Donald Trump's "America First" Is a Dangerous Fantasy in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Trump speaks at the daily coronavirus response briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2020 Tom Brenner / Reuters 

Donald Trump's "America First" Is a Dangerous Fantasy in the Coronavirus Pandemic:
by Philip H.  Gordon April 4, 2020 

It should come as no surprise that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose foreign policy doctrine is called “America first,” vastly underestimated the importance to U.S. security of defeating the novel coronavirus pandemic abroad. Trump was slow to recognize that the United States could not seal itself off from the virus: on February 26, the president predicted that the number of infected Americans would soon go down “close to zero,” while the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted that the United States had “contained” the threat because its borders were “pretty close to airtight.” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross even assessed that the troubles in China “will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” 
But of course American borders were not airtight at all, and the United States is now home to the highest number of reported cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in the world, with more than 7,000 deaths, a number almost certain to increase exponentially in the coming weeks.  
 With the domestic toll rising, the administration and many governors have belatedly implemented aggressive containment measures, and Congress has stepped in with a $2.2 trillion stimulus package to provide temporary economic relief to American workers and businesses. But Washington is still not doing nearly enough to prevent and mitigate the spread of the disease beyond U.S. borders—in some cases, the administration has even cut foreign assistance and rejected diplomacy where more of both were needed. 
The health and safety of the American people are the rightful priorities of the U.S. government, but concentrating narrowly on fighting the virus at home while allowing it to spread abroad would be as shortsighted as focusing on fighting a fire only in one’s own home when one’s whole neighborhood was engulfed in flames.
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