In the movie, Thank You for Smoking, the lead character (Nick Naylor) takes his son (Joey Naylor) with him on a business trip to Los Angeles. Out for a night in Santa Monica, Joey asks his dad about his job as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco. In the course of this conversation, Nick reveals to Joey ( and to us) how significant argument works in the 21st century in America:
Joey:
But you still didn’t convince me.Nick:
Because I’m not after you. I’m after them.
Appearing on the Sunday news shows this morning, America’s teabagger Secretary of State decided it was time to yet again trot out the Big Lie – that China is solely to blame for the COVID-19 Pandemic – in the vain hope that it will deflect attention from, and blame for, the Trump administrations completely horrible response to the pandemic and the needless deaths that occurred as a result.
As Max Boot and others have noted, Pompeo is perhaps the worst Secretary of State, ever.
In the past two months, our lives have changed beyond all recognition. The only thing that has remained the same is President Trump’s failed foreign policy. Neither Trump nor Mike Pompeo — the worst president and worst secretary of state in U.S. history — has made any effort to rise to the occasion. As the New York Times recently noted, “This is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.”
Trump and Pompeo are hostile to international cooperation in the best of times — and all the more so now, when they feel the need to scapegoat others (China, the World Health Organization) for the administration’s own failures. Thus, Trump put a 60-day hold on U.S. donations to the WHO when its work is more vital than ever. This is like shuttering the fire department because you’re mad it was late responding to a call.
Trump’s animus against the WHO has further alienated the United States from its allies and sabotaged efforts to coordinate a unified virus response from the United Nations and Group of 20. Last week, the United States was even AWOL at the WHO’s launch of a global effort to speed up the production of vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.
Pompeo and his godfather, the orange monster himself, keep hammering this point, claiming that there is ” a great deal of evidence that the virus began in a Chinese lab.” Now, mind you, that this is in opposition to the assessments from several scientific bodies and our own Director National Intelligence. Neither Trump or Pompeo have put forth any of the evidence, despite requests to do so. (Trump even went so far as to claim that he “was not allowed” to discuss it. This even though he is the ultimate authority on what can and cannot be released).
As I pointed out last month, it no longer matters that the virus began in China. The only thing that matters for the US is how the US is going to arrest its spread. Even if the claim is valid ( and we have no evidence to prove that it is), it does not, in any way, excuse the botched response of the United States.
And Pompeo should know that.
As a result, in a recent article in The Atlantic, China is now taking advantage of the US’s failures to shape a message to the rest of the world that paints the United States in the worst possible light. Specifically, their news agency Xinhua put out this propaganda video.
Although this looks like an I’m-bored-at-home amateur production, it is not: The video was published on April 30 by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. It has since been promoted by Chinese diplomats and watched, as of yesterday afternoon, by more than 1.6 million people around the world.
It has also been mocked and denounced as crude propaganda—which, of course, it is. Crude propaganda is what China’s leaders do, both at home and abroad, and since the pandemic began they have stepped up their efforts. But even those who are mocking should beware: Anybody who knows any history will be aware that propaganda—even the most obvious, most shameless propaganda—sometimes works. And it works not because people necessarily believe that all of it is true, but because they respect the capabilities or fear the power of the people who produced it.
Americans can laugh at this approach and try to highlight the Chinese downplaying of their own mistakes and other shadings of the truth, but Americans would be well advised to ignore this at their peril.
United States:
But you still didn’t convince me.
China:
Because I’m not after you. I’m after them.
Them, is the rest of the world, outside of the United States that have had to deal with the virus and its horrifying results and have watched dumbfoundedly as the United States did little to nothing in the first months of this year to avoid the disaster or provide any global leadership and reassurance.
So this cheezy video may be a lot more effective than our rotund, teabagger SECSTATE may care to admit.
Propaganda also works best in a vacuum, when there are no competing messages, or when the available alternative messengers inspire no trust. Since mid-March, China has been sending messages out into precisely this kind of vacuum: a world that has been profoundly changed not just by the virus, but by the American president’s simultaneously catastrophic and ridiculous failure to cope with it………Quotations from the president’s astonishing April 23 press conference have appeared on every continent, via countless television channels, radio stations, magazines, and websites, in hundreds of thousands of variations and dozens of languages—often accompanied by warnings, in case someone was fooled, not to drink disinfectant or bleach. In years past, many of these outlets presumably published articles critical of this or that aspect of U.S. foreign policy, blaming one U.S. president or another. But the kind of coverage we see now is something new. This time, people are not attacking the president of the United States. They are laughing at him. Beppe Severgnini, one of Italy’s best-known columnists, told me that while Italians feel enormous empathy for Americans who have suffered as they have, they feel differently about Trump: “In this time of darkness and depression, he keeps us entertained.”
But if Trump is ridiculous, his administration is invisible. Carl Bildt—a Swedish prime minister in the 1990s, a United Nations envoy during the Bosnian wars, and a foreign minister for many years after that—told me that, looking back on his 30-year career, he cannot remember a single international crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all. “Normally, when something happens”—a war, an earthquake—“everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing, for better or for worse, and then they calibrate their own response based on that.”
This time, Americans are doing … nothing. Or to be more specific, because plenty of American governors, mayors, doctors, scientists, and tech companies are doing things, the White House is doing nothing. There is no presidential leadership inside the United States; there is no American leadership in the world. Members of the G7—the U.S. and its six closest allies—did meet to write a joint statement. But even that tepid project ended in ludicrous rancor when the American secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, insisted on using the expression “Wuhan virus” and the others gave up in disgust. Not only is the president talking nonsense, not only is America absent, but the nation’s top diplomat is a caricature of a tough guy—someone who throws around insults in the absence of any capacity to influence events.
What Pompeo or, for that matter, a certain percentage of Americans, refuse to admit, is that the President of the United States has ZERO credibility with any of the other major nations. During my time in Germany over the last three years, I can personally attest to having seen the low regard that Trump is held in. Red Hat wearing Trump aficionados – who hold other nations in low regard anyway, don’t seem to understand that. Dismissal on their part, however, does not mean that the ridicule is nonexistent. It just means that they refuse to see it.
And as a result, China is winning the messaging war and planting the seeds to discredit the United States in many areas. China does not have to refute everything the United States says – it merely has to be effective in sewing doubt. So far, the score on that is in China’s favor.