NBC: As US struggles to contain coronavirus, China asserts itself as Global leader

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With Italy in dire need of medical equipment, an economic superpower stepped in to help.
No, not the United States.

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It was China.

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Beijing last week promised Rome a thousand ventilators and 2 million masks, part of a global outreach effort that includes massive donations across Africa and a $20 million gift to the World Health Organization earmarked to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, proposed slashing the U.S. contribution to the WHO last month and has said very little about international cooperation to stop the spread. Instead of providing aid abroad, Trump has been soliciting it. According to a readout by the South Korean government, Trump on Tuesday asked that country’s president if he could provide medical equipment to the U.S.

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It was an extraordinary request from a U.S. president and a jarring contrast to the role America usually plays in a global crisis. Meanwhile, international observers have watched as American governors have squabbled with the president over whether he is properly managing the response in his own country.

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As those scenes play out daily, China senses a moment of opportunity to portray itself as a powerful and competent player on the world stage, former officials and experts told NBC News.

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“We’re bungling this in a fairly open and transparent manner,” said Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Beijing’s push for global leadership is able to get so much tailwind by virtue of the relative absence of any U.S. leadership.”

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“They lit the fire and they are only selectively providing firefighting equipment to those they want to save,” a senior administration official said, citing the assistance to Italy as an example.

China scholars consulted by NBC News don’t disagree, but many also say that what counts most now is not how the outbreak started, but how it ends.

“China is now working very hard to position itself as the country that got out ahead on this virus, took extraordinary measures to contain it and that saved a lot of lives abroad … and that is now willing to share its capabilities and its knowledge and its finances to help others around the world deal with it,” Kenneth Lieberthal, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, said.

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Trump’s message “has been that America is going to look out for its own interest, not for the interest of others,” former CIA Director John Brennan, an NBC News contributor and frequent Trump critic, said. “That’s why China and Russia are stepping in. They see the U.S. retreat in many respects from its traditional leadership role as presenting opportunities to them to demonstrate that they are an available alternative.”

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Chinese leaders saw the 2008 financial crash as a historic shift in the global order, a telltale sign of decline in American power and influence. Now they see the U.S. response to the coronavirus in a similar light, and they have ramped up their propaganda in an attempt to seize the initiative, Ely Ratner of the Center for a New American Security think tank, said.

“Beijing is going for the knockout punch. There's no hiding what they're doing here,” said Ratner, who served as the deputy national security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden.

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“The Trump administration's incompetence at home and its lack of leadership abroad is creating a completely open field for them to run down,” he said.

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Six years ago, the U.S. led an international effort to combat the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, deploying thousands of troops and medical teams, setting up treatment centers and mobile testing units. But this time, Trump’s “America First” outlook, and the scale of the crisis in the U.S., has created an international vacuum that Beijing is eager to fill, experts said.

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To make its case, China has unleashed a stream of propaganda, touting its delivery of medical supplies from Serbia to Indonesia to Ethiopia, and dismissing the U.S. response as a failure. Beijing is even spreading brazen disinformation suggesting without evidence that the U.S. military somehow was behind the outbreak, despite all signs pointing to the epidemic starting in the city of Wuhan in China’s own Hubei province.

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