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Did Trump Trade Wars Just Escalate to Germ Warfare?
by David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog:
Europeans are feeling like President Trump just dropped a COVID-19 economic bomb on the European Union. In response to his March 11th talk from the Oval Office, EU leaders said they did not see this coming. Was this a COVERT economic attack on the EU as some in the EU think?
If you break down what President Trump said and did, it smells a bit like economic warfare that has capitalized on the coronavirus outbreak. It was certainly taken that way by American investors who focused entirely on the policy’s economic impact on European commerce.
The most pungent evidence of EU trade targeting emitted from the president’s sole exclusion of the UK from his 30-day ban on travel between Europe and the United States. The president explained, when questioned as to why he excluded the United Kingdom, that it was because the UK has done a good job of keeping the virus down and because it now has solid borders between it and the EU.
President Donald Trump on Thursday said he excluded the United Kingdom from a travel ban since the country is doing a “very good job” — even as coronavirus cases there rose and two more people died.
Take a look at this viral map to review the facts:
That is where all of Europe stood two days before the president gave his talk. Cleary the UK is much better than four European nations — Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Just as clearly, the UK is not any better than Sweden, Norway, Finland, or the Netherlands and is worse than Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria and Greece, and far worse than nearly all of Eastern Europe. Of course, the president did refer to the EU’s open borders as being part of the problem.
Thus, the president’s statement appears to some to be a cover for why he is hitting the EU with this travel ban but not the UK. We know he is working a cooperative trade deal with the UK, and the EU is not cooperating with him in his trade war in the way he would like. The UK, on the other hand, has almost as many cases of COVID-19 as the US among a much smaller population!
The UK has reported a total of 798 coronavirus cases and eleven deaths linked to the virus…. The UK has seen a rising number of cases of “community spread”: people with no known exposure to others with the virus or travel history to countries where outbreaks have been reported…. There were 208 new cases of the virus as of Friday morning, the Department for Health and Social Care has announced. This was the biggest single-day increase in cases since the outbreak started in the UK.
WHO declares Europe the new coronavirus epicenter.
In Trump’s defense, the largely European World Health Organization, declared Europe the new ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Europe has become the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic as cases in China slow and the deadly coronavirus runs through Italy and nearby countries, WHO officials said Friday. WHO officials declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on Wednesday as the virus spreads rapidly across the world from Asia to Europe, the Middle East and now parts of the United States….
“More cases are now being reported [in Europe] every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference at the organization’s Geneva headquarters….
Italy currently has the most cases outside of China with at least 15,113 infections, followed by Spain at 4,334, Germany at 3,156 and France at 2,882.
That is a pretty strong defense, coming out of the neutral center of Europe as it does. On the other hand,
The World Health Organization (WHO) … has consistently maintained that international travel restrictions will prove ineffective—a stance supported by the fact that Italy, the hub of European contagion with more than 12,000 cases, was the first EU country to flout the WHO’s advice and ban flights to and from China, the source of the coronavirus.
And, on what I guess would be a third hand, Trump received some odd reluctant support from his critics:
Traces of evidence that Trump dropped a COVID-19 bomb into the trade war
However, there is still more of a case to be made that this was a calculated trade move.
The president knew that the EU could not help but note how the UK, which is cooperating with the US, was treated deferentially. If the main concern was the virus, why not ban it, too and eliminate all contagion from Europe. It is not as if there is not a lot of physical contact between the UK and EU nations.
The EU knows the UK is not that much more virus-free than many EU nations an noted as much. All EU nations have their own individual policies for combatting the disease because health is one area where the EU does not have much control over other nations. Thus, an EU-wide ban seems a little indiscriminate.
Part of the president’s European viral battle plan claimed Europe wasn’t doing enough. In the video above, the president says,
Taking early intense action, we have seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe. The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots. As a result a number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.
Many questioned what evidence there was to support “scapegoating” Europe, as some diplomats called it, as the source for contagion to the US. However, Trump got some support from his opposition on this one, though also with no evidence:
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