Is America Finished? Time To Bid It Farewell? Only If President Trump Remains!
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa
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America or the United States of America was described by the late Ronald Reagan in numerous speeches, as well as his Farewell Address in January 1989, as the “shining city on the hill”. The phase, to be sure, was the work of his speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
At five million cases of SARS Cov II, which triggers COVID-19, as of August 10th, 2020, the United States is now literally in the Intensive Care Unit. The caseload could yet increase.
Should the cases continue to spike dramatically to give the United States a deadly blow, another serious headache is the extent to which its testing system could yet fail again. The testing system could fail again! More tests, for the lack of better words, do not, lead to immediate breakthroughs to contain the problems. Thus, the issue facing the United States now is, will it experience a rapid or slow-motion decline, perhaps what the likes of Jared Diamond of UCLA called systemic collapse if SARS Cov II is here to stay? As things are, some 20 percent of the Americans are “anti-vaccers,” according to the research of Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic Council, with another 31 percent who are unsure if they want the vaccine at all, if one is discovered.
Almost half of the United States, at this stage, seems to reject or equivocate on something deeply important to their own health, and the national well being of the United States itself. Without healthy Americans, the workforce would be distrusted, and unable to join the global economy at all.
Be that as it may, the problem with predicting the “collapse” of the United States, in any which form, is the fact that the leadership of President Donald Trump is faulty from the word get-go. It is not the all-round problem of the United States per se. Thus there are scholars such as Stephen Walt at Harvard University who believes that the United States can still make a come back.
As things are, President Trump is clearly the alpha and omega of the pandemic ravaging the United States. His earlier assertion, if not national delirium, that the pandemic can “just go away” is sheer buffoonery on a scale unseen from an American president when 160,000 Americans, including frontliners, have perished.
Fortunately, across all fifty states of the United States, there is uneven but growing resistance to his inept leadership; some of which can’t even take a firm stance on the importance of wearing a simple mask, against a disease that is clearly air-bourne.
One hasn’t gone into the vapid and poor responses of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, now lampooned as the “Secretary of Failures.” Oddly, President Trump attacks his own senior health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. The two have had to warn Americans not to resort to taking “bleach nor the unproven hydroxychloroquine” to treat themselves with SARS Cov II, as both are injurious to the health of the persons taking them.
Undoubtedly, the United States, at this stage, is indeed failing politically and physically. Otherwise, why would it remain the leading country to have the largest number of cases, and a cascade of problems, for months on end?
Quixotically, though not unpredictably, this has led President Donald Trump to flail the American press and anyone with which he could blame — due to the source of his massive drop in popularity — except himself.
Given the wretched state of the United States, it has no one but to adduce the multitude of its mismanagement by itself. The prime culprit is President Trump who is enabled by Senator Mitch McConnel.
Be that as it may, it would still be a grave mistake to count the United States out for the count. Why?
In spite of the ambiguity surrounding the fate of the United States, German sociologist like Ulrich Beck has long warned of such dangers posed by a globalized world. He called the latter the “risk society,” of which the United States is but one of the many in this world. Everything is fraught with risk. Therefore, one needs (better) “science” to go beyond (strong) “science” or even (better) “modernity” to go beyond (mere) “modernity”. In other words, in a society such as the United States, risk has increased wholesale. To mitigate the risk, however, a society must be better than the one before.
As long as the United States can understand this concept or risk, it stands a chance to trigger its own revival. Similarly, the United States and each of the countries affected by the pandemic must face the risk head on to innovate on risk, and around, it.
For now, however, the administration is not the epitome of what the United States is capable of achieving, especially in the field of sciences, including vaccines, notwithstanding the complexity of the virus entwined with the numerous challenges posed by the vaccine.
Take the research tabulation of the New York Times. There are 29 vaccines in human trials as of August 22 2020 with another 179 are in pre-clinical trials. China may be at the forefront of the stage human trial, by experimenting on the volunteers living in Dubai, but it has five vaccines in the pipeline. The United States has hundreds of them at work. In other words, insofar as finding the vaccine is concerned, there is the race ahead against each other, such as China and Russia, even if the United States cannot stage an immediate V-shaped recovery.
While the failure rate of most vaccines are above 90 percent, some may yet succeed in three ways. One, to trigger the number of T cells to fight back the proliferation of SARS Cov II in the infected body. Two, to lull the virus of SARS Cov II away from latching on to the healthy human cells, thus reducing the chances of deeper infection within the body of the person. Three, to lock on to SARS Cov II with the goal to burrow into its protein laced outer wall of the cells to prevent its RNA from multiplying further to trigger a graver biological attack against the body’s immune system.
In fact, as long as the United States does not have an exaggerated timeline of defeating SARS Cov II immediately, the process of understanding how the vaccine can be best deployed would be a good start to find the way to a gradual but certain recovery; instead of being totally waylaid, as the United States is facing now. More importantly, it relies on the Federal Reserve Authority to print up to USD 3.5 trillion to keep the country going economically. Otherwise, Americans would have to adapt to newer and more resilient federalism to thrive.
Such views, that the United States can recover, with the right common sense on how to tackle the pandemic head-on, are seconded by likes of The opinion editorial of The New York Times too. Others believe the United States can still recover albeit in a dramatically changed world. Meanwhile, as the United States recover, it must understand that China has become a formidable power that cannot be underestimated at all.
Meanwhile, the United States may be down but not out. As long Americans rise up in unison to remove President Donald Trump on Nov 3 2020 they may well buy themselves a true chance to restore the United States.
