Cooperate With China on Coronavirus But Don’t Trust It
A Cold War lesson: Authoritarian, Leninist regimes put self-interest ahead of altruism.
He’s watching for an advantage.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
The coronavirus pandemic is a global menace that respects neither borders nor geopolitical dividing lines. It thus seems to demand greater U.S.-China cooperation in the near term, even as its longer-term effect will likely be to heighten the budding rivalry. There is in fact a long history of the U.S. working with geopolitical rivals to deal with global problems of common concern.
But that history also reminds us of something else that is relevant in the current crisis: Ambitious authoritarian regimes don’t do anything for selfless reasons, and they often use good deeds as cover to perpetrate bad ones.