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The New York Times takes stock of how the world views us now, in the midst of this pandemic, and found the governing words to be “sadness” and “disbelief.”
BERLIN — As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief.
“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.
Of course, as of today it’s not 22 million unemployed—it’s 26 million. Next week it will be 30 million. And the rest of the world is noticing.
Those in the rest of the world need only turn on their televisions or log on to Google News to witness a patently incompetent “leader” making an ass of himself by crudely insulting reporters at press conferences where the topic is literally life and death, or using Twitter to encourage armed right-wing groups to storm state capitals and “liberate” states from their Democratic governors. They need only to scroll down on their smartphones to see him hawking phony virus cures, like a nineteenth-century snake-oil salesman, and realize that a country stupid enough to elect such a person cannot be trusted or relied upon for anything in this deadly pandemic. They see that the U.S. government cannot even be bothered to sufficiently test its citizens for the virus, or to provide medical equipment to hospitals. And they need only to click on their tablets to see Mitch McConnell and his Republican henchmen in the U.S. Senate threatening to withhold aid from the sick and unemployed … just to see “blue” states go bankrupt.
The people of the world watch all of this, and they take notes.
It’s no wonder they recoil in “sadness” and “disbelief,” because these are not characteristics of a country that deserves their respect or inspires any confidence. If anything, the U.S. provides an urgent lesson in how not to respond to this crisis. With an infection and fatality rate not just exceeding, but grossly exceeding that of every other nation on the planet, what other possible conclusion could they draw? The Times quotes Dominique Moisi of France’s Institut Montaigne, who articulates what every other nation is thinking: “America has not done badly,” he says—“It has done exceptionally badly.”
For Europeans looking in from the outside, America’s response to the pandemic must look like an episode of Black Mirror, in which the gaping cracks of a society that can neither care for its sick nor provide for its unemployed have simply grown too obvious to ignore, The Times notes.
[I]n the United States, it has exposed two great weaknesses that, in the eyes of many Europeans, have compounded one another: the erratic leadership of Mr. Trump, who has devalued expertise and often refused to follow the advice of his scientific advisers, and the absence of a robust public health care system and social safety net.
As The Times points out, this is the first global crisis in over a century where no one—absolutely no one—is turning to the United States for leadership or guidance. Thanks to Trump, American democracy itself is no longer even worthy of admiration. Who would want its citizens to live in a “democracy” that, for all its enormous wealth, can’t (or worse, won’t) protect its own citizens? Such a country deserves to be shunned and ignored, not imitated, The Times observes.
The country that helped defeat fascism in Europe 75 years ago next month, and defended democracy on the continent in the decades that followed, is doing a worse job of protecting its own citizens than many autocracies and democracies.
Nowhere is the stark divide between effective and competent leadership and bungling incompetence more visible than in comparing the U.S. response to that of Germany. As The Times points out, Germany enjoys a “robust” public healthcare system, while the system in this country leaves most citizens’ health and lives subject at the mercy of private corporations, with their very ability to be insured contingent, for the most part, on full-time employment. In this country, to propose even a partially public funded healthcare system results in corporations inciting armies of race-baited, duped and ignorant citizens to disrupt town halls and burn effigies of their congressperson or president. What kind of “liberty” or “freedom” does that represent, Europeans must ask themselves.
Yes, people in other nations in the world take note of these things. They also take care (some of them at least) to try to elect leaders of quality, not miserably unqualified reality-TV show conmen with no record or discernible interest in public service. The difference between Donald Trump and Germany’s Angela Merkel, The Times points out, is a study in stark contrasts.
Ms. Merkel has done what Mr. Trump has not. She has been clear and honest about the risks with voters and swift in her response. She has rallied all 16 state governors behind her. A trained physicist, she has followed scientific advice and learned from best practice elsewhere.
Unlike Trump, Merkel does not approach the crisis as an opportunity to punish political opponents but as an urgent imperative to protect her own citizens. As noted by The Times, the panel she convened to inform her decisions “includes not just medical experts and economists but also behavioral psychologists, education experts, sociologists, philosophers and constitutional experts.” Meanwhile, Trump is consulting business executives whose only concern is how to return profitability to American corporations. It’s painfully obvious which leader actually cares about their nation’s citizens, and which does not.
The Times also quotes historian and author Timothy Garton Ash, who says that America should “take an urgent warning” from the collapse of past empires, all of whom carried their innate dysfunction like a disease until they were finally overwhelmed by an unexpected crisis. “[Y]ou can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time,” he said. “Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”
If nothing else, this pandemic is making it abundantly clear to the rest of the world that America is desperately mired in dysfunction, and that the rot feeding it comes straight from the top. So it’s no surprise they want nothing to do with us, they don’t seek our advice, and don’t even try enlist our help. In effect, they’re practicing “social distancing” from us on a global scale. The only question is whether Americans will ever earn the confidence and embrace of the world again.
