President Donald Trump assailed China as the coronavirus villain Tuesday in a strongly worded United Nations speech, extolling his own actions in the pandemic and demanding that the global organization hold accountable “the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world.”
Trump’s speech — made via prerecorded video to a General Assembly that was drastically curtailed because of the pandemic — was followed by a recorded speech from President Xi Jinping of China, who called the coronavirus a crisis shared by everyone. Offering no hint of contrition, Xi portrayed his nation of 1.4 billion people as having acted responsibly to combat Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
“Any attempt of politicizing the issue or stigmatization must be rejected,” Xi said.
Taken together, the speeches by the American and Chinese presidents, broadcast from the world’s biggest diplomatic forum, punctuated the growing schism between the two superpowers during Trump’s first term, which has raised alarms about a new cold war.
“Each of these leaders sees flexibility as weakness, and the ability to make concessions is the essence of diplomacy,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. “So they’re at continued loggerheads. It’s a very alarming downward spiral.”
That such a standoff would be on public display at the United Nations, Schell said, “makes the UN more or less irrelevant, and that’s alarming too — we’ve fallen out of the framework of engagement, where we had some ways to mediate our differences.”
With just weeks before the presidential election, Trump also used his speech to highlight what he sees as his foreign-policy achievements: isolating Iran, moving to withdraw forces from Afghanistan and orchestrating normalized ties between Israel and two Persian Gulf Arab countries. But his attempt to shift the blame to China for the coronavirus pandemic — and away from what critics call his own inept response — was a dominant theme in the speech.
“We have waged a fierce battle against the invisible enemy — the China virus,” Trump said.
Trump did not mention that the United States has far more confirmed cases than any other country, nearly seven million, and far more deaths, over 200,000.
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