Get a hold of this, my friend. It is March 16, 2020
and despite the Coronavirus disease having affected the entire planet for
nearly three months, nobody could get the straight story as to what's happening
in America from the occupants of the highest office in the land that held a
news conference almost on a daily basis.
This is abnormal and needs to be called what it is.
But was it what Joshua Kurlantzick did? No, it wasn't. Instead of telling what
has been happening in the briefing room of the White House, he wrote an opinion
piece under the title: “China and Coronavirus: From Home-Made Disaster to
Global Mega-Opportunity,” and had it published on the website of the Council on
Foreign Relations on March 16, 2020.
The piece came under eight subheadings that went like
this: (1) First, China botches...; (2) Then it cracks down very hard; (3) And
now, it's making the most out of it; (4) Xi Jinping: From domestic crisis
manager...; (5)... to responsible global actor; (6) Stealing the soft power
mantle from the US; (7) China's claim to global leadership; (8) Conclusion.
Even if you didn't know what has been happening (or
not happening) at the White House briefings, seeing the first subheading of
Kurlantzick's piece, which says: “China botches,” you being a normal person,
would have felt sympathy for the Chinese officials that had to deal with a
calamity of this unprecedented magnitude.
But sympathy is not what Joshua Kurlantzick has
expressed. Instead, he accused the Chinese government of suppressing accurate
information (which means a deliberate act) while at the same time accusing it
of confusion (which means an unwitting act,) both of which led him to slander
that government, accusing it of being responsible for spreading the Coronavirus
globally.
And then, applying the classic trick that goes:
“damned when you do and damned when you don't,” which you'll find in the bag of
every clown, Kurlantzick went on to say that Beijing admitted to the scale of
the crisis ... but then what? But then Beijing did the following, according to
the clown: “It imposed a medieval quarantine despite the enormous
ramifications.” As if this were not dumb enough, he added to the silliness of
his performance by calling the quarantine a medieval one. And of course, he
said it without explaining how that might differ from a state-of-the-art
quarantine.
Now that he's had his fill denigrating China, Joshua
Kurlantzick decided it was time to scare America about its rival. He began the
assault on China by admitting that it “had gotten a handle on the outbreak …
and had drastically slowed the rate of new infections.” But as fate would have
it, while China was healing, the rest of the world was catching the disease. And
so, he went on to complain that this gave the Chinese president Xi Jinping the
opportunity to extend his helping hand to the rest of the world, including some
Western states.
What has added to the impetus of the Chinese president
looking like a “responsible global actor,” is that the Western nations,
including America, bungled their response to the outbreak. In fact, says
Kurlantzick, it was not only China that did a good job dealing with the
outbreak, it was other Asian nations as well, such as South Korea, Japan and
Singapore, he went on to say.
This being the case, you would think that Joshua
Kurlantzik, who is of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have welcomed
such positive development and built on it by suggesting how America should
respond with an eye on fostering better relations with China and the other
Asian nations. Unfortunately, however, what the man did was the exact opposite
of that.
He saw in China doing as well as it did, not an
opportunity to cooperate with and build a better world, but a rising
competitor, if not a foe or even a dangerous opponent. Unnerved by the
international bodies that praised Beijing for its intelligent response to the
pandemic, Kurlantzick expressed his negative sentiment by using a subheading
that says China is “stealing” soft power from the US. In saying so, he
suggested that power and influence are a zero-sum game … what China gains,
America loses.
In fact, the next subheading being about China
claiming global leadership, creates the suspicion that the Council on Foreign
Relations, as a think tank––and not just this one writer––considers the rise of
China or any other rising power for that matter, as an ominous development.
And when you pursue this thought to its logical
conclusion, you cannot escape the realization that the Council on Foreign
Relations is not here to help America produce smart diplomacy for a complex
world. It is here to help America build paranoia about a dangerous world that
must be stifled, or risk being killed by it.