Ex-Australian Leader Bashes Trump’s COVID Response

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People knew that the headline was foretelling near-certain American disaster, “The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy.”  Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ripped open the consequences that Donald Trump’s “America First” attitude is bringing to America.

The trouble is that the U.S. president’s campaign slogan has not weathered well during a crisis, especially one as vicious as the coronavirus pandemic. Rudd called Trump a “quack apothecary” and worse.

POTUS’ earth-shattering demand was that the country’s top scientists check out injecting disinfectants into sick people’s lungs and inserting powerful lights into their bodies. Trump also peddled an ineffective and deadly prescription as a miracle cure, and his snake oil wagon was packed full of it.

Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-9.08.27-AM Ex-Australian Leader Bashes Trump's COVID Response Featured Foreign Policy Military Politics Top Stories

Rudd continued, saying that this White House’s management of the coronavirus pandemic set America’s division in stone and ‘”a further constraint on U.S. global leadership.” The former Australian PM wrote for The Foreign Affairs magazine and said Trump’s administrative style was:

‘[C]haotic [and it ] has left an indelible impression around the world of a country incapable of handling its own crises, let alone anybody else’s.’Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-9.08.54-AM Ex-Australian Leader Bashes Trump's COVID Response Featured Foreign Policy Military Politics Top Stories

Should Trump be reelected, he wrote::

‘[I]t will mean greater decoupling and possibly attempted containment, driven by Trump’s base and widespread national anger over the origins of the virus, although this strategy will be rendered incoherent at times by the president’s personal interventions.’

He continued writing that China’s leaders would like that result:

‘[I]t sees value in his tendency to fracture traditional alliances, to withdraw from multilateral leadership, and episodically to derail the United States’ China strategy.’

Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-9.07.59-AM Ex-Australian Leader Bashes Trump's COVID Response Featured Foreign Policy Military Politics Top Stories And it was not just the coronavirus that has revealed these failings. Rudd argued that the weakening of the United States’ global position was happening before the pandemic:

‘Prior to the current crisis, the postwar liberal international order was already beginning to fragment. The United States’ military and economic power, the geopolitical fulcrum on which the order rested, was being challenged by China, first regionally and more recently, globally.’

The former Australian leader continued:

‘The Trump administration was adding to the order’s problems by weakening the U.S. alliance structure (which in conventional strategic logic would have been central to maintaining a balance of power against Beijing) and systematically delegitimizinxg multilateral institutions (effectively creating a political and diplomatic vacuum for China to fill). The result has been an increasingly dysfunctional and chaotic world.’

Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-9.09.34-AM Ex-Australian Leader Bashes Trump's COVID Response Featured Foreign Policy Military Politics Top Stories He claimed that the world was in jeopardy of a second cold war. If Trump wanted to derail the U.S. and China’s cold war destination and prevent certain dismemberment, he needed to be more conciliatory. Otherwise, both countries were headed toward a serious and deadly crash.

The U.S. and China do not need to take the disastrous path, Rudd claimed:

‘With the wrong decisions, the 2020s will look like a mindless rerun of the 1930s; the right decisions, however, could pull us back from the abyss.’

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