The Deadliest Year In the History of U.S. Drug Use: além da pandemia, os americanos continuam a ter anti-racionais e usuários de drogas

THE OTHER EPIDEMIC 

The New York Magazine, Intelligencer, December 23, 2020

The Deadliest Year In the History of U.S. Drug Use

By Zachary Siegel 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/cdc-drug-overdose-deaths-in-2020-on-track-to-break-record.html 

While over 300,000 Americans and counting have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, another public-health disaster is taking more lives than ever before: drug overdoses.

Overdose deaths in 2019 were significantly higher than 2018, jumping from 67,367 deaths in 2018 to 70,630 overdose deaths in 2019, marking a nearly 5 percent increase, according to a new report issued Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If that’s not grim enough, a separate health alert published by the CDC this week reports a “concerning acceleration” in overdose deaths for 2020, which provisional data show is on track to be the deadliest year for U.S. drug overdose deaths in recorded history. Complete data for 2020 is not expected to be available until some time next year.

The CDC estimates that 81,230 drug overdose deaths occurred from June 2019 to May 2020. The largest overdose spike happened from March to May of this year, which coincides with the beginning of the pandemic when the economy collapsed, lockdowns were imposed and “social distancing” became a new way of life. In addition to unemployment and financial precarity driving up despair, public-health experts have also suggested that isolation during the pandemic has led more people to use drugs alone with no one around to revive them or call 911 if they overdose.

“I’m horrified by the increases across the board,” Dr. Kim Sue, a physician-anthropologist who studies addiction at Yale University’s School of Medicine, told Intelligencer. “Even before the pandemic, the U.S. was going in the wrong direction.”

Illicit fentanyl, an Über-potent opioid manufactured around the world in clandestine labs and used to adulterate heroin, is largely responsible for the soaring death rate, according to the CDC. While illicit fentanyl used to be concentrated in New England, it has rapidly spread across the Midwest and in recent years has made its way to the West Coast. In San Francisco, more people have died this year from overdoses than from COVID-19. In 2019, the city saw 441 overdose deaths compared to 621 so far this year, a 40 percent jump. Across the country, deaths are also steeply rising from stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, the CDC found, and many deaths involve a combination of different kinds of drugs, not just opioids.

America’s overdose crisis is proving to be a dynamic and ever-changing phenomenon that experts say has played out in three waves. The first wave began in the early 2000s and mainly comprised deaths from opioid pain relievers like oxycodone. After a crackdown on prescription pills, people flocked to a ballooning heroin market as pills became scarce and expensive. The third and much more deadly wave that sent the overdose rate soaring was driven primarily by powerful illicit fentanyl analogues that began to be used in heroin.

Now the U.S. may be entering a fourth wave, or something more like a tsunami. Illicit fentanyl and stimulants such as meth and cocaine now account for the bulk of overdose deaths. From 2012 through 2019, the rate of overdose deaths involving cocaine increased more than three-fold, and stimulants like methamphetamine increased more than six-fold, according to the CDC. Trends in stimulant overdoses are also on track to worsen during 2020. Deaths involving cocaine increased by 26.5 percent from June 2019 to May 2020, while deaths involving stimulants such as meth increased by 34.8 percent during the same period.

President Trump took credit in 2018 for a meager decline in overdose deaths, but they have skyrocketed even as the federal government made $3.4 billion available to states to fund addiction-treatment services and purchase the opioid-overdose-reversal drug, naloxone. A new report by the Government Accountability Office shows why that funding has made little impact: Over $1 billion in federal grant money meant for the opioid crisis has yet to be spent by states. Addiction experts cite burdensome bureaucracy, needless paperwork, and poor use of existing treatment infrastructure as reasons why so much federal money that was earmarked for the overdose crisis remains unused. “Bureaucracy is literally killing people,” Robert Ashford, an addiction researcher who studies recovery, tweeted. The latest pandemic-relief package contains another sizable investment in mental-health and addiction services. Experts also lament that federal grant money specifically intended for the treatment of opioid-use disorders wasn’t available to people who needed treatment for other substance-use disorders — such as stimulant and alcohol addiction.

Yale’s Sue and many of her colleagues believe that America’s “drug war” approach is outdated and that it has caused more harm than it aims to prevent. Focusing on suing Big Pharma, ramping up trafficking busts, and sending people suffering from addiction to drug courts are “myopic” and “misguided” approaches, Sue said. “We have to innovate and pivot quickly, enacting evidence-based harm-reduction strategies to keep people alive,” she added.

There’s a long list of policies and interventions Sue hopes to see in the near future. “I am heartened to see in the CDC report that drug checking, mobile buprenorphine or telemedicine, wrap-around post-overdose care, and diversion from jail or prison, are critical components of a novel and engaged response,” Sue said, adding she’d also like to see supervised consumption sites and much greater access to effective medications that treat addiction.

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has yet to select a director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), a.k.a. the “drug czar,” but whoever takes the job surely faces an uphill climb in their effort to prevent the crisis from getting even worse. If Biden keeps up the trend of hiring from the Obama administration and the Washington drug policy blob, America’s approach to addiction is unlikely to dramatically change anytime soon.

“Why must U.S. drug policy be led by people who continue doing the same thing, putting a square peg in a round hole and expecting improvement?” Sue said.

Chinese Security Engagement in Latin America - R. Evan Ellis (CSIS)

 Meu "colega" do Department of State continua sua ofensiva do final do governo Trump contra a China na América Latina, provavelmente no mesmo estilo paranoico do documento que ele me mandou anteriormente e que divulguei ontem: "The Elements of the China Challenge", e que agora trata de um "perigo" iminente:  

Chinese Security Engagement in Latin America

(CSIS, November 19, 2020)

Dear Colleague:

Although you just heard from me yesterday, I am writing now to share with you a new report that I authored, on Chinese military activities in Latin America, published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
This work looks at the range of strategic benefits to the PRC of that expanding security engagement in the hemisphere, from supporting near-term PRC goals of supporting its global commercial engagement, to utility in a possible (if undesired by all) future war.  The work further examines patterns across the region in that engagement, including arms sales, training and military education, exercises and other activities in the region.

The report is available here as a PDF document, and also at the website of  CSIS, which published it (please copy the whole link if it becomes split between lines):
https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinese-security-engagement-latin-america 

Thank you, as always, for the opportunity to continue in contact through this medium.

Respectfully, 
Evan Ellis
Dr. R. Evan Ellis
Research Professor of Latin American Studies 

U.S. Army War College Strategic
Studies Institute
47 Ashburn Drive
Carlisle, PA 17013
Tel: (717) 245-4085
Cell: (703) 328-7770
Twitter: #REvanEllis

Copiar o documento neste link: 

https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/201119_Chinese_Security_Engagement.pdf

How Trade Policy Failed US Workers, And How to Fix it - Global Development Policy Center

 

How Trade Policy Failed US Workers – And How to Fix it

Tuesday, September 15th, 2020

A new report from the Global Development Policy Center in collaboration with the Groundwork Collaborative and the Institute for Policy Studies examines U.S. trade policy and performance in the Trump and COVID-19 era.

The report examines U.S. trade policy prior to the pandemic and reveals an approach heavily focused toward the interest of the financial sector and large national corporations. Secondly, the authors review current U.S. trade agreements – including the new US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) Agreement and the Trump administration’s current trade war with China – examining their impact on U.S. workers and the hard-hit states Ohio and Michigan. 

Key Findings:

• Recovery in Michigan’s manufacturing sector slowed under Trump to one percent each year on average, down from 4.4 percent under Obama.
• Total employment growth in Michigan during the three full years of Trump’s presidency was by far the lowest in a decade.
• The trade deficit has soared since Trump took office from Obama, rivaling the George W. Bush administration trade deficits.
• Ohio manufacturing wages declined during the Bush administration, recovered slightly under Obama, and declined again under Trump.
• Trump’s trade wars undoubtedly contributed to the sharp slowdown in the Ohio’s employment growth observed in 2019.
• U.S. and global trade policy has enabled extensive offshoring in the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries and severely diminished production in the U.S.
  
• By a nearly 9 to 1 margin, Ohio manufacturers reported being negatively impacted by Trump’s trade tariffs in 2019.
  
• Despite Trump’s China-bashing, U.S. firms invested $14 billion in China in 2019 — more than the year Trump was elected. 
• Trump’s own administration expects the economic impact of the USMCA to be negative.

Download the Michigan Factsheet Download the Ohio Factsheet

Workers in hard-hit U.S. states have been devastated not only by years of pro-corporate trade policies, but also by policies that scapegoat China and other countries instead of providing real security to workers. 

A more cooperative international approach based on guaranteeing rights for workers in all countries could remove incentives for employers to shift jobs to places where workers are less protected. And it could create larger domestic markets to sell goods and services in more countries, leading to more shared prosperity.

The authors note that, “In this time of crisis, we need a new trade policy more than ever to support an economic recovery from the pandemic and to start building an equitable economy that is resilient to future crises. A new policy must shift bargaining power away from corporations and towards working people to create an economy that works for everyone, not just special interests.”

Key priorities for reform: 

• An immediate moratorium on all international trade and investment rules that restrict government responses to the crisis. These include intellectual property rules that limit the availability and affordability of medicines and medical equipment, as well as trade rules against policies that subsidize industries or regulations that promote public health.
• Renegotiation of all trade rules that constrain pro-worker and pro-environment domestic policy agendas. Recovery from the pandemic will require significant support from the government for job creation and health and social services. Many current trade rules forbid policies like these. These need to be suspended and then renegotiated. 
• Strong new enforcement mechanisms to hold individual corporations accountable for violations of labor, human, and environmental rights. U.S. trade agreements put the responsibility for protecting these rights and standards on governments. However, it is usually private firms that commit the violations and they, too, must face real penalties. 
• Elimination of monopoly protections for essential medicines and new rules that encourage innovation and cooperation in the pharmaceutical and medical product industries. 
• Incentives for goods and services that prevent, mitigate, and help adapt to climate change. Trade rules should complement domestic agendas for a just transition to a clean energy economy that does not leave workers behind. 
• Elimination of investor-state dispute settlement. This anti-democratic system allows private foreign corporations and investors to sue governments over public interest laws and regulations. It also encourages the offshoring of U.S. jobs by restricting the ability of foreign governments to improve labor and environmental regulations.
• A new mechanism for screening foreign investments to ensure they contribute to real security. This would go beyond “national security.” We also need to ensure foreign investors make concrete commitments to providing decent jobs and benefits for local workers and communities, particularly vulnerable groups, in an environmentally sustainable manner. 
• Elimination of trade and investment rules that prevent policymakers from controlling footloose capital. Without a full toolbox of financial tools, governments are limited in their ability to prevent crises like the 2008 crash and the economic impact of the current pandemic from spreading. 
• Renegotiation of trade deals to include effective penalties for tax dodging by multinational corporations and the wealthy. The U.S. government should work with global partners to forge an international agreement to stop the global race to the bottom in corporate taxes and allow countries to raise the revenue needed for recovery and to finance inclusive societies for the future. 
• Overhaul of the current anti-democratic trade policy-making process. Corporate lobbyists have called the shots on trade policy for too long. A new trade policy must expand the power of workers and other public interest stakeholders over decision-making and oversight. 

The report was produced by Sandra Polaski, Senior Research Scholar at the GDP Center, Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, John Cavanagh, Director of the Institute for Policy Studies, Kevin Gallagher, Director of the GDP Center, Manuel Pérez-Rocha, Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and Rebecca Ray, Senior Researcher at the GDP Center.

Download the Full Report

http://www.bu.edu/gdp/files/2020/09/How-Trade-Policy-Failed-US-Workers-and-How-to-Fix-it-FIN.pdf

U.S. image ‘plummets’ in leading democracies - Democracy Digest

 

U.S. image ‘plummets’ in leading democracies

Dalibor Roháč

Democracy Digest, September 2020

Opinion of the United States keeps falling in 13 advanced democracies, including staunch American allies, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, The Post reports.

“In several countries, the share of the public with a favorable view of the U.S. is as low as it has been at any point since the Center began polling on this topic nearly two decades ago,” Pew noted. Those surveyed, on the whole, placed less confidence in the U.S. doing “the right thing regarding global affairs” than authoritarian leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Eighty-five percent of people in other wealthy democracies believe the United States handled the coronavirus pandemic poorly.

“In at least seven nations, including key allies like Britain and Japan, approval ratings for the United States plunged to record lows,” The Post’s Adam Taylor observed. “In Germany, just 26 percent of the respondents held a positive view of the United States — the lowest rating since 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.”

The U.S. failure to address the Covid pandemic is a major factor in the decline in the country’s global standing.

“Despite the trillions of dollars the United States has spent on national security in the past two decades, it was not prepared to combat this wholly predictable threat,” wrote Rozlyn Engel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Its emergency response was challenged by a heavy reliance on foreign medical equipment and highly interdependent supply chains,” she observed in a recent study. The pandemic may now leave American middle-class households more disillusioned with globalization and less willing to pick up the costs of military and diplomatic engagements, obligations to international organizations, and new trade and investment deals.”

The US handling of Covid-19 does not make it a ‘failed state’ or a complete outlier, says analyst 

The number of per capita deaths in the US is lower than in the UK and on a par with Sweden’s – hardly a success story in the current pandemic but arguably a country at more-than-decent levels of economic development and governance. The US case fatality ratio (a somewhat tricky metric when the true number of cases is unknown) is close to global average, just below Germany’s. Death rates recorded in Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are worse than in the US.

The picture is by no means a flattering one. But in no other country has the pandemic been portrayed to the same extent as a fatal indictment of its social contract and system of government as in the US, he writes for The Critic.  

A survey of U.S. voters published this week by the Eurasia Group Foundation found majorities favored restoring international pacts like the Paris climate accords. More than twice as many  — 56 percent compared to 23 percent — sought to increase engagement with the world compared to those who wanted less.

US decline and resilience - a book by Bruno Maçães reviewed by Dominic Green

BOOKSHELF | By Dominic Green
The American Century to Come
History Has Begun
By Bruno Maçães
(Oxford, 227 pages, $29.95)

The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2020

The astute reader will have noticed that there is no shortage of books on America’s political and cultural decline. Bruno Maçães, who is in no doubt of America’s decline, sees the potential for its resurgence. The key to the future is American relativism. “We are unlearning old truths, a prelude to learning new ones,” he observes in “History Has Begun.” The book, though flawed by expansive predictions and occasional historical inaccuracies, is a fascinating survey of the decline and possible rise of the American empire. We may still believe in the liberal values that have guided Western politics since 1945, but they are now, Mr. Maçães argues, “true in a different way.”
The “automatic expansion” of liberal values no longer seems inevitable. If China sustains an alternative model for “developing and controlling the key technologies of the future,” the United States will find itself peripheral to a
Eurasian world order. Mr. Maçães’s recent book “The Dawn of Eurasia” advised
Europeans to stop worrying and learn to love the Belt and Road Initiative. Here, too, he
counsels the embrace of fate and radical relativism in the “game of civilization”—this
time as a means of securing American society and sustain- ing America’s global power.
“What if American history is only just beginning?” Mr. Maçães asks. He sees our
current troubles in Joseph Schumpeter’s terms: The
destruction of liberal values is also the “natural and spontaneous” creation of a new “post-
modern and postliberal” order. The book attempts to trace the emergence of a truly American “way of looking at the world” and to “decipher the logic of this new civilization.”
American society, Mr. Maçães reminds us, was founded on a “flight from reality.” The reality was the hereditary habits and laws of Europe. Alexander Hamilton called for “one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.” Nonetheless Hegel reckoned America was only “an echo of the Old World,” and Tocqueville could only conceive of America as “the end point of European culture and politics.”
The poets broke free before the politicians. Notwith- standing the continued existence of slavery in North America, Emerson and Whitman conceived of a “new man,” the practical proto-Pragmatist. “Reality,” writes Mr. Maçães, was for them “essentially a theatre for heroism. Call it the Hollywood theory of truth.” The truth of course is that Emerson would not have been able to conceive of his new American soul had he not read the Englishman William Blake’s vatic ecstasies or the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle’s prophecies on the forthcoming heroic European soul.
The “Americanization” of Europe, a form of reverse imperialism by mass-production and modern efficiency, was underway by the 1890s. But Americans, the first post- colonial people, were unwilling to recognize the extent of their power or its possible applications.
Roosevelt and Truman did better, though the Truman Doctrine of defending democracy anywhere was a recipe for “planetary conflagration.” After 1945, America was a global power in the European mode, able to “pursue its own instincts in complete freedom.” This, Mr. Maçães believes, led to disastrous attempts to export the deep “fantasy” of American liberalism to such unreceptive locations as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
A European politico argues that American policy making—for good and ill—was always about creating new and better fantasies.
Part of the problem was the consensual replacement of America’s “liberal society” by an “unreal world.” Mr. Maçães traces this not to imperial arrogance but to technologically enhanced decadence. Television, and now the internet, align Freud’s pleasure principle—seeking pleasure to avoid pain— with “the principle of unreality: everyone can pursue his or her own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real—as something valid for all.”
Mr. Maçães writes perceptively on how the democratic right to a vivid fantasy life slowly annexed first domestic politics and then, fatally, foreign policy. There is no American reality, only the “fictional structures” pioneered by “Holly- wood, Disneyland and Vegas” and now applied to media events with names like “Russia collusion” or “impeachment.” The winners are the strongest performers: Donald Trump, whose “Art of the Deal” counsels “truthful hyperbole, an innocent form of exaggeration,” or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose Green New Deal is a quest “set in a kind of dreamland” and who admits, “We have to become master storytellers.”
The lesson of Vietnam was not to avoid overreach or idealism, but to find a better story: to avoid wars whose narratives might run out of control, and choose ones in which the “heroic act” could be accomplished with minimal risk. This “dream of total control” was the strategic equivalent of a cable television package. It drove the canny actor Ronald Reagan to limit his foreign campaigns to invading Grenada, and it encouraged politicians and strategists to ignore any fact of local context that might complicate the heroic script.
The American fantasy is energy-independent, so it can run and run. Mr. Maçães, a Harvard-trained political scientist who served as a Portuguese representative to the EU, suggests ways in which the United States can secure its interests as a peripheral power against the emerging Eurasian order. As Britain once “balanced” Europe to prevent the emergence of a hegemon, the United States can broaden its narrative techniques from those of the epic to those of the multivoiced novel. Can it play the “great balancer” of Eurasia—Europe, Russia, India—and prevent China from sweeping the board?
Mr. Maçães’s later chapters identify the path to the new America with embracing Silicon Valley and the application of military surveillance technologies to civilian life, including a drift toward a “hybrid Eurasian culture” that adopts Chinese innovations in surveillance and artificial intelligence. The word “democracy” does not appear in these chapters, though “empire” does. This is the emerging truth of the “new, indigenous American society.” To comprehend that emerging reality, it is necessary to read this book, flaws and all.
Mr. Green is Life & Arts editor of the Spectator (US).

The 21st Century Cold War (Trump-USA vs China) - Alexei Bayer (The Globalist)

A China não é a URSS, com o que esse jornalista concorda. Mas ele esquece de mencionar que os EUA entram nessa "guerra" numa defensiva, o que é a pior postura que pode ter um país.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The 21st Century Cold War

Talk of a new Cold War is becoming ever more pervasive. In its 21st century rendition, it is China, not Russia, that is in the U.S.’s crosshairs.

By Alexei Bayer 

The Globalist, July 15, 2020

Talk of a new Cold War is becoming ever more pervasive. However, in its 21st century rendition, it is China, not Russia, that is in the U.S.’s — not just the Trump Administration’s — crosshairs.

Godless people

As it is turns out, China, still ruled by the same old communist party as at the time of Chairman Mao, is a perfect candidate for a new Cold War.

After all, it fits the template of the old conflict between democracy and godless communism.

China: As if the Soviet vision had actually worked

True enough, today’s China is quite different from the erstwhile Soviet Union. On the economic front, it is communist in name only (“CINO”).

In fact, Marx, Lenin and Mao must be busily spinning in their graves. At the time of Mao’s death less half century ago, pretty much everyone in China still wore identical Mao jackets and hats.

Plus, people aspired to no bigger worldly possessions than a bicycle. Now, the country has nearly 400 billionaires. That puts it second only to that citadel of imperialism, the United States.

Another leader for life

But don’t worry. In many other ways, China’s Xi Jinping proves himself a worthy heir to the communist leaders of the past. Like almost all Communists of yesteryear, Xi is planning to rule his country for life.

Under his leadership, the Chinese government is also becoming a “masterful” (i.e., unflinching) repressor of dissent at home and seeks to put an end to freedoms in Hong Kong.

China’s CCP government censors the internet the same way the Soviets used to jam Western radio broadcasts. It is needlessly secretive, leading most recently to widespread condemnation of its handling of the COVID 19 outbreak.

It ain’t the good old U.S. anymore, either

Of course, the United States is now a very different country, too. During the early post-World War II decades, it could very effectively counter Soviet claims of building a workers’ paradise.

The United States actually had what the Soviet Union always only claimed — strong wages, stable jobs and comfortable lifestyles of its unionized blue-collar workforce.

These days, American unions are in shambles and Americans without a college degree, like true proletarians in the Marxist sense, struggle to make ends meet with no benefits or job security.

Soviet-style leadership at the White House

In the old days, the United States could brag about its fourth estate — the highly respected and even feared free press, reporting the truth and “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” in contrast to communist propaganda hacks.

At least for another five months, the United States has a president who attacks the country’s largest news organizations as purveyors of fake news. And he knows no limits in channeling his inner Uncle Joe Stalin by calling journalists “enemies of the people.”

Of course, sending out the U.S. military on peaceful American protesters — on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre no less — surely didn’t make for good propaganda material either.

Painful role reversal

But this is only half the problem. The truth is that the roles of the Cold Warrior sides have been reversed. During Cold War I, the Soviet Union was always a sullen bully with a giant chip on its shoulder, claiming to be the victim of capitalist machinations.

Washington, on the other hand, played the adult to Moscow’s teenager. It often yielded to Russia’s unreasonable demands — because the United States was so strong that it could afford to be magnanimous.

The Soviets always threatened aplenty, almost always without following through and thus appeared weak. Meanwhile, the U.S. side worked to engage them and to find the common ground.

Who is the mature power now?

In today’s rendition of the Cold War, with Donald Trump in the White House, it is stunningly often Beijing that is playing the adult to America’s whining, bad-tempered and very short-sighted teenager.

Donald Trump is always ready to complain how China, the bad guy, takes advantage of poor and weak America, whether on trade, technology or now the coronavirus.

China, meanwhile, is working to diffuse tensions. Most recently, when Donald Trump threatened to exclude Chinese airlines from flying to the United States, Chinese officials simply lifted pandemic-related restrictions on foreign flights to China, depriving the Trump Administration of a chance to escalate the conflict.

Trump, the “shoe banger”

During the Cold War, it was the then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who, when angered by something during his speech at the United Nations, took off his shoes and started banging it on the desk.

Today, it is Trump, not Xi, who’s more likely to engage in such a stunt.

Conclusion

The first Cold War was won by the stronger, adult player — meaning at the time the United States.

Whatever we may think of China and the distasteful ways in which it oppresses its own people, we must recognize that, at least for now, it is China that acts like the adult in the room.

That is not a good omen as to the outcome of the second Cold War.

More on this topic

• How Trump Is Tied to China, Literally
• US-China Trade: It’s Politics, Stupid!
• Rare Earths: China’s Strongest Card
• 
  

G7: liderança americana ficou no passado - Foreign Policy

ANALYSIS

U.S. Allies Look on in Dismay While U.S. Rivals Rejoice

Trump’s failure to convene a G-7 meeting is only the latest blow to America’s crumbling prestige in the face of nationwide unrest.

BY KEITH JOHNSON

 | Foreign Policy, JUNE 4, 2020, 2:43 PM

Police officers push back protesters decrying police brutality near the White House on June 1. JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week declined an invitation to join U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington for a star-crossed meeting of the G-7, and then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson rebuffed Trump’s plans to bring Russia back into the group, it underscored how profoundly U.S. allies and partners have soured on American leadership amid a mishandled pandemic and a violent crackdown on protesters.

Merkel’s rebuff, like similar chidings from other German and European officials aghast at the scenes of White House-encouraged violence they’ve watched over the last week, is just the latest indicator that U.S. allies are fed up with an America they see drifting closer to authoritarianism and away from the core values Washington had always preached.

U.S. rivals, meanwhile, are rejoicing. “It’s kind of a feast for the Chinese Communist Party, and for the Kremlin, and all those other strongmen that are really insecure,” said Sascha Lohmann, an expert on U.S. domestic and foreign policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. China has gleefully used U.S. racial tensions, protests, and violent crackdowns to push back against U.S. criticism. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman offered sympathy to Americans standing up to “state oppression.” Even Venezuela is piling on.

“In terms of how this plays out, it’s kind of a devastating blow to the image of the United States,” Lohmann added.

All in all, the scenes broadcast around the world over the past week of runaway police brutality, tear-gassed photo ops, unchecked assaults on reporters, and U.S. soldiers and paramilitary units taking over the streets of Washington and barricading the White House add up to a huge blow to the moral credibility of the United States. For decades, American diplomats were able to more or less convincingly cajole other countries to respect ideas like the freedom of the press and the right to peaceful protests. Now, such messages, coming on the heels of U.S. abdication of the very multilateral order it helped build, increasingly fall on deaf ears.

“What happened over the last week is perhaps a catalyst in this loss of confidence in the United States, and its traditional role as the ‘beacon of hope’ and all those shiny concepts,” Lohmann said. For many tempted to dismiss the Trump years as an aberration that doesn’t reflect the real America, the latest unraveling is opening some eyes, he said.

“There’s a reality check going on among European audiences that, for much of the last decade, we were living with a highly idealized picture of the United States,” he said.

Of course, there’s a certain blind spot in Europe’s reaction to the latest breakdown in American society. While a European Union commissioner claimed that such scenes of police brutality that prompted the ongoing protests couldn’t happen in Europe, they already have. In just the past year, Spanish security forces have cracked down hard on pro-independence Catalans, and French riot police ferociously thumped yellow vest protests.

But, without a doubt, the past week has clearly opened the United States up to charges of hypocrisy that countries such as Iran, China, and Russia—frequent targets of U.S. moral scoldings—have eagerly seized upon. That makes it that much harder for U.S. diplomats to condemn China’s crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong or call out Iranian excesses in battling its own protesters, or criticize Hungary’s steady erosion of the rule of law, or Myanmar’s documented brutality in battling its own minority populations. The United States has spent decades vocally condemning China’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, which happened 31 years ago Thursday. Yet this week, a leading Republican senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, called for U.S. troops to be unleashed on U.S. protesters in the name of restoring “law and order,” neatly echoing Beijing’s own line.

Granted, for many in Germany and across Europe, it’s hardly just the last week that has dashed illusions. Many Trump administration actions, from attacking NATO and levying tariffs on close allies to pulling out of important international organizations like the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization, already undermined European confidence in U.S. leadership. 

In France, the American carnage over the past week is just the culmination of years of disappointment with the United States. In 2003, France and the United States had an acrimonious split over the Iraq War, and relations were further soured by U.S. abuses during its anti-terrorism campaigns. While hopes were high during the Barack Obama years, U.S. inaction in Syria particularly disappointed French policymakers, who felt let down in a core interest of theirs. And then came Trump.

Corona virus em Hong Kong: lições para os EUA e para o Brasil - Adam Taylor (WP)

By Adam Taylor with Benjamin SolowayThe Washington Post, March 12, 2020  Email

Hong Kong learned from SARS. Can the United States learn from Hong Kong?

Two women wear masks in Hong Kong on March 25, 2003. (Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images)

HONG KONG — The traumas of recent history have informed Hong Kong’s response to the current coronavirus pandemic. An outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, better known by its acronym SARS, tore through the city in 2003, leaving 299 people dead.

Keiji Fukuda, a U.S. expert on infectious diseases and former assistant director-general for health security at the World Health Organization, told Today’s WorldView that SARS and other outbreaks provided lessons for Hong Kong that it is applying today. “Virtually everybody here has been through the drill,” he said. “They know the consequences.”

As cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, spread around the world, countries including the United States will need to internalize some of those same approaches, Fukuda said. The United States has marked well over 1,000 cases, despite administering a limited number of tests, while Hong Kong, despite its proximity to and interconnections with mainland China, has confirmed only about 120 cases.

The local government recognized the risk early, raised the alarm Jan. 4. The fears soon proved justified. The city logged its first case on Jan. 23 — the same day that China declared a lockdown in Wuhan, the epicenter of the initial outbreak.

Fukuda, now head of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, said the city took the novel coronavirus so seriously in part because many people there were already accustomed to worrying about infectious diseases. “In Hong Kong it is pretty common, even without an outbreak, to see people going around in masks because they may be sick and they don’t want to infect other people,” he said. For many in Hong Kong, the habits that can help control an epidemic are quite common.

That intrinsic level of consciousness may be hard for the United States and other countries to import. “I think there are lessons that the U.S. and other countries can pick up from Hong Kong,” Fukuda said, “but applying them may be difficult.”

Hong Kong made investments to improve its health system after SARS, Fukuda said, funding new measures and building a major infectious disease program at the University of Hong Kong, the school at which he teaches.

An official investigation led to the resignation of the city’s top health official in 2004. This time around, the city government launched a response plan well before confirming any cases. Amid pro-democracy protests, it was willing to take firm measures early on, announcing it would cancel school in late January and pushing citizens to socially distance from each other in public spaces.

The world is adjusting to a new normal. In Asia, some countries are now closing in on two months of severe restrictions on daily life. Beijing has put swaths of China on lockdown. Despite the heavy toll, mainland Chinese officials are now suggesting their tactics should be emulated abroad.

Critics think otherwise, and point to the chaotic Chinese response in the early days of the virus. Fukuda, for his part, sees the lockdown on Wuhan as a crucial move for stopping the virus’ spread, but doubts that similar tactics could work for long in a democracy. “It’s unimaginable for me in the U.S. that you could lock down 50 million people,” he said.

In South Korea, where there are nearly 8,500 confirmed cases, mass testing of more than 10,000 individuals a day has become the norm. One reason South Korea was motivated to test so many so quickly was the memory of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), an outbreak that killed 33 people in 2015, where faulty tests abetted the spread of the virus.

The United States, meanwhile, stumbled in its own efforts to develop a test. Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration, told The Post that it reflected a slow overall reaction. “They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” he said.

Hong Kong was not the only place to react with relative rigor early on. Taiwan and Singapore have been able to keep their numbers low because of surveillance and contract tracing — in some cases raising privacy concerns. All three countries saw deaths from SARS.

“Singapore has been very open about all of it’s cases and has described in detail and in near-real-time it’s epidemiological investigations,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in an email.

There are no quick fixes, and Hong Kong’s response has been far from perfect. Some critics have argued that the Hong Kong government was too slow to impose border restrictions. The full impact of the outbreak remains to be seen, as a second wave of cases in Singapore may show.

Fukuda cautioned that it is hard to compare the actions of a city of about 7 million with a country of more than 300 million. But just as Hong Kong learned from SARS, the United States may have to learn from covid-19.

“The U.S. has probably two of the strongest health institutions in the world,” Fukuda said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, but their funding goes “up and down.” It was unclear who was leading the response, he said, and who was paying for vital measures including tests — which are covered by the government in Hong Kong.

“The virus is moving a lot quicker than the [United States] is going to move,” he said.