Will
this pandemic prove the decisive factor in America’s retreat from global
hegemony?
For declaring in March that the U.S. economy might be reopened
by Easter, President Donald Trump was roundly mocked.
Yet,
it appears his political instincts were correct. He was more in tune with his
country than were his critics.
By
early Easter week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the governors of six states in the New
York-New Jersey region had formed a consortium to synchronize the opening of
their economies. California’s Gavin Newsom and the governors of Washington and
Oregon had done the same.
The
governors may disagree on the timing, May 1 or May 15, but most agree with
Trump. America cannot remain shut down for months without lasting damage to the
livelihood and lives of millions of citizens who are about to be shoved into a
new Great Depression.
Twenty-two
million Americans are now unemployed.
However,
something just jolted the gathering consensus over the need to reopen soon.
Tuesday and Wednesday, the U.S. set records for the numbers of fatalities from
the virus. Tuesday it was 2,364 dead, the following day 2,371. That put the
national casualty total above 30,000.
The
U.S. did not record its first coronavirus fatality until Feb. 29. It took 38
days after that to reach 10,000. However, it took only nine days to vault from
10,000 fatalities to more than 30,000.
The
ominous implication: If this 2,300-dead-per-day figure is near the new normal,
we would surpass the 61,000 fatalities projected for the duration of the
pandemic — in two weeks!
Even
if we reduce the Tuesday-Wednesday average daily death toll by over half, to
1,000 deaths a day, that would mean 44,000 more dead for a total of 75,000 by
June 1.
What
makes COVID-19 worse than the flu?
The
coronavirus is more easily transmissible. It is more savage in how it maims
immune systems. It is more lethal, killing far more of the infected than the
regular flu, though we do not know exactly how much more lethal. For we have no
hard number of those who carry or have carried the virus asymptomatically.
Nor
we do know whether having survived COVID-19 renders one immune to a new
infection. Since the medical experts are predicting a second wave of the virus
in late summer or fall, this is no small matter.
And
seeing what happened on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the coronavirus could
have a major impact on U.S. global commitments.
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Americans
were already coming home from the Middle East, drawing down our 12,000 troops
in Afghanistan after a deal with the Taliban, and moving our 5,000 troops in
Iraq into fewer bases.
We
have disengaged from the Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen and are
drawing down our forces in Syria.
In
Libya’s civil war, it is Russians, Turks, Egyptians and Gulf Arabs, not
Americans, who are the supporting actors.
American
soft power is also in retreat from the world.
Some
10,000 Peace Corps volunteers have been brought home. Scores of thousands of U.S.
citizens have been repatriated by the State Department. We have shut the door
to Europe, China, the world.
What
now becomes of the U.S. geostrategic “pivot,” the shift of planes, troops,
ships and bases from the Middle and Near East to the Indo-Pacific theater to
contain a rising China?
And
contain China with what?
The
Roosevelt has been ravaged by the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, 589 cases of
COVID-19 were reported from a crew of 4,800. Four thousand sailors in Guam are
in various stages of a 14-day isolation period in hotels and spare rooms across
the island.
But
it is not just the Roosevelt. Every U.S. warship — carriers, cruisers,
frigates, destroyers, subs — has cramped quarters conducive to the spread of
the coronavirus.
How
many of these vessels will soon be doubling as hospital ships?
The
same question might also be asked of the U.S. Army and Marine barracks in South
Korea, Japan, Australia and Okinawa.
There
are allegations that the coronavirus did not originate in the Wuhan “wet
market” where bats are sold for food but instead escaped through a horrible
blunder in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory a few miles away.
Whatever
the truth, the Wuhan virus appears to have become the most effective means of
disabling U.S. hard and soft power that we have encountered in many a decade.
Of
those 10,000 Peace Corp volunteers, and scores of thousands of other Americans
who have been repatriated home, how many of these “soft power” soldiers will be
going back after they have been out of their host country for 18 months?
Will
this pandemic prove the decisive factor in America’s retreat from global
hegemony?
With
the U.S. budget deficit for 2020 originally set at $1 trillion, now triple
that, there is going to be a hard reckoning for the allocation of our
diminished resources after the nation reopens.
And
policing the planet is likely to be seen as yesterday’s priority, and a primary
candidate for discard.
