America’s Come-From-Behind Pandemic Victory

Local sheet metal worker Demetrius Buttelman gestures after being inoculated with the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine at a pop-up COVID-19 vaccination site in Elmont, New York, on April 14 (Source: Mary Altaffer-Pool/Getty Images)

All protracted crises have multiple phases, which means real-time assessments of who is winning or losing can change dramatically based on when one takes a look. An analysis of how the Allies were doing in World War II, written in February 1942, would not have been very generous. And the trajectory of the Cold War looked very different in 1949 or 1969 than in 1989.

The same is true of the coronavirus pandemic. In late January 2020, the conventional wisdom was that COVID-19 was mostly a problem for China: a “Chernobyl moment” for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By mid-March 2020, the conventional wisdom was COVID-19 was a disaster for the United States: a “Suez moment” for a declining superpower. In mid-2020, Europe looked like a relative winner in the crisis; today it looks like a loser.