As the White House works to break an impasse and achieve a COVID emergency relief package even after the election, it’s essential that we recognize that the current stalemate is untenable. Getting to a deal – even an imperfect one – is what’s in the best interests of the American public and the world. Too much is on the line – not just for reviving our economy but also for protecting our national security interests.
President Trump doesn’t get enough credit for rightfully disrupting decades of Washington’s short-sightedness about China and its impact on the global economy: forgotten Americans everywhere need us to export more and import less, and they count on clear-eyed leadership to check a rising China.
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The COVID pandemic has hit our overseas markets as much as our own. This will slow our economic comeback as the world’s great exporter. It has simultaneously handed China an opening to use humanitarian assistance as a Trojan horse all over the world to advance its avaricious agenda. To this point, less than 0.1% of Congress’ COVID-19 supplemental funds have been dedicated to the international response. We need to address that disparity: this is our moment to counter China’s opportunism, protect our interests and revive the export markets key to our economic growth.
China inflicted COVID-19 upon the world through its initial cover-up, stonewalling countries the virus would soon infect. President Xi Jinping has used the virus as an opportunity to practice what China calls “mask diplomacy” – providing humanitarian assistance from protective equipment to ventilators, as a public diplomacy coup. Yet some of the equipment sent around the world was faulty or simply didn’t work. It’s not that China really cared that the donated goods didn’t work. The Chinese communist party simply wanted the public relations coup, and they got it. TV networks around the globe reported on China’s ‘generosity,’ often ignoring the fact that the propaganda was as shoddy as the donations.
This is just the latest example of the new Chinese playbook to win influence and ultimately export its ideology. Over the past five years, China has doubled its diplomatic budget and embarked on a “One Belt One Road” initiative seven times the size of the Marshall Plan. Predatory Chinese investment has targeted developing nations in Asia and Africa, earning China’s investments in pursuit of maritime dominance the moniker of Jinping’s “String of Pearls.” They’ve spread influence through soft power, investing in media think tanks, cultural and academic sectors to create a positive image throughout our hemisphere.
In 2018 alone, China proposed increasing its foreign affairs budget by 15%. Over the last fifteen years, China’s development assistance in Africa alone increased by more than 500%. Eight years after Xi pledged to deliver on a “China Dream” to compete with the “American Dream,’ he’s reinvented big-hearted American development and public diplomacy to selfishly fit China’s ambitions. As a result, instead of being blamed for COVID, China is opportunistically using it to seize a greater foothold, even in our neighborhood with accolades from Mexico and other Latin American countries. We can’t cede this battleground to a rising China.
Moreover, it’s in our economic interests to win the global fight against COVID as quickly as possible. Our fastest growing export markets are in the parts of the world most devastated by COVID. Our agricultural exports aren’t shipping to Pacific Rim countries, from timber to corn. The reason is easy to understand: the emerging markets that covet our products are also being pummeled by the pandemic and the slowing supply chain. Exports dropped by a margin more precipitous than we’ve witnessed in eleven years. Sectors with complex value chains, such as electronics and automotive, are also suffering.
If we don’t invest now in an international response, it could get worse. In sub-Saharan Africa, 41% of the population lacks access to clean water and soap, critical for the basic sanitation necessary to stop the spread of disease. Imagine a catastrophe on a continent that holds only 2,000 ventilators across 41 countries; ten countries lack any at all. There are only 5,000 intensive care beds from Morocco to South Africa. Those statics should be a canary in the coalmine for all of us about the urgency of beating COVID “over there” before it takes millions more lives and undermines our export economy “over here.”
We live in a world facing new pandemic threats. The tools and weapons great powers are using to fight each other today are fundamentally different than those used 30 years ago. We need to see COVID-19 through clear eyes, as an existential threat to our lives and our prosperity. We also need to see China as Trump does, as a vicious competitor with big, bold geostrategic ambitions. Investing now in the international COVID response will protect our interests, to stop the COVID virus from taking down a continent and check a rising China as well.
Heather Nauert is former spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State.
