Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Washington Post thinks China’s Coronavirus incompetence, lies and coverups, which directly led to the premature deaths of thousands of US citizens, is somehow fostering a new era of closer international cooperation.

The pandemic could be a call to action on climate change

By Ishaan Tharoor 
April 24, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. GMT+10

Amid its horrors and tragedies, the coronavirus pandemic has driven home a startling reality. Travel bans and lockdowns have cleaned the globe, flushing the murk from Venice’s canals, clearing Delhi’s polluted smog, making distant snowy peaks visible for the first time in years from the shores of the Bosporus. With humans in retreat, nature reclaimed what was once its own in whimsical ways: Goats strutted through villages, antlered deer grazed on manicured city lawns and mountain lions found perches by suburban fences.

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“A good way to think about the coronavirus pandemic is that it is like climate change at warp speed. What takes decades and centuries for the climate takes days or weeks for a contagious disease,” New York University climate economist Gernot Wagner wrote last month. “That speed focuses the mind and offers lessons in how to think about risk in an interconnected world.”

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In Washington, there’s a cautious hope that the urgency presented both by climate change and the pandemic may cool the geopolitical tensions between the United States and China and force greater global collaboration.

“We all breathe the same air and we’re all going to live with the same rising seas,” Michael Chertoff, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, told Today’s WorldView during a webinar this week. “And whatever we may disagree about some things, we’re going to need to sit down with them and our like-minded allies and everybody else and figure out what can we do collectively to protect the global commons against either pandemic diseases or disastrous climate change.”

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/24/pandemic-could-be-call-action-climate-change/

Meanwhile back in the real world, China appears to be attempting to exploit Chinese Coronavirus outbreaks on US Warships with aggressive fleet manoeuvres. Asia Times thinks the Chinese are attempting to permanently push the USA out of the South China Sea, by presenting a show of naval force the USA is no longer able to match.

Not exactly the opening salvo you would expect from an outbreak of global peace and cooperation.