Wednesday, April 22, 2020

The USA scuppers yet another important international agreement

I know we should be used to it by now, but it still rankles every time. Here is just one more example where pretty much the whole world is in agreement over something EXCEPT the United States, which uses its outsized influence to scupper an international agreement.
The case in point is a draft agreement by 19 out of the G20 industrial nations - hell, even China and Russia were on the good guys' side - that there needs to be a "global response" to the pandemic, cooordinated by the World Health Authority (WHO), and that there needs to be "equitable access" to medical supplies, tests, vaccines and treatments for the virus. This, of course, is inceasingly important as we come ever closer to a working vaccine for COVID-19.
However, a certain pouting president has a bee in his bonnet about the WHO, and is not too keen on the whole "equitable" thing, given that Americans are clearly a superior race and should have first dibs in everything (the America First" school of philosophy), objected to this apparently innocuous and obvious motion.
Because of the US veto, all the G20 got was a weak watered-down statement which talked about "systematic weaknesses" and "vulnerabilities" but proposed absolutely no solutions, i.e. it wasted the whole time and effort of all these high-ranking and expensive international diplomats.
Three-and-a-half years of the Trump administration is starting to feel like decades. Anyone who has to deal with the administration in an official capacity must be so stressed and exhausted by now. It's one thing when small countries, lacking in international influence - countries like Belarus or Nicaragua, for example - are off the charts for randomness and selfishness. But when it's America, the whole world suffers the consequences.

UPDATE
Notwithstanding the above, world leaders, with the conspicuous absence of the Americans did in fact go ahead and establish a collaboration agreement with WHO to develop safe and effective drugs, tests and vaccines for COVID-19, and to ensure equal access to to them for rich and poor alike.

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