Coronavirus hasn’t diminished America’s indispensable leadership

As with Shakespeare’s imagining of Henry V’s leadership in the camp before Agincourt, America’s global leadership is often hard to see in its entirety. But that doesn’t mean it has disappeared or that it does not remain indispensable.

Those who lament American global leadership on the coronavirus have legitimate complaints. But in using that complaint to describe the end of America’s global leadership, they fail to recognize the coronavirus’s limits. The virus does not and never will solely define international affairs. And judged against the totality of international affairs, the United States remains the indispensable nation.

I note this in light of the growing sentiment that the coronavirus will write the epitaph for the U.S.-led international order. At the New York Times, Katrin Bennhold on Thursday described the end of American exceptionalism. At CNN, David Andelman offers the slightly unoriginal center-left take that Emmanuel Macron is the world’s great hope (although he is France’s great hope on economic issues). Such sentiments are perhaps best encapsulated by Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic essay, which argues that America’s handling of the coronavirus has defined China more positively in its wake.

But Applebaum was wrong in 2014 when she suggested that Xi Jinping sought coexistence with the liberal international order, and she is wrong about America now.

American global leadership does not end with President Trump’s disinfectant musings or any failure to provide greater coronavirus aid to allies. Our international leadership begins and ends with America’s ability to shape circumstances in favor of the human interest. That is the story of the post-1945 world order. And it sustains.

It is the American-led spread of free trade that has brought billions out of poverty. The rise in Chinese living standards is not a consequence of the Chinese Communist Party but rather of China’s vast exports to the world. It is also American medical innovation from new drugs, medicines, and treatments that continues to lead the world — as in the technology sector, where it is Apple, Google, and Microsoft that rule the roost.

This is not to say America is perfect. Rather, it is to say that America is the defining instrument of an economic system and most of the new developments within that system, fueling constant improvements in human well-being.

This bears noting because the coronavirus-has-ended-American-leadership movement doesn’t simply believe American leadership has ended. In equal measure, its progenitors assume that the European Union or some new democratic collective can sustain the benefits of the American order even in America’s absence. That assumption is equally fallacious. It fails to recognize that America’s order cannot exist without American-led defense on the periphery.

We have proof of that at this very moment.

It is the U.S. military that is now, nearly alone, restraining China as it tramples on the sovereign rights and future economic prospects of the Asia-Pacific rim. As the world is distracted by the coronavirus, China is moving against Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines and attempting to dominate sea lanes that account for trillions of dollars in international trade. Imagine what will happen to prices of your household goods if China gets to decide who transits those lanes? Imagine what it will do to Asia-Pacific workers if they cannot sell their goods to the global market? Imagine what it will do for democratic advancement if China is able to set the price for global trade at deference to its authoritarian hegemony?

So too in the Persian Gulf, where American service personnel are taking the lead against Iranian escalation. Some say the Trump administration’s Iran policy is misjudged. Perhaps, perhaps not. But we can be certain that no one, barring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, will benefit from the Strait of Hormuz being shut down.

In Europe, it is American fighter wings, nuclear forces, and logistics trains that confront Vladimir Putin with his most potent deterrent against continuing aggression. Similarly, it is the U.S. intelligence community and its closest ally that detect ISIS sleeper cells most often, identify coronavirus deceptions most clearly, and support our allies (and sometimes even adversaries) most ably.

This doesn’t mean our allies don’t matter or that they shouldn’t receive our gratitude.

Australia currently has a warship sailing with our own in the South China Sea. Facing immense Chinese pressure to abandon us, we should be grateful Canberra is doing the opposite. Our European and Arab allies are also supporting the guarantee of transit rights through the Strait of Hormuz — and helping to train Afghan and Iraqi security forces. So even as we must always push allies to do more, so also should we show gratitude where they bear burdens alongside us.

At the margin of global impact, however, none of this would occur without American leadership. Consider current global events.

As the BBC’s Gordon Corera reports, the EU remains deeply hesitant to challenge China on its coronavirus lying. Even on that immensely important issue of Xi Jinping’s deception, deception that has cost much life and treasure, the EU’s preference is to remain silent. Indeed, as the New York Times reported on Friday, the EU even watered down a report on Chinese disinformation.

Why?

Put simply, it’s because China is more powerful than the EU and because China already holds great economic leverage over the EU. And so we see here where the EU’s fine rhetoric on the democratic rule of law meets its limit. It’s at the great Chinese wall of countermanding influence.

Now ask how many European warships are currently contesting China’s imperialism in the South China Sea? Or contesting Russia’s submarine incursions into the Mediterranean? Do we expect that the watchtowers of the liberal international order would be manned absent America? Do we believe that foreign aid and Angela Merkel’s experience alone, as important as they are, will obstruct our adversaries’ battle groups?

Negative.

Absent America, the watchtowers would instead be manned by the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security. And that, my friends, would not be very good for global human rights, living standards, or the right of people to set their own destiny.

Fortunately, indispensable America still stands the watch.