Tag: Public Health

Reluctance as Policy

Mike Coté2 Comments

The Biden administration has a fatally flawed understanding of our position vis a vis our geopolitical adversaries; their consequent reluctance to capitalize on weakness betrays American interests.

Geopolitics has always moved quickly in the modern era, accelerated by rapid communications and technological progress. Swift nautical vessels carried letters across vast distances in the Early Modern period; railways connected the world even faster, fundamentally altering the human perception of time itself; wired telegraphy made it so that messages could be transmitted as quickly as electrical currents could flow, while wireless telegraphy – the radio – created mass culture as we know it; television and satellite coverage made those messages into a natural audiovisual medium, bringing global events into sharp focus. Now, in the 21st century, information can flow from one corner of the world to the other instantaneously and powerful human and computer networks can work together to analyze, contextualize, and present this data nearly as quickly. This technology allows decision-makers near-total perception of the information environment. The task of statesmanship is to understand this information, determine what is salient and what is not, and – ultimately – to make choices on that basis.

Regrettably, the Biden administration is failing on that crucial task. Instead of making timely strategic and tactical decisions to forward our national interests and grand strategy, they have seemingly adopted a policy of reluctance. In an era of rising Great Power competition and conflict, we are signaling impotence with respect to our two primary geopolitical antagonists – Russia and China – just as they are each dealing with significant weaknesses of their own. This is exactly the time we should be showing strength and capitalizing on the challenges of our rivals, but instead we are proving indecisive and hesitant. That is a recipe for disaster.

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Pandemic Restrictions & Religious Freedom

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Why the Supreme Court got it right in overruling California’s draconian lockdown rules.

The United States has been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year now. Some states — including my own, New Jersey — have been in varying stages of lockdown or otherwise heavily restricted for many of those past 365 days. California is a perhaps the exemplar of this lockdown approach, having drastically curtailed civil rights for millions of its citizens under the guise of Governor Gavin Newsom’s “emergency powers”. Just a week and a half ago, those restrictions — in California and by proxy elsewhere — were dealt a crushing blow by a majority of the Supreme Court. Much of the coverage of this important decision has been framed negatively, focusing on the religiosity of the petitioners, the fact that the decision was a split one, or decrying the Court’s ‘new direction’ after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Some pundits have even gone as far as claiming that the Court’s decision “Doubles Down On Religious Rights Amid Pandemic,” or that the majority had ulterior motives for its decision, as they are all “ultraconservatives” whose decision “may kill people”. This is all utter nonsense. The Supreme Court absolutely made the right decision in this case when it comes to religious rights under the First Amendment and the government’s power to curtail them in times of crisis.

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The Disgrace of the WHO

Mike Coté2 Comments

Rejoining the World Health Organization (WHO) was a mistake. The Biden administration should revoke their promise to do so, post-haste.

Throughout the past year of the global pandemic, the World Health Organization has been negligent and has routinely gotten things wrong. From their wholesale reliance on China’s word when it came to the early outbreak to their stance against masking and long-time claims that the virus was not airborne, the group failed at its mission of global public health. These failures are not unrepresentative of the WHO’s general approach, as the body seems to focus more on international politics than it does health these days. The organization is led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian public health figure whose candidacy to lead the body was mainly supported by the Chinese government in opposition to a Western-backed figure. Tedros has come through in a big way for his Chinese Communist Party backers, taking the Chinese government line as the gospel truth and pushing against any and all parties who blame China for this plague year. The WHO has been inconsistent on nearly all aspects of its coronavirus approach, but for its constant support of the CCP. This should be unacceptable in a global public health organization.

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