Trump can't blame China for his own coronavirus failures

[Zorro]

The 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed 50 million to 100 million people around the world, is now known as the “Spanish flu.” But it actually started in Haskell County, Kan., and it was spread around the world by U.S. soldiers initially infected at Camp Funston in Kansas. It should be known as the “American flu” or “Kansas flu.”

The influenza became a global pandemic in no small part because U.S. officials failed to warn their own citizens — or the world. Many, in fact, lied to avoid undermining the war effort. As historian Joshua Zeitz noted in Politico: “The U.S. Surgeon General, Rupert Blue, assured Americans that ‘there is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.’ … Colonel Philipp Doane, who led health and safety at the military shipyards where the disease first spread, dismissed the ‘so-called Spanish influenza’ as ‘nothing more or less than the old-fashioned grippe.’”

So should the nations of the world have punished the United States and demanded reparations for its role in spreading one of the most destructive diseases in history? That would seem to be the logic of the China hawks who demand that China be punished because the novel coronavirus originated there.

The Post reports that “senior U.S. officials are beginning to explore proposals for punishing or demanding financial compensation from China for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.” Some within the administration have even talked of canceling part of the U.S. debt obligation to China. Talk about a cure being worse than the disease: No step is more calculated to shake the faith of global financial markets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/03/trump-cant-blame-china-his-own-coronavirus-failures/

[exboyfil]

1. I don't even know how you can disavow a portion of the debt

Can't those securities still be traded?

Also $1T isn't really that big a deal for a country like China. They could hurt us far more than we can hurt them through that approach.

The only way you get reparations is to militarily beat a country. I doubt US citizens are willing to sign up for that. The Trump administration would have to show incontrovertible proof that the pandemic was intentional, and that isn't happening because it isn't true. At worse they were incompetent and secretive which would cause many countries to go to war with us for the same reason.