By Henry Fowler, Stevensville
One possible positive consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is the diminishment of globalism (i.e., the erasure of national borders to ease the global movement of people and goods) and in particular, America’s reliance on China for vital necessities like pharmaceuticals.
Because American capitalists care only about profit, not about the common good of society, and because the American political class no longer puts America First, the vast majority of pharmaceuticals that keep Americans alive are manufactured in China, a hostile global rival. The Chinese regime is now capable of blackmailing the United States by threatening to cut off pharmaceuticals. The coronavirus pandemic has finally made clear the utter stupidity of off-shoring the manufacture of strategically necessary goods.
Some American politicians have recognized this stupidity and are attempting to do something about it. Missouri’s U.S. Senator Josh Hawley has introduced legislation to help secure the U.S. medical product supply chain. Others have questioned our reliance on China to produce essential parts for the supply chains of goods vital to our national security.
With this concern growing in America and probably in Europe as well, the Chinese regime is understandably worried that its quest to become the premier manufacturing center for the world is in danger. Their worry is justified.
It is clear that the coronavirus originated in China and that the Chinese regime ignored the first warnings out of Wuhan and tried to suppress that information, making the outbreak much worse than it could have been. If the Chinese regime had intervened three weeks earlier than it did, 95 percent of its spread would have been arrested.
This is not “scapegoating.” To scapegoat is to blame an innocent party. There is nothing innocent about the regime of the Chinese Communist Party, and what it has done.
To deflect blame from itself, the Chinese regime has been running a global propaganda campaign to blame the United States for the coronavirus. The New York Times has a great short documentary detailing how they’ve done it. For this video and more information, see Rod Dreher’s blog “Trump is Right: It’s China’s Fault.”
Well before the new coronavirus spread across America, the Chinese regime was trolling U.S. publications, expelling American journalists, and “weaponizing wokeness” over anything it perceived as critical of the Chinese regime’s role in mishandling the pandemic. To hear Chinese spokespeople use the language of racism and prejudice is absurd, considering this is a regime that has put more than 1 million Muslims and ethnic minorities in “reeducation” camps.
The Left in America has followed the Chinese lead and created a moral panic about the dangers of “racism” and “xenophobia.” Leftists are more concerned with protecting the Chinese from racism than with protecting their own neighbors from a deadly plague.
We can’t let the Left prevent the reconsideration of globalism and the necessary return of American manufacturing, with a special focus on on-shoring critical supply chains that have been moved to China.
We should reverse our historic mistake when we outsourced our economic independence to rely for vital necessities upon countries like China that have never had America’s best interests at heart.