Donald Trump and the International Institutional Order
I would prefer not to have to write on Donald Trump. I much prefer an institutional and structural analysis when it comes to politics. Trump is a crude brute when it comes to politics, and this makes him easy to attack. The most skilful operators attempt to take the credit for all that goes well and blame others for all that goes badly. All politicians do this, and the more successful ones are so skilled at it that they fool enough of the voting public to keep winning elections. Trump is not a good political operator, and his attempt to claim credit and blame others is transparent. There is an inadvertent honesty, or revelation, to it all that I would relish, if only Trump’s critics would see that Trump is not the problem, merely the monstrous manifestation of a malaise that goes much deeper. He and his ilk may be part of that problem, but it goes way beyond him. That the Democrats have selected another moderate middling mediocrity as leader, who will become complicit in a failing status quo, is of far greater concern to me than Trump. It isn’t that Trump isn’t an outrage and a disaster, because he most assuredly is. It is that left leaning, progressive, and liberal critics still think middling mediocrity complicit in a divided and failing status quo offers anything like a way forward. The problem is a system mired in crisis and contradiction and the failure of critics to generate anything like the collective radical wit and will to move forward. If ever socialism or anything that hints at socialism is mentioned it is met with a pretended sympathy sounding the retreat, because ‘people aren’t ready for it yet.’ Socialism is older than God’s dog. If people aren’t ready for it now, they never will be. People should have the guts to say what they mean, and that can’t really means they don’t want to. But guts are the last things that cowards show. Trump is merely fake revolution. The writing was on the wall, there was a need for real change. Trump read it, but interpreted in such a way as to be anti-establishment within the very parameters of the establishment that is at the root of the crisis. And so it continues. To run another half-way house against that is to invite yet more failure, disillusion more people wanting change, and justify a further reaction to the right as a result.
Trump is exposing realities about power and politics that power would preserve to remain concealed. Power is best preserved by being concealed. Donald Trump really is an outrage. There is a need for cooperation and coordination on an international scale in the new global environment. That said, the international bodies that Trump is criticizing have been complicit in the crises in which the world is currently mired. The danger is that politics becomes fractured into pro- and anti-Trump. A more nuanced approach is required on the left. Because far too many who are anti-Trump are proponents of dangerous ‘moderate’ myths and delusions. They give the impression that the social order was working perfectly fine until Trump turned up. This is far from the truth. Trump is himself a product of popular discontent with the status quo. Very many people were destabilized and disenfranchised by the globalisation of economic relations. Here, it is the liberals from Bill Clinton to Tony Blair who stand accused of being the architects of this crisis. That, too, is a superficial analysis. Clinton and Blair et al capitulated to economic libertarianism, privatisation and globalisation. To go back to this kind of politician is merely to invite further crisis, crash and reaction in the future. We should be careful of simply being anti-Trump, for the reason that many of the international and environmental bodies he is attacking have been complicit in the failures and crises that have brought the world to the brink of disaster.
I am currently reading an article in Intellectual Takeout entitled ‘after Trump, who will Progressives Hate?’ It's a jaundiced, tendentious article but it does highlight how defenders of the status quo can turn an obsessive focus on the personalities involved in a crisis into a case of demonization, as if the progressive or liberal cause has no deeper basis other than personalisation and hate. I have commented on Trump, but not a lot, and always with the cautions and qualifications I issue here. All is not well in this world, whether or not Trump exists in it or not. So note well my words above. I have no interest in making Trump a scapegoat for all that is wrong in the modern world, the crisis we face is structural and institutional, and in taking fire at some institutions, Trump is actually hitting the mark here and there. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons, and with goals in mind that could make the situation worse. But the failings predate him and are many. Those who think that a return to normality ‘after Trump’ is ‘progressive’ are not progressive at all, they merely prove the extent to which liberals have become the new conservatives, invited reactionary revolution in the absence of genuine social transformation.
We should be careful in criticising Trump not to fall into a position of uncritically endorsing all that he opposes. There is a reason why Trump’s fake anti-establishment rebellion from within the establishment is striking a chord – the institutions of the old order are patently not working. There is a danger of allowing Trump’s provocations inducing people to defend all that the President attacks. This is a snare that has progressives, liberals, and leftists limiting their reformist ambitions to failing and fundamentally unreformable institutions within an unreformable system. The international bodies being attacked by Trump have been established as a de facto system of global authority, supplying the law and order that the capital system, as a fundamentally anarchic and subjectless system of production, cannot supply itself. They are thus charged with managing a fundamentally unmanageable system, keeping its contradictions and crises within certain limits whilst at the same time preserving the very production and power relations that generate them. It is an impossible task and, as capital reaches its limits, so too do its institutions. With the mainstream politics of the conventional public domain closed off to radical challenge, the likes of Trump have a free hand in engaging in a pretend rebellion against the old institutional order. The mistake to make is to think that if Trump is against it, then it must be good. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accords was an international outrage, but environmentalists well knew that Paris was feeble, inadequate, and a failure, and should have made that clear instead of insisting on a flabby consensus and cooperation over goals that fall short. This kind of unity in inadequacy and failure is a gift to the likes of Trump. It gives him and his ilk reasons to rip up the old institutional order and replace it with something more to their own liking. That should be the job of the Left. Instead, too many ‘progressives’ have become conservatives, defending the existing authorities in their failure.
There are a number of reasons why President Trump’s anger with the World Health Organization may strike many people as plausible. The organisation has struggled to combat the coronavirus pandemic from the first and stands accused of having given too much credence to China’s initial messaging. It may well be that the WHO’s apparent ‘kowtowing’ in its dealings with Beijing were integral to its attempt to negotiate access, but this has provoked the ire not merely of Trump and his supporters in the United States, but critics in other countries. Japan’s deputy prime minister recently called the WHO the “China Health Organization.” I address the substance of these charges below. I believe they are hard to square with the record and that the WHO could have done little more than it did.
Trump’s haughty declaration to halt funding to the WHO in the middle of the pandemic has drawn widespread condemnation. The President of the USA is not only at odds with other world leaders but with his own administration’s officials in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department. These agencies underscore the importance of supporting and influencing the WHO in the midst of a common crisis. This is certainly true, but we risk missing what the act reveals about the political game that Donald Trump is playing. Trump is plainly out to exploit any opportunity provided by weakness, failure, and crisis to punish, undermine, or even abolish multilateral agreements and international institutions so as to unconstrain and ‘unburden’ the United States, even when it is unclear what the United States may gain from the breakdown in international cooperation. There is a need to remember that the whole point of these international bodies as a de facto system of international order and control is to bring a degree of government to an ungovernable anarchy of production. The reasoning is that all lose when the global system fails, and so it is in the interest of all, the strongest most of all, to ensure that the system is maintained in some kind of functional order. Trump clearly believes that he can pull the plug, allowing the USA to go it alone. He will find that he has renationalized all the old problems of the sixties and seventies in even less propitious circumstances. The globalisation of economic relations is irreversible. The question is not globalisation but what kind of globalisation.
Trump’s attack on the WHO was motivated in the first instance by narrow political calculations as well as long-range strategy.
In the immediate context, the WHO serves as an external scapegoat for his administration’s mishandling of the pandemic crisis. The facts are as plain as the statements from Trump’s own mouth that the President and the administration he leads denied, downplayed, and delayed with respect to the scale of the threat posed by coronavirus. In terms of preparation and response, Trump is culpable. He therefore badly needs a scapegoat to deflect attention from his culpability. China was his first target, and hasn’t been his last. The WHO and the UN are further targets. Despite the transparency of Trump’s actions here, it has to be said that his supporters are dutifully compliant, ranging from the conscious agents of deception to those whom they are out to deceive.
In terms of long-range strategy, the attack on the WHO and the UN are part of Trump’s attempt to reorder and even destroy the system of international authority. The President of the USA considers these international organizations and their protocol as institutional constraints on American power and financial burdens on the American purse. He therefore identifies them as impediments to the American national interest and acts to remove them. Since entering the White House, Trump has inveighed strongly against various central authorities and institutions constituting the international order, the United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the European Union and its member states. The withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Accords could be taken as the USA of Trump’s declaration of independence from the world and war upon it.
So Trump is obviously engaged in an aggressive politics, and is manifestly wrong, then? The danger for leftist critics is for them to respond to Trump in kind by falling into the strong defence of the institutions he is attacking. This would effectively fall into Trump’s trap of inverting politics, putting progressives in the position of reactionary defenders of a failing status quo and allowing him to maintain his pose as populist rebel.
The solution is to call the bluff of Trump and other fake rebels and populists and proceed to demand the thoroughgoing social, structural, and institutional transformation of a clearly failing world order.
This world order and the institutions which compose it have been faltering and failing for a long while now. The inability of the Left to fashion a coherent and cogent transformative politics out of this decline is a major factor in the rise of illiberal ‘populist’ demagogues within some of the major liberal democracies of the world. The failure to deal with a deep-seated malaise creatively and progressively creates a space for its exploitation by negative and destructive forces. The fact that the Democrats in the US have chosen Biden to stand against Trump and the Labour Party in the UK have chosen Sir Keir Starmer as leader (having seen off Corbyn) indicates the predilection for ‘moderate’ middling mediocrity on the supposedly reformist wing of politics. It is a recipe for failure, defeat, and further reaction. In light of current events, this is proof positive that certain forces prefer the evil twins of failed reformism and reactionary rebellion to profound social transformation.
The coronavirus pandemic is showing up the institutional inadequacies of the global order. As Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly write: “The political winds and pressures of the 21st century, from human migration and extreme income disparity to protectionism and rising new powers, have weakened its foundations, leaving it ill-equipped to handle the first truly global threat to its very existence.”
This is an understatement. The global order has been badly managing any number of global issues for decades now – environment, economic contradictions and crises, financial corruption, tax evasion and avoidance, war and terror, narcotics, people trafficking. It has, thus war, just about managed to keep a lid on these problems. The coronavirus pandemic reveals not merely how ‘ill-equipped’ the global institutional order is to deal with the global problems of the interconnected world, but how little ‘global’ it actually is. These bodies are created by and responsible to national governments and lack a global identity. Hence the paralysis. We have seen it in climate conferences time and again. What is noteworthy is the extent to which many progressives who identity as liberal and reformist are complicit in this fake internationalism and institutional failure, effectively canalising creative political energies into sterile forms. For reactionary reasons, Trump is far more of a rebel. So when he attacks, don’t merely invert the terms he dictates, change them in your favour and demand true transformation instead of rebellion. The old order is manifestly failing. Rather than defend it for the reason that Trump is attacking it, work with others to change it in the context of a profound social transformation.
The dangers lie in limiting political ambition to the defence of a failing institutional order. This concedes the initiative to demagogic populist leaders as they attempt to supplant democracy with overtly authoritarian regimes. As Stewart Patrick, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Bloomberg News: “The currents of populism are so great now that leaders are no longer inclined or rewarded for behaving in terms of international cooperation. There is a growing risk that these organizations could weaken and atrophy. There just aren’t enough leaders out there taking an enlightened view of the international interest.”
All lose in the long run when the system fails. The problem is that in the short run, it may pay some to defect from international agreement and cooperation, thereby weakening and in the end undermining collective order. This is especially true in the context of globalisation, its social, economic, and cultural failures and its discontents. In the 1990s, the globalisation of economic relations was presented as the only game in town, and was presented as such by ‘liberals’ such as Clinton in the US and Blair and Brown in the UK. Many were excluded from the benefits of globalisation and discontent has grown. Trump read the writing on the wall and interpreted it his own way. The language struck a chord with people and still strikes a chord. There is a bitter irony in seeing right wing American conservatives employing the language of sixties Labour leader Harold Wilson and all that ‘I’m Backing Britain’ and ‘Made in Britain’ rhetoric. Renationalising all the old problems in a new international environment is a recipe for disaster. It is no solution to the problems that the world faces, but neither is the limp, lame reformism whose manifest failures have incited fake (reactionary) rebellion.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, William Burns, former deputy secretary of state and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued that over the years U.S. leaders have sought to build partnerships that served as “an invaluable force multiplier” for the American agenda. The pandemic is exposing a new reality: “In this one, the Trump White House’s blend of arrogance and ineptitude, against the backdrop of more than three years of diplomatic disarmament, is a force divider.”
A Guardian article entitled US's global reputation hits rock-bottom over Trump's coronavirus response warns that US policy failure could do lasting damage as the President insults allies and undermines alliances.
Trump’s incoherent and inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic is criticised as irresponsible to the point of culpability. A ‘parallel disaster’ is the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner. ‘Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.’
‘Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.’ Trump is no longer perceived as an incompetent but now as a threat. The issue is not merely one of failed leadership but of openly hostile, reckless actions expressing contempt for anyone and anything perceived to stand in the way of American self-assertion. Trump and his supporters divide the world into USA and the rest, friends and enemies. By the ‘USA’ they mean themselves and their obsessions and interests, by ‘friends’ they mean themselves and not those many Americans who disagree. It’s a narrow world that will become ever narrower in time.
‘US reputational damage is not confined to Europe. There was dismay among the G7 countries that a joint statement on tackling the pandemic could not be agreed because Trump insisted on calling it the “Wuhan virus” – his crude way of pinning sole blame on China.’
Trump has been attempting to shift blame and deflect attention from his ineptitude from the first. His televised Covid-19 briefings are a frankly bizarre experience, not merely reversing the truth but drowning any evaluative standards within an acid of randomness. The notion of reversal at entails that the structure of truth remains in place, but Trump’s briefings are of an entirely different order. The sense of truth is destroyed to such an extent that truth-seeking becomes impossible. At this stage, it becomes useless to even ask questions. Trump regularly propagates false or misleading information, bets on hunches, argues with reporters and contradicts scientific and medical experts. The result is a collapse in credibility in and a loss of respect for US leadership.
While publicly rejecting foreign help, Trump has privately asked European and Asian allies for aid – even those, such as South Korea, that he previously berated. And he continues to smear the World Health Organization in a transparent quest for scapegoats.
As for the dismay among G7 nations, Trump could care less. This is just another international body which serves to constrain the US within some kind of international authority. Trump plainly feels that the US should not be so beholden. He evidently wants the world to be run in the same chaotic way that the USA is run. It’s the rule of the rich and the powerful, and devil take the hindmost.
‘To a watching world, the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.
That’s a title the US appears on course to lose – a fall from grace that may prove irreversible. The domestic debacle unleashed by the pandemic, and global perceptions of American selfishness and incompetence, could change everything. According to Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, Trump has presided over “a failure of character unparalleled in US history.”
Simon Tisdall asks ‘Do Americans realise how far their country’s moral as well as financial stock has fallen?’
I know many Americans who do and are both outraged and saddened, working to bring the country back to its senses. I know many Americans who spin the facts in the opposite direction to claim America is bigger and better than ever, which is bigger and better than any place on Earth, and don’t care for those who say otherwise.
Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, said he hoped the crisis would force a fundamental US rethink about “whether the ‘America first’ model really works”. The Trump administration’s response had been too slow, he said. “Hollowing out international connections comes at a high price,” Maas warned. ‘America First’ could be America Alone and Gone, left behind by the world. It could also be that, wedded to failing, ill-equipped, inadequate institutions, the world order too is headed for oblivion. To repeat, avoid reducing this issue to having to choose between two false options, populist authoritarian nationalism and empty globalisation. Try global social transformation instead.
Again, the danger lies in targeting criticism on the figure of Trump. Trump may be the personification of this international institutional weakening and atrophying, but the crisis in the international order predates and goes far deeper than him. The danger in personalizing this issue is not only that it comes to neglect the essential institutional and structural analysis, it allows conservative critics and apologists to claim that ‘progressives’ merely engage in ‘hate’ campaigns which ‘demonize’ figures it dislikes like Trump. I am currently reading an article in Intellectual Takeout by Barry Brownstein entitled ‘after Trump, who will Progressives Hate?’
So note well my words above. I have no interest in making Trump a scapegoat for all that is wrong in the modern world, the crisis we face is structural and institutional, and in taking fire at some institutions, Trump is actually hitting the mark here and there. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons, and with goals in mind that could make the situation worse. But the failings predate him and are many. Those who think that a return to normality ‘after Trump’ is ‘progressive’ are not progressive at all, they merely prove the extent to which liberals have become the new conservatives, invited reactionary revolution in the absence of genuine social transformation.
The problem is far greater than Trump, and the failure to understand that point, combined with an obsessive focus on Trump, enables his supporters and defenders to make the critical political running. As a result, political roles come to be reversed, with progressive, reformist critics defending the very institutions complicit in political and economic failure. The fundamental problem facing the world is a capital system reaching its limits, its contradictory dynamics miring the world in converging crises and the global institutions designed to manage its anarchy on an international basis becoming increasingly obsolete. The U.N. Security Council is the product of the World War II settlement and is not a fit body for a truly globalized world. It is a body dominated by the five permanent members, and these have used its veto powers to stall and block effective and meaningful collective action. At the same time, the newer alliances and blocs that have formed as a counterweight have proven no more effective and no less useless. The constant appeals to and celebrations of global “solidarity” and “shared values” are empty and ideological, an attempt to assert in word the very things that are lacking in deed. These bodies have presided over three decades of unfettered globalization that have played disproportionately into the hands of the rich and powerful. That entrenchment and extension of uneven development is directly implicated in the unravelling of the socio-economic and ecological fabric of the world.
For my part, as a socialist and a radical, I am interested in the extent to which those who identify as ‘progressive,’ be they reformists and leftists (liberals, really) in politics or environmentalists, seek to prosecute their political demands within the institutions of a global order that are palpably not up to task and are failing. It is for this reason that the defence of the Paris agreement against Trump’s vandalism was lame and ineffective – Paris is inadequate and is a recipe for failure. Greta Thunberg wants to pressure the governments of the world to abide by the terms of the Paris agreement. Why the insistence on the appearance of consensus and why the commitment to empty and ineffective cooperation? Can't we do much better than Paris? We need to, that's for certain. For all the radical rhetoric, the institutional demands of progressives are tame and reformist, working within institutional parameters that are demonstrably failing. Trump’s motivations and intentions may be wrong, but the inadequacies of the international institutions and the de facto international order are many and manifest.
Taufiq Rahim, a Dubai-based global health expert with the New America organization, argues that “every aspect of the international architecture has failed.” “It starts with the U.N. Security Council, which has shown itself to be not just ineffective but no longer fit for purpose. While the G-7 and G-20 have convened in some form or other, that hasn’t led to any direct immediate action.”
We can say the same with respect to environmental action and the international (and national) legal-institutional framework designed to protect the environmental good. The reformist approach through existing institutions has now racked up decades of failure, in politics, economics, and ecology. So when Trump and his supporters lead an attack on international bodies and legislative-regulative frameworks, the response should not be a knee-jerk defence of all that he attacks, but to call his revolutionary bluff and demand a thoroughgoing root and branch institutional and structural transformation. This would be to reverse the Dutch Auction in which reactionaries inveigle progressives into a competitive lowering of standards. These institutions and bodies are failing and have been failing for a long time; they are complicit in the global crisis of capital and express the contradictory dynamics of a capital system exhausting its limits. In criticizing Bernie Sanders and justifying Joe Biden, progressive voices claim that people are ‘not ready for’ such radicalism. So we opt again for moderate middling mediocrity that we know falls far short of the transformations required and is hence certain to fail. If you fail to resolve a problem positively and creatively, then you open a space for political opponents to resolve it negatively and destructively, entrenching the very power relations that lie at its core.
There are those who say that rather than criticize and punish global institutions like the WHO, the United States ought to “lean in” and actively work to reform and modernize the U.N. system from within. That implies that such institutions are reformable. That was the argument against Brexit in Britain. The problem is that people have heard the promises of reform for many years now and no longer believe them. Trump has railed against ‘globalism’ from the first and has sought geopolitical confrontation to enable him to reorder institutional arrangements.
Some experts claim that Trump’s aversion to multilateral diplomacy and commitments won’t prevent China from imposing its will on organizations like the WHO. “While Western commentators often portray these moves as sinister, China is just using available tools to advance its own interests,” wrote academics Alexander Cooley and Dan Nexon in The Post’s Monkey Cage blog. “And these techniques are not new. What we’re seeing now is only shocking to many U.S. observers, who have grown accustomed to a world where the United States makes the rules.”
By the time the pandemic is over, presuming that such a day will come, the rules may well have changed.
That said, Trump really is an outrage.
This article makes the mild observation that ‘allies suspect the US president is attempting to distract attention from his administration's failings in dealing with the virus.’ Until people have the guts to tell it like it is in politics there will be no advance. There’s no point carrying on patiently in the hope that Trump will learn by experience to see the error of his ways. His zero-sum mentality takes such passive opposition as weakness on the part of his enemies and an opportunity to press further harder. There is some evidence that people in politics are beginning to see that. Of course Trump is criticising the WHO as an attempt to deflect attention from his culpability in the coronavirus crisis hitting America.
There is now a huge backlash against Trump for cutting WHO funds in the midst of a crisis. That he should do so should tell us all we need to know about the man and the kind of politics he practises. What surprises me, though, is that so many still are so surprised and shocked. Trump has behaved like this from the first. His withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was an act of environmental vandalism and international aggression, and was done precisely for those reasons, offering a visible demonstration of power that excites his core support.
Trump's attempt to scapegoat the World Health Organisation (WHO) for the COVID-19 pandemic has been rebutted in terms of the key points, and rebuffed in a virtual summit of the G7 world's richest nations. It is so transparently an attempt to scapegoat that it may also backfire on him. We shall see. Many of his supporters are in the grip of such a deep delusion it is difficult to know what may persuade them out of it. Probably nothing. So we are waiting for good sense to prevail among sufficient others.
Trump has drawn international outrage for suspending funding for the WHO in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. It is an act of aggression that beggars belief when coordination and cooperation in the use of resources is required to minimize impact and death all over the world. Some analysists wonder how many Americans realize how low the reputation of the US has fallen as a result of actions like this on the part of its President. I would guess that they don’t care, since for them it is America first and foremost and the rest of the world not at all. They give the impression of wanting to unfund and unravel every international body on the planet that isn’t subordinate to American national interest. The following day all other world leaders attending the meeting gave the WHO their support. I doubt Trump supporters could care less. With Paris, Trump declared war on the world, and the world should have seen it then. Trump is an outrage, shock horror!
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw funding for the World Health Organization jeopardises efforts to coordinate international efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO is the principal global body tasked with battling the outbreak. It’s a decision that cannot but lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths. The decision is morally repugnant and would be so even if there was an element of truth in Trump’s criticisms of the WHO. The White House was involved in attempting to put a gloss on the outcome of the virtual summit claiming that "much of the conversation centred on the lack of transparency and chronic mismanagement of the pandemic by the WHO. The leaders called for a thorough review and reform process."
I shall analyse below whether there is any substance to Trump’s charges. Here, it is sufficient to say that all organisations and institutions tasked with managing complex issues err, that is no reason to undermine them or dismantle them, not least in the absence of alternatives at a time when international cooperation is needed. It should come as no surprise, then, that all other world leaders stood by the WHO, declaring it as integral in to the efforts being made to coordinate an international response.
The principal charges from the Trump Administration is that the WHO was too slow to respond to the outbreak in Wuhan and too ready to praise China's response, kowtowing to Beijing for political reasons. Like much that comes from Trump and his supporters, there is a simplicity and immediacy to these charges that is superficially true and compelling. But only if we reduce a complex issue to the simple and superficial. Other governments have expressed frustration with China and have argued that the WHO requires a measure of reform. Trump and his supporters will feel vindicated, claiming that for all the criticism, nothing gets done and no changes and reforms are made. But the decision to cut funding for the WHO in the midst of the coronavirus crisis has caused universal dismay. The WHO plays a vital role in international efforts to battle a range of diseases and testing vaccines in scores of nations. I would compare it to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accords. The threat to life there is more long-term and remote, but real, and so Trump’s withdrawal caused outrage. At the same time, Paris was and remains deficient, giving us a flabby cooperation and unity around goals that fall short. There is a need for reform, there is a need for tougher targets and action. These are promised. They never happen. I made my criticisms at the time in December 2015, only to be told, for the umpteenth time, ‘this is just the beginning.’ I was told the same with respect to Thunberg’s climate strikes and Extinction Rebellion. These are beginnings that never strike roots, grow up and go anywhere. It’s a permanent arrested development.
Hence my caution is merely being anti-Trump. There has been lousy practice within the dominant institutional order in face of myriad and converging crises.
Trump is not the leader for genuine reform let alone revolution. In fact, the man is a public menace. He is the very last person to be talking about the failures of others on coronavirus, given that he initially called the coronavirus outbreak a hoax and then proceeded to downplay its threat, comparing it to flu. Even as it struck he announced – on the basis of who knows what evidence – that America would open at Easter. The result of his denial and delay is that the number of coronavirus cases is rising more steeply in America than anywhere else in the world. His supporters are busy spinning facts and figures to prove otherwise, that the Trump administration is dealing with the crisis better than any other government, and that America’s health service is the best in the world. And that the people who have died would have died anyway .. I just despair of such people, they seem to inhabit the realm of the damned.
If we are playing politics as a zero-sum game, then Trump has succeeded in blindsiding the governments of the world. It is impossible to rise to the demands for reform when it isn’t at all clear what kind of reforms that Trump would like to see at the WHO for funding to be reinstated. He pulled the same stroke on Paris. If a better ‘deal’ was possible, he would be in favour of it. Of course, the Paris accord is framed so as to facilitate environmental diplomacy. If Trump had a better deal in mind, he could have presented it. He didn’t present any deal because he has none. It is pure international vandalism, a ripping up of international arrangements. Again, I am not going to simply shout ‘outrage’ at this, because those bodies of de facto international authority have not proven successful in managing capital’s global crises and contradictions. I am not going to criticize Trump in favour of supporting failing institutions, they are a busted flush and Trump is making political capital out of denouncing their complicity in socio-economic and environmental failure. A properly constituted and confident Left should be doing precisely that. Instead, there are too many still clinging to middling moderation, little realizing that there centre ground has been hollowed out.
Despite his complicity in denying and downplaying the threat from coronavirus, Trump doesn’t merely defend his record at these press briefings he holds, he boasted of it. In a complete reversal of the truth, Trump rails at the news media and blames it for false claims with respect to the inadequacies of his COVID-19 response. Trump supporters are also busy in this reversal of the truth. They believe in attack as a form of defence and have gone on the front-foot against critics, accusing others of not helping. An accusation like that not only puts people on the defensive, having to justify their actions in the face of crisis, but allows the impression to grow that the accusers are somehow on top of the problem, all evidence to the contrary. The people who have denied, downplayed, and delayed from the first are the very last people to be point accusing fingers at anyone. I give them short-shrift and tell them that this is their mess, own it, if they have the guts. In other words, I have also learned the lesson that attack is the best form of defence. And the accusers here haven’t got a leg to stand on.
Since this is politics, the lesson is to take politics seriously and do it properly. It will take more than fact-checking to stop the likes of Trump.
But fact checking remains important. Truth remains the best weapon we have in the attempt to hold power to account. That’s why Trump and his supporters do their level best to destroy moral and intellectual standards, to wear us down and make us feel nothing matters anymore. The assertions and arguments are random, and that appeals to many, who then feel reassured that their nonsense is just as good as anyone else’. In such a world, power prevails and justice is the interests of the strongest. That’s the world these people are trying to engineer into existence.
So it is worth cleaving to the truth.
Let’s take it point by point and see.
Announcing the withdrawal of US funding for the World Health Organization, President Trump set out seven principal charges against the organisation.
Here is each charge, as present in Donald Trump's own words, and a brief commentary as to their relation to the facts.
1. The WHO is “very China centric”
The WHO is an international body that represents 193 member countries. The most senior experts and advisers tend to come from the West. Those are the facts. Trump’s charge is more a question of political bias. If you are involved in seeing China as an enemy, even-handed behaviour on the part of others will seem as bias. The charge is more revealing of the US mindset. If you are spoiling for a geopolitical confrontation with China, then any institution that isn’t actually against China can be accused of being for China.
2. “One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.”
This charge has to be related to the International Health Regulations (2005) which are binding on all WHO member states. This states that health measures “shall not be more restrictive of international traffic and not more invasive or intrusive to persons than reasonably available alternatives.” Whether these regulations have proven dangerous and costly in this instance can be debated. The fact is that it was the US that was pivotal in getting this law in place. The upshot is that the WHO can only recommend travel restrictions in the most extreme circumstances. That may need to be changed. But would the US be in favour? Trump, let us remind ourselves, denied and downplayed the threat and did so out of concern over ‘government’ restrictions depressing ‘the economy.’ I think we are entitled to be extremely sceptical at the idea of Trump and his supporters demanding tougher restrictions, with regard to travel and other areas.
From an early stage of this crisis the WHO described such travel bans as “ineffective in most situations.” In its support it cited good evidence showing that restrictions on the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies may interrupt aid and technical support and disrupt businesses. This was widely taken to mean the WHO opposed all travel restrictions. It is also a concern of those who delayed when it came to a lockdown.
3. “The WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion”
The facts do not bear this claim out. China alerted the WHO to the outbreak on 31 December and its report was shared around the world the following day. Newspapers, briefed by the WHO, began to write on the outbreak shortly after.
On 10 January WHO warned that the virus’s “modes of transmission remain unclear” and advised anyone “travelling in or from affected areas” to avoid “close contact” with others. WHO guidance on laboratory testing issued the same day, warned that healthcare workers should use full personal protective equipment when dealing with suspected cases.
Those actions seem timely. It would be instructive to run this timeline against what Trump was saying at the same time and what the Trump administration were doing.
4. “Through the middle of January, [the WHO] parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human to human transmission happening, despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary”
The WHO issued a tweet on January 14 which stated that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” That tweet has been subject to heavy criticism. It would seem that the entire case rests upon this tweet. It is worth establishing that at a press conference on the same day, Maria Van Kerhkove, the American epidemiologist who heads the emerging diseases and zoonosis unit at the WHO, informed reporters there was “the possibility of human-to-human transmission between people" and "there's also the possibility of super-spreading events". She added: "From the information that we have, it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission."
5. “The WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts. There was credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate.”
The WHO was first alerted by the Chinese authorities to the outbreak only on 31 December 2019.
But it begs the question that if the Whitehouse was so knowledgeable in advance, why it didn’t take timely and effective action, instead of downplaying the threat. ABC News in America reported last week that the US military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) had information on the outbreak as early as November as a result of “analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images”. This intelligence was given to the Whitehouse, say ABC’s sources, but not the WHO. The White House denies the report exists. ABC News is part of the American Broadcasting Corporation.
6. “The delays the WHO experienced in declaring a public health emergency cost valuable time, tremendous amounts of time”
The WHO convened an Emergency Committee on 22 January to assess whether the outbreak constituted a public health emergency. The independent members from around the world could not reach a consensus based on the evidence available at the time. The committee reconvened on 30 January two days after the first reports of limited human-to-human transmission were reported outside China. A Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) was declared the same day.
7. “The inability of the WHO to obtain virus samples to this day has deprived the scientific community of essential data”
Chinese scientists publicly released the genetic sequence of Covid-19 on January 11 and by early February the WHO was in a position to distribute a test for Covid-19 worldwide.
The Chinese government blocked a WHO delegation from visiting Wuhan in the first few weeks of the outbreak. As a result, the director general of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, flew to Beijing on 29 January in order to negotiate entry and information sharing. Dr Tedros has been criticised for appearing to flatter the Chinese leadership during the trip. In context, it is clear this was part of the attempt to curry favour with the authorities and enable a WHO team to gain access to Wuhan. This was achieved on February 22.
The conclusions are clear to anyone who doesn’t have a dog in the political fight. The image with which this commentary is head has Donald Trump accusing WHO of precisely the thing he is guilty of, mismanaging the coronavirus crisis and attempting to cover up his complicity by deflecting blame. Here is the response to the article in Intellectual Takeout, which claims that progressives use hate as a force to unity, asking who progressives will demonize next. People, 'progressive' or otherwise, will legitimately criticize anyone who is culpable and complicit in bad decisions, practices, and policies that have a deleterious impact on their lives. It is that simple. The article opens with the tale of New York City’s Comptroller Scott Stringer, who recently suffered the loss of his mother, Arlene Stringer-Cuevas, at the age 86 due to complications from COVID-19. Labeling his pain as “incalculable,” Stringer appeared on CNN to proclaim his anger. During an interview with Anderson Cooper Stringer lashed out: “Donald Trump has blood on his hands, and he has my mom’s blood on his hands.” The author of the article writes: 'Stringer’s grief is certainly understandable. Were any of us in the same boat, we’d likely engage in finger-pointing as well. Indeed, in the current coronavirus social climate, folks are banding together, looking for someone to blame. That blame often falls on Donald Trump. But why?'
There is a perfectly simple answer to that question: Trump's denial and downplaying of the threat, his lack of preparation, and his wretched response. He and his supporters obsessed over the encroachment of 'government' on liberty and on economic activity and in the process wasted precious time. As a result, there has been and will be thousands of preventable deaths, deaths that would have been avoided by timely and firm action. It is for this reason that the criticism of Trump is fierce. And proportionate to the level of the man's culpability.
Barry Brownstein in Intellectual Takeout asks why, but engages in precisely no analysis at all of Trump's response in respect of the timetable of the coronavirus crisis. That's where you will find the reason why Trump is attracting so much angry criticism. These angry criticisms are entirely legitimate when related to the facts of the matter - and I mean the facts, not the spun fictions of the Trump team. Brownstein leaves the spinning of facts and figures into their opposite to others. In this division of labour his role is to suggest a psychological motivate behind this politics of hate. He quotes Eric Hoffer in The True Believer to shed light on how mass movements use hatred as a unifying force: "Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents." The hater, Hoffer adds, "becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. "Mass movements need also need a "devil," Hoffer explains. For some in history that devil has been Jews. In current times, that devil is often Trump. He goes on to refer to the 'growing anti-Semitism in the progressive moment.' These people take the truth and not merely invert it, they pervert it. We know fine well who the 'some' in history are who have demonized and persecuted the Jews, and it's not the 'progressives.’
I'll finish with the question as to why people like me criticize the UK and the US governments so much and not China. So I shall add this article. There are many more you can read along these lines. The moral is this: “The more honest you are, the more trust you gain.” The UK and the US still have a degree of trust and democracy, which means it is worthwhile trying to hold their governments to account, and inform the citizens. Trump is doing his best to destroy these things, hence I make these criticisms.
On Tuesday, respected Beijing gynecologist Dr. Gong Xiaoming slammed as “hardly convincing” claims by China’s Ambassador to France that official statistics were accurate. “Many people [died] who were not hospitalized in time and so were not calculated in the total data,” Gong posted to his 4.7 million followers on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo.
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And with that established, maybe the likes of Brownstein will now get round to examining Trump's denial, downplaying, and delay in his response to the coronavirus crisis. But that would be to presume that his 'but why?' question is raised in a genuine commitment to truth-seeking.