The long list of politically generated absurdities is creating a future crisis to go with the real one. The longstanding staggering hypocrisy of the US, which makes billions off Chinese-made American products, is well-known and much-despised. The United States has been vocally hostile to China almost from the day they started making iPhones in China, long before Trump.
The Chinese side isn’t much if at all better. The endless, useless cyberwar and IP theft, well documented and a source of genuine conflict, is a constant source of far more genuine anger. This extremely expensive and intensive, not to say totally unnecessary, affliction on the world’s economic sanity.
The problem for the world is that these transparently futile negatives on both sides add up to a massive, polarizing, world geopolitical mess and some of the most totally bogus headlines in history. Rhetoric is only rhetoric, but it’s an excuse for some pretty weird situations.
For example, right now:
• The world needs to dig itself out of the pandemic black hole ASAP. That rather obvious fact is not in dispute on either side. Delays will prolong the misery, slow the recovery severely, and add a Depression which will sledgehammer both the United States and China. Both nations are looking at a virtual doomsday scenario; any distraction, let alone actual or indirect conflict, can only be disastrous.
• Contradicting facts (and in the US case even your own intelligence services), is stupid and a half. Idiotically claiming the COVID-19 virus was a bioweapon, or deliberately made in a lab, simply paints governments into unworkable positions.
• ingenuous/disingenuous US allies calling for a totally futile “investigation” into the pandemic cannot achieve a damn thing. These amateur theatricals are simply aggravating a situation which is extremely economically dangerous in all its factual aspects, without this absurdity.
• Trying to rewrite history might work well in the utterly delusional fantasyland of US politics, but it’s fooling nobody outside the American political lunatic asylum. Nearly four years of disinformation has done nothing to encourage credibility in politically partisan, lying-out-of-sheer-force-of-habit drivel. American and international experts are entirely consistent in their criticism of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, and that’s not going to change. Blaming China is simply annoying people who know a lot better.
The verminous, venal vacuum of US politics has nothing to do with economic realities or any other realities. It’s cosmetic fluff from an administration infamous for its misdirection and lousy logic. The world, unlike the equally unreliable right wing media, isn’t really buying a single syllable of it. China’s understandable but considerably overblown response to idiotic political PR is therefore at the point of being counterproductive.
The world needs to move on. The world’s too small, and right now too broke, for this timewasting babble. Let’s get the machine working again, and lose the distractions.
