT, an international network of scientists tasked with hunting down viruses likely to jump from animals to humans. Coronaviruses, like the one that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), were a major concern; in 2007, researchers from the University of Hong Kong said the prevalence of SARS-like viruses in bats was a “time bomb.” 

But PREDICT, which had cost about $207 million over its ten year existence—or less than the cost of two F-35B fighter jets—was ultimately shut down by the Trump administration in October 2019, the same month COVID-19 may have made its first leap from animal to human. 

Münter believes this move was tragically shortsighted. “The CDC estimates that three quarters of new human diseases originate from animals,” she said. “These high impact threats that humanity is facing but that we know are coming should actually be called gray rhinos instead of black swans,” Münter continued, citing the term popularized by Michelle Wucker. “They’re dangerous, we know for certain they are in our future, and we can see them coming towards us.”

Animal-transmitted diseases will become more likely as the combined effects of climate change and habitat destruction force animals and humans into closer contact. “We’re increasing the frequency where these viruses have the opportunity to make the jump [from animal to human],” Münter warned. “Either from the wild or a wild species interacting with livestock and then making the jump to humans through our livestock consumption.” 

Such a threat assessment calls out for a reprioritization of federal funds, argued Münter. “Our future challenges and threats to our national security are going to come from a lot of places that have nothing to do with weapons and guns,” she said, pointing to the sixty percent of discretionary spending that goes to the Pentagon each year. Military spending “is not going to protect us against future pandemics. It’s not going to protect us against climate change.” 

Even if the U.S. government did divert Pentagon funds to combat climate change and future pandemics, the more difficult challenge may be convincing Americans to adopt more climate-friendly lifestyles such as eating less meat or buying an electric vehicle, said Münter. But the self-professed “vegan hippie chick with a race car” is used to swimming upstream. 

“What I was trying to do in the racing world was reach out to people that didn’t agree with me,” Münter explained. “You have to get outside of your box.” She pointed to her NASCAR collaboration with Operation Free, a group of veterans and national security experts working to promote climate change awareness and a clean energy future. 

“It was such a powerful message because the NASCAR community has a longstanding relationship” with the military, said Münter. “So, it was powerful for these NASCAR fans to come to my tent at the racetrack and meet military generals and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan” who would talk about the geopolitical and environmental risks entailed by American oil dependence. 

“Of course, there was a little confrontation” to her vocal climate advocacy, Münter admitted. But the recent coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened her belief that the world needs to change, and that the difficult task of persuading people to act is worth it. 

“As long as we continue on this path that we are on,” she explained, “we are setting ourselves up to take ourselves off the planet.”