War Without Rules

muzzled its doctors and refused to share the genetic sequence and virus samples or allow outside scientists into China to study the origins and formulate treatment-to this day?

 

Thanks to COVID-19, by late 2020, the world's major economies would lose an estimated $4 trillion in economic output-and eventually more than five million people would die. In addition to reopening their economy faster than the West, the Chinese owned the means to mass produce many of the goods the West urgently needed, like ventilators and personal protective equipment. They would also gain a propaganda victory as they found yet another reason to point to U.S. failings while falsely praising their own conduct by rewriting and burying history.

 

For the Chinese leadership, COVID was not a problem, it was an opportunity. It was a weapon to be used to advance the interests of China. Whether or not it was a deliberate or accidental release from the Wuhan lab-we may never know-everything that followed was an orchestrated response that caused havoc for the rest of the world.

 

If these consequences of the CCP's actions had been the result of a conventional military attack, America would have surely retaliated. But instead, this kind of stealth war-combining ruthless economic policies, indifference to the public good, and a weaponization of the internet-attracted minimal attention. While conspiracy theorists speculated that the Chinese had designed COVID-19 in a lab as a bioweapon, few Americans discussed the less extreme but proven case: that the CCP took advantage of a surprise crisis to advance its own interests and hurt its adversaries. They had started lying to the public from the moment of Dr. Li Wenliang's warning, and they're still lying about Chinese COVID statistics as I write this in late 2021.

 

Looking back, we can see that the United States ignored that hoary military maxim of know your enemy. How different would the early days of the COVID e