Quo Vadis New World Order?
Pat Buchanan has a very thoughtful article today at The American Conservative. In it he reflects on the possible consequences of Covid-19 for the New World Order: Will the Coronavirus Wipe Out the New World Order? We can only wait and see, but even now the consequences appear to be such that change may be inevitable. Here are some extended excerpts:
Dr. Brian Monahan, attending physician of Congress, told a closed-door meeting of Senate staffers this week that 70 million to 150 million Americans—a third of the nation—could contract the coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci testified that the mortality rate for COVID-19 will likely run near 1 percent.
Translation: between 750,000 and 1.1 million Americans may die of this disease before it runs its course. The latter figure is equal to all the U.S. dead in World War II and on both sides in the Civil War.
Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that 70 percent of Germany’s population—58 million people—could contract the coronavirus. If she is right, and Fauci’s mortality rate holds for her country, that could mean more than half a million dead Germans.
... Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch seemed to support Merkel, saying between 40 percent and 70 percent of the world’s population could become infected.
Again, if Fauci’s 1 percent mortality rate and Lipsitch’s estimate prove on target, between 3 billion and 5 billion people on earth will be infected, and 30 million to 50 million will die, a death toll greater than that of the Spanish Flu of 1918.
There is, however, some contradictory news.
China, with 81,000 cases, has noted a deceleration in new cases and South Korea appears to be gradually containing the spread of the virus.
Yet Italy, with its large elderly population, may be a harbinger of what is to come in the West.
As of Thursday, Italy had reported 12,000 cases and 827 deaths, a mortality rate of nearly 7 percent. This suggests that the unreported and undetected infections in Italy are far more numerous.
...
What does the future hold?
It may one day be said that the coronavirus delivered the death blow to the New World Order, to a half-century of globalization, and to the era of interdependence of the world’s great nations.
Tourism, air travel, vacation cruises, international gatherings, and festivals are already shutting down. ...
As for the “open borders” crowd, do Democrats still believe that breaking into our country should no longer be a crime, and that immigrants arriving illegally should be given free health care, a proposition to which all the Democratic debaters raised their hands?
The ideological roots of our free trade era can be traced to the mid-19th century, when its great evangelist, Richard Cobden, rose at Free Trade Hall in Manchester on January 15, 1846, and rhapsodized: “I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.”
In the pre-Trump era, Republicans held hands with liberal Democrats in embracing NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and most favored nation trade privileges for China.
In retrospect, was it wise to have relied on China to produce essential parts for the supply chains of goods vital to our national security? ...