General Discussion

riversedge

(70,174 posts) Fri Apr 17, 2020, 11:50 AM Apr 2020

China Wins: Why Trump's WHO Funding Cut Is a Gift to Beijing

Where the US leaves a void internationally--china-or Russia steps in. damn.

Link to tweet

?s=20

China Wins: Why Trump's WHO Funding Cut Is a Gift to Beijing
https://time.com/5822078/china-wins-trumps-who-funding-cut/

By Kimberly Dozier April 15, 2020

When he accused the World Health Organization (WHO) of going soft on China over the COVID-19 pandemic and suspended U.S. payments to the agency, President Donald Trump put the strategic question of the century on the table. What’s the best way to win the global competition with Beijing: America First confrontation or multinational cooperation? The fight over the WHO shows why the right answer is a matter of life and death for hundreds of millions of people.

Trump and his allies say that the Geneva-based WHO botched the global pandemic response by praising Beijing’s handling of the crisis, parroting its denial of the COVID-19 threat, and opposing travel restrictions to and from the country. “The WHO willingly took China’s assurances to face value,” Trump said Tuesday as he announced the aid suspension at the White House. “Reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide,” he said.

Even some of the President’s critics agree that the WHO was too deferential to China at the start of the crisis. But they say undermining the agency is self-defeating. Since WWII, the U.S. and liberal democracies have fought to define the missions and standards of international bodies like the WHO. Cutting funding to the agency in the middle of a global pandemic, the critics say, just guarantees more, not less, sway by China at a time when the country is seeking to expand its influence over international bodies. “If we cede the playing field, obviously China is going to fill in that space,” says Amb. Joseph DeTrani, former CIA director of East Asia Operations. “They are doing that as we speak.”

It’s not just the WHO. The attack on the agency follows a Trump administration pattern of threatening to strip U.S. funding from some international organizations and to withdraw from others, like the U.N. Human Rights Council. That too plays to China’s broader strategy of transforming the U.N. “into a platform for its own foreign policy,” says Kristine Lee, Associate Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. The Chinese Communist Party sees COVID-19 as an “opportunity to launch itself onto the global stage” that has “catalyzed a renewed sense of ambition,” she says.

Such ambitions are relatively new. Deng Xiaoping, the successor to China’s revolutionary founder Chairman Mao Zedong, adopted an isolationist strategy, and for years China avoided international entanglements. But the current Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought expansion of influence in international bodies. China has already maneuvered Party officials into top spots in at least four of the U.N.’s 15 specialized agencies, while the United States leads only one. And China’s efforts to influence the WHO, the health arm of the U.N., are a good example of that strategy, experts on both sides of the debate say.........