World looks
on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way
The
president’s outlandish behavior as Americans suffer has inspired horror and
confusion while alienating allies
Julian
Borger in Washington, Helen Davidson in Sydney, Leyland Cecco in Toronto,
Daniel Boffey in Brussels Philip Oltermann in Berlin, Angela Giuffrida in Rome,
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro and Emmanuel Akinwotu in London
Fri 15 May
2020 09.00 BSTLast modified on Fri 15 May 2020 15.07 BST
The Trump
administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with
its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction
the world wants to follow.
Across
Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the
coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through
derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing
room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the
attention of the planet.
“Over more
than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings
in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt,
awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But
there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now:
pity.”
The US has
emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the
Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership
have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a
round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world
leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of
them” believe the US is leading the way.
None of the
leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each
milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack
of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on
12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in
Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money”
to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the
US.
The
president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization
last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell,
a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason
justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever
to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”
A poll in
France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader.
Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only
Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.
A survey
this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the
US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since
January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.
Dacian
Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group
in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the
latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.
“Post-truth
communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not
work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost
lives.”
Around the
globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has
alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt
shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the
breaking point.
The Ontario
premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on
several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve”
during a crisis.
“When the
cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s
been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”
In
countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of
wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.
Trump’s
press briefings have captured the world’s attention.
Milavić
said: “The vice-president is wearing a mask, while the president doesn’t; some
staffers wear them, some don’t. Everybody acts as they please. As time passes,
White House begins to look more and more like the Balkans.”
After
Trump’s disinfectant comments, Beppe Severgnini, a columnist for Italy’s
Corriere della Sera, said in a TV interview: “Trying to get into Donald Trump’s
head is more difficult than finding a vaccine for coronavirus. First he decided
on a lockdown and then he encouraged protests against the lockdown that he
promoted. It’s like a Mel Brooks film.”
In several
countries, the local health authorities have felt obliged to put out statements
to counter “health advice” coming from the White House, concerning the
ingestion of disinfectant and taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug
found to be ineffective against Covid-19 and potentially lethal.
The Nigerian
government put out a warning that there is no “hard evidence that chloroquine
is effective in prevention or management of coronavirus infection” after three
people were hospitalised from overdosing on the drug in Lagos. It was not
enough to prevent a fivefold increase in the price of the drug, which is also
used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Trump’s
decision not to take part in a global effort to find a vaccine, and his abrupt
severance of financial support to the WHO at the height of the pandemic, added
outrage and prompted complaints that the US was surrendering its role of global
leadership.
“If there
is any world leader who can be accused of handling the current crisis badly, it
is Donald Trump, whose initial disdain for Covid-19 may have cost thousands of
Americans their lives,” an editorial in the conservative Estado de São Paulo
newspaper said last month.
The
newspaper said Trump had only decided to take Covid seriously after finding
himself “cornered by the facts” – and expressed shock at his decision to halt
WHO funding.
“Even by
the standards of his behaviour, the level of impudence is astonishing for the
holder of an office that, until just a few years ago, was a considered
reference in leadership for the democratic world,” it said.
Nowhere in
the world is the US response to the pandemic more routinely castigated than in
China. It is hardly surprising. Trump has consistently pointed to Chinese
culpability in failing to contain the outbreak in its early stages, and the
pandemic has become the central battleground for global leadership between the
established superpower and the emerging challenger.
There is a
palpable sense of relief among Chinese state commentators that the US
president’s antics have diverted some of the anger that would otherwise have
been aimed at Beijing.
“Only by
making Americans hate China can they make sure that the public might overlook
the fact that Trump’s team is stained with the blood of Americans,” said an
English-language Global Times editorial late last month.
Its editor,
Hu Xijin, tweeted: “US system used to be appealing to many Chinese people. But
through the pandemic, Chinese saw US government’s incompetence in outbreak
control, disregard for life and its overt lies. Washington’s political halo has
little left.”
China’s
failure to cooperate fully with the WHO and its heavy-handed diplomacy has won
Beijing few friends, despite its dispatch of medical assistance around the
world. But the German news weekly Der Spiegel argued that Trump had
single-handedly managed to spare Beijing the worst of the global consequences
for its failings.
“For a
while, it looked like the outbreak of the coronavirus would throw China back by
light years,” the magazine argued in an editorial. “But now it is US president
Donald Trump who has to spend day after day in a stuffy White House press room
explaining to the world why his country can’t get a grip on the pandemic.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário