The fight against the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted society and the economy more than anything in generations. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration completely lifted its shutdown of U.S. airspace after a week. The damage to the airline industry will be far more severe as the pandemic and shelter-in-place regulations mean there are few passengers to fly, even if airspace technically remains open.
Speaking to the German public, Chancellor Angela Merkel likened the coronavirus challenge to the disruption of World War II. “Since German unification, no, since the Second World War, there has been no challenge to our nation that has demanded such a degree of common and united action,” she said. The New York Times published an opinion essay by University of Washington Professor Margaret O’Mara titled, “America Is at War, and There’s Only One Enemy,” which discussed the ways in which President Trump’s invocation of the Defense Production Act had World War II parallels (even as she pointed out differences). George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen told Reason that “I think there’s a good chance … that this becomes like this generation’s World War II.” In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the same comparison: “We have to treat it like a war here in New York,” he said. “In this war ventilators are what the missiles were in World War II.”
If the coronavirus is like World War II, then perhaps it is time to talk about reparations. Simply put, whether the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was natural or due to sloppy procedures at a nearby high-security Chinese laboratory that may have been investigating the virus. What is certain is that the highest levels of the Chinese government, up to and including Xi Jinping, lied to the world and undertook a cover-up that allowed the virus to spread out-of-control. Indeed, it was brave whistleblowers who informed the world about what communist authorities sought to cover up. Some have since succumbed to the virus, but Chinese authorities continue to disappear others.
If Beijing was serious, it would not put Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian in front of a podium. If the coronavirus pandemic is like World War II, then Zhao is Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s minister of propaganda. For Zhao to suggest the United States was responsible shows, whatever the virus’s origins, that the Chinese government seeks to weaponize and derive advantage from the crisis. In short, had it not been for Xi’s venality and incompetence, Zhao’s dishonesty, and the complicity of thousands of other senior Chinese Communist Party leaders, the world would not be in recessions and millions who will die from the Wuhan coronavirus would have escaped that fate.
It is all well and good to speak about accountability, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been on point in placing blame where blame is due. Rhetorical admonishment and perhaps feigned contrition on the part of Chinese leaders will not be enough. Nor should the world excuse China’s paltry attempts to change the narrative by providing a planeload of aid to Italy or Iran. To applaud China for this would be equivalent to celebrating an arsonist who set a forest ablaze and then called the press to see him throw a bucket of water at the flames.
Rather, it is time for the international community to talk about reparations. At a minimum, the Chinese government should now, and for decades to come, pay the World Health Organization’s multibillion-dollar budget ($4.4 billion for 2018-2019). Such funding should not translate into set-asides for WHO appointments of Chinese officials, especially because they have shown themselves repeatedly incapable of defending public health when it most matters. China should also pay annual reparations, much as Germany did for Israel and Japan did for a host of Asian countries, to a host of governments to acknowledge their responsibility for transforming a local outbreak into a pandemic.
If the coronavirus is a global crisis on par with World War II, it is time to recognize the enemy is not only the virus, and that identifying culpability is important not only to push back on China’s farcical narrative but also to ensure that authorities in Beijing pay the price for direct decisions which have brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.
