What to call the pandemic sweeping across the world has become the subject of peculiar political, press, and pundit focus. At press briefings this week, President Trump has doubled down on calling the virus at the heart of the pandemic “the Chinese virus.” Richard Engel at NBC News labeled this racist. “This is a virus that came from the territory of China but came from bats. This is a bat virus, not a China virus. It doesn’t speak Chinese,” he lectured.
Freelance writer Jeryl Bier has collected a series of screenshots of media outlets, the Atlantic and the New York Times, for example, condemning as racist the moniker Chinese virus or Wuhan virus after Trump used the phrase, despite having used the same phrasing previously. Likewise, Vox headlined an article “Trump’s new fixation on using a racist name for the coronavirus is dangerous” despite having called the new sickness “the Wuhan coronavirus” themselves multiple times. The World Health Organization has also engaged in its own naming debate, finally settling on COVID-19, as well as its fair share of political hypocrisy.
Pointing out hypocrisy is a Washington sport, but in this case, the very debate in which the media, politicians, and United Nations bureaucrats now engage is wrong-headed and counterproductive.
Simply put, when Washington and New York focus on naming debates, it is usually a sign of policy confusion, frustration, and hopelessness. Rather than advance a solution, it feeds an illusion of substantive action but achieves little.
Nor is the name chosen by policy or media elites seldom the one that sticks.
Consider President Barack Obama’s fixation with ISIL for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant rather than ISIS, for the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham. Obama feared that ISIS might be misconstrued as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and push the United States further toward direct conflict with Syria. He also warned against acknowledging the “Islamic” portion of the Islamic State, hence his embrace of the acronym. However, omitting mention of Islamic meant little to those living under the group’s flag or battling against it. Nor did the choice of acronym matter as, in reality, most everyone in the region called the group by its Arabic acronym, Daesh. However, even then, Lt. Gen. James Terry, then commander of U.S. Army Central, appeared ridiculous to most everyone in the Middle East when he urged people not to use ISIL or ISIS, but instead to choose Daesh, so as not to associate the group’s abuses with Islam.
The problem runs deeper. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s first secretary of Homeland Security, sought to re-cast terrorism as “man-caused disasters.” “I referred to ‘man-caused’ disasters,” she explained. “It demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.” The BBC took a similar attitude, refusing even to label those who slaughtered journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as terrorists. The head of BBC Arabic explained, “Terrorism is such a loaded word” and too “value-laden.”
Of course, neither Napolitano’s change of phrase or the BBC’s denial changed the fact that terrorism remained a problem. If anything, the politically correct patina simply gave cover not to address the problem.
The same naming distraction also infected the Bush administration when the Pentagon wasted hundreds of man hours against the backdrop of escalating insurgency in Iraq debating whether the terrorists were “Anti-Iraqi Forces,” jihadists, terrorists, or insurgents. Debates were heated: To use the term jihadist, some in the policy community argued, was to imbue the terrorists with religious legitimacy, as if any potential terrorist looked at Washington bureaucrats to determine what was or was not Islamically permissible. Some scholars even suggested in a New York Times op-ed that to call terrorists Jihadists was to endorse their mission just as much as “if Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken to calling Adolf Hitler the ‘leader of the National Socialist Aryan patriots’ or dubbed Japanese soldiers fighting in World War II as the ‘defenders of Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.’”
The list goes on. During the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that “rogue regimes” be recast as “states of concern.” Rather than change behavior in Tehran or Pyongyang, however, Albright’s phrasing change simply distracted from the broad goal of changing the behavior of both.
Back to the Chinese virus, Wuhan disease, COVID-19, novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Save the debates over racism or deeper meanings of each word choice for the college seminar room, if they ever reopen. Debates over phrasing usually serve as distractions and diversions away from far more serious and substantive debates. In Iraq, for example, it did not matter what the terrorists were called; what mattered was their defeat. Ditto with the Islamic State. Name games with Iran and North Korea won’t solve the nuclear program of either.
Stupid gotcha stunts or judgmental riffs on the part of the press do more to delegitimize it or allow the administration to avoid answering tough questions on the pandemic than to address the most important decisions that must now be made which are, quite literally, matters of life and death.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
