https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-pandemic-china-united-states-west-must-end-dangerous-dependence-on-beijing/
As the pandemic has made clear, the U.S., and the West as a whole, cannot continue to depend on an authoritarian rival state for strategically important goods.
I t is not necessary to agree with all of President Donald Trump’s foreign policies in order to agree with one of his foreign policies. His approach to China is a case in point.
Since it emerged late last year, the coronavirus has brought into sharp focus the outlines of the international system and amplified long-standing tensions between Washington and Beijing. Many of Trump’s critics have identified him as part of the problem, arguing that an “America first” foreign policy — which was written into the official National Security Strategy that his administration published in 2017 — at best undermines international cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus and at worse obstructs it. A divided West, the argument goes, is ceding global leadership to China.
Yet the pandemic has highlighted something that Trump’s National Security Strategy identified three years ago. Instead of becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system — a term coined by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in 2005 to describe the role that the Bush administration hoped China would play following its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) — China has instead “expanded its power at the expense of others.”