- Wrong decision at the wrong time
US President Donald Trump has long been averse to the United Nations, mainly because it does not do what the USA wants it to do. It does not operate as an organ of US foreign policy, as he feels it should. However, though the WHO is a UN agency, its functioning has been non-political, and is best exemplified by the role it has been playing in the coronavirus pandemic, in which it has collected information from all over the world, and has disseminated the best practices in tackling this problem. At a time when the WHO has asked for donations of $1 billion, President Trump is stopping even normal US funding, which was $400 million in 2019, or 15 percent of its total funding. As has become all too familiar, President Trump has chosen to pull the plug for reasons of domestic politics, because he wishes to deflect criticism of how he has handled the pandemic in the USA from his own omissions to China, which he blamed for concealing vital information at the time the disease broke out, and in which he alleges that the WHO connived.
The move has been condemned by UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, as well as by the EU foreign policy chief, the German and Russian Foreign Minister, and the New Zealand Prime Minister, among others. However, it can only be hoped that President Trump will make a break with tradition and yield to good sense. Just because Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s Task Force on Covid-19, said that President Trump’s delayed reaction made the effect on the USA worse than it could have been, does not mean he has any right to blame the WHO. As one reaction had it, he should blame China directly.
President Trump has been caught in a bind. The way the pandemic hit the USA, which by Thursday evening, had suffered over 600,000 cases and 26,000 deaths, it had to go into a lockdown much earlier than the country did. Early action would have stopped Trump from staging campaign events, and led to a tanking of the economy, and thus the prospect that he might lose the November election and end up a one-term President. However, his political prospects should not let him endanger the world’s health.
