US a Failed State against COVID-19

The ignorance and arrogance of Donald Trump and his administration have become a lethal cocktail.

The United States has become a metaphor for the contradictory times we are living in. Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos described this contradiction recently. “America can destroy the earth several times with its atomic weapons, while it’s incapable of controlling a virus that other countries with less resources have kept at bay.”

The U.S. started with an advantage when the global pandemic spread, as there was plenty of time to learn from events in Italy and Spain. In spite of all this, the U.S. has turned out to be a failed state.

The ignorance and arrogance of Donald Trump and his administration have become a lethal cocktail. The virus continues to spike in at least 27 states, with the U.S. contributing to one out of four new recorded cases in the world. Some states that managed to flatten the curve, like California, are registering a daily increase in cases of over 60% again. And it’s not a second wave, it’s still the first without proper management. The official data says there are 2.5 million infected and 125,000deaths, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that the real number could be up to 10 times larger. It’s a catastrophe.

Like little children who cover their eyes in the belief they’re hiding, Trump couldn’t come up with anything better to say at a sparsely attended campaign rally, than there are more cases because there is more testing, as if stopping the tests would make the virus vanish. This kind of magical thinking and denial of reality is causing the equivalent of a 9/11 death toll each week, the difference being that this time the casualties cannot be attributed to a foreign enemy and fought with weapons and military intelligence. Instead, we have a force of nature that we can only confront with rigor, solidarity and scientific intelligence, contrary to the social Darwinism that Trump advocates when he says that nothing is more important than the economy.

There has been much speculation about how the pandemic is contributing to a new global geostrategic balance. The fall of an empire doesn’t just happen overnight, it brews over a long period of time. Some events, however, may symbolize the decline. We don’t know if the U.S. will recover. For the moment, the country has exercised global hegemony for more than a century through its ability to attract the finest scientific intelligence in the world. Now, it’s incapable of taking advantage of that science and available knowledge. And what’s worse, the country is in the hands of someone unable to comprehend the dimensions of his own ignorance.