TUESDAY, JULY 28 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A21
TUESDAY Opinion
F
ive months after the pandemic
took over our lives, after nearly
150,000 died in the United States
and after the economy went into
intensive care, President Trump said last
week that he was “in the process of
developing a strategy” to fight the
coronavirus.
Why the rush?
Now, the strategy the president has
been so hurriedly developing has come
into sharp focus. He plans to defeat the
virus in a round of golf — no matter how
high the membership fees, how great the
hazards, or how long the hours on the
practice green.
As the daily death toll has again
climbed above the 1,000-a-day mark —
the equivalent in deaths of a 9/11 attack
every three days — Trump has redoubled
efforts to lower his handicap. He has vis-
ited golf courses 17 times since late May,
including 11 times in the past month, ac-
cording to TrumpGolfCount.com, part of
a cottage industry tracking the
president’s favorite outdoor pursuit.
He played golf Saturday with football
Hall of Famer Brett Favre. He tweeted
Sunday morning that Favre “hits it
LONG!” — and then went out to play an-
other round on Sunday. He says he does
“a lot of work” on the golf course (and a
“tiny bit of exercise”). His “work”
apparently even extends to Britain,
where, the New York Times reported,
Trump asked the U.S. ambassador to get
the British government to steer the
British Open tournament to the Trump
Turnberry resort in Scotland. (Trump
denies the report, so it must not be true.)
An hour after returning from Sunday’s
round, Trump issued a tweet expressing
exhaustion with his hectic routine. He
said he would be unable to throw out the
opening pitch at the Yankees game on
Aug. 15 “because of my strong focus on
the China Virus.” If the nascent baseball
season hasn’t been snuffed out by the
virus by that date, New Yorkers, who
favor Joe Biden by 25 points over Trump,
no doubt will be crestfallen because of
the president’s absence.
But we all must make allowance for
his newfound “strong focus” on the coro-
navirus, which Trump is fighting with
every tool in his golf bag: not just irons
and wedges, but putters, drivers and fair-
way woods. Several sources familiar with
his strategy say he is even considering
using the rarely unsheathed 2-iron.
Some critics say the president should
hang up his spikes. “Trump has time to
golf as states report more than 1,000
COVID-19 deaths for fifth day straight,”
was the liberal site Daily Kos’s unkind
assessment Sunday.
Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera and the In-
tercept noted that the virus death toll is
“the equivalent of four plane crashes a
day in the US, killing everyone on board”
while “the president is golfing this
weekend. Again.”
To these critics, I retort: Now watch
this drive.
Trump’s problem is not that he’s play-
ing too much golf. His problem is he isn’t
playing enough golf. Part of this is for the
reason New Yorker satirist Andy Borow-
itz reflected in May with his piece titled,
“Fauci Urges Trump to Remain on Golf
Course Until Pandemic Is Over.”
It’s not just a matter of distracting
Trump while the professionals fight the
virus. Much of what he needs to know
about fighting a pandemic can be learned
on the golf course.
Consider some basic rules of etiquette
in golf:
l Keep up with the foursome in front
of you.
l Don’t throw your clubs.
l Replace your divots, repair ball
marks and rake bunkers.
l Don’t step on another player’s line or
into another player’s line of vision.
l Listen to your caddy’s advice.
l If your errant shot puts others in
danger, yell “FORE!”
The rules of presidential etiquette
during a pandemic are similar:
l Keep up with the rest of the world
on testing and personal protective
equipment.
l Don’t blame the World Health
Organization and the Democrats for
everything.
l Clean up your own policy messes and
don’t tell governors to compete for
ventilators.
l Wear a mask and maintain social
distancing.
l Listen to public health experts’
advice.
l If a deadly virus is spreading, don’t
tell people it will “disappear.”
Above all, though, golf is a game of
honor. If you hook your tee shot into the
woods, you look for the ball for five min-
utes, then assess yourself a penalty stroke
if you can’t find it. That may be the hard-
est lesson of all for Trump. According to
those who have played with him, Trump
doesn’t take a penalty stroke; he simply
gives himself a “mulligan” — a free do-
over. It lowers his score, but it’s cheating.
Maybe that’s why he has such trouble
with the pandemic. He can get away with
cheating on the golf course. But covid-19,
as we have seen, does not allow
mulligans.
Twitter: @MilbankDANA MILBANK
WASHINGTON SKETCHThe president
is not playing
enough golf
L
ast month, I offered some bad news
for megacity office workers: You’re
probably not going back anytime
soon. Today, I have to break it to the
parents among them that I suspect your kid
isn’t going back to school this year, either.
Some of you already knew that, because
your district has announced it will be
100 percent online. To the rest of you, let me
explain why I think your district is going to
follow suit.
Yes, I know that, under what appears to
be heavy pressure from President Trump,
the Centers for Disease Control and Preven-
tion has revised its older, more conservative
guidelines to urge schools to reopen, saying
it will be “safe in communities with low
SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates.” But that’s
a description many states don’t currently
fit. No matter what the CDC says, moreover,
districts moving to in-person classes will
face daunting logistical challenges, fierce
resistance from teachers and even push-
back from parents. Those challenges will be
exacerbated by a phenomenon I first no-
ticed as a tech consultant in the 1990s.
Back then, we had a saying: “No one ever
got fired for buying IBM” (sometimes “Mi-
crosoft”). Those companies might not have
been making the best products, and they
were definitely more expensive than the
competition. However, while their products
might have been a bad deal for the users,
they delivered excellent paycheck insur-
ance for IT managers: If something went
wrong, you could always say, “I used the
industry standard.” That defense wasn’t
available to anyone who tried to “think
different.”
Once a few folks decided upon a “safest
option,” everyone else ended up falling in
line behind them. And this sort of behavior
is hardly limited to computer nerds —
money managers, for example, are notori-
ous for herding.
So are schools likely to be. While the
decision to reopen them may look to us like
a complicated trade-off between the epide-
miological risks of reopening and the socio-
economic costs of staying closed, for the
people making those decisions, the stakes
are even more perplexing. Teachers wonder,
“How can I possibly avoid catching covid-19
in a classroom full of natural anarchists
whose personal hygiene skills are still evolv-
ing?” Administrators puzzle over a related
query: “What happens if a child dies?”
Spoiler alert: The parents may well sue,
and the district officials who made the call
will, at minimum, spend days in court
defending the placement of every single
hand-sanitizer dispenser. Long before then,
frightened teachers will be pointing to the
all-online districts and demanding to know
why their district doesn’t care about the
safety of its teachers or kids. If almost every
school opens up, those officials could take
refuge in an “industry standard.” But as
some districts close, the pressure on others
begins to grow; as more give into it, I expect
the snowball will eventually become un-
stoppable.
Parents are familiar with this behavior,
by the way. It’s the same phenomenon that
has been ratcheting up the demands on
them for years.
When I was a kid, most 11-year-olds were
allowed to sit alone in a car while Dad ran
into a store, bike miles to a friend’s house,
wait at the bus stop by themselves, or stay
home alone for a few hours after school
until Mom got home from work. Today,
most parents would never dream of allow-
ing their children to do any of these things,
even though crimes against children have
been falling for decades.
Talking to those parents, I often find that
they are buying themselves a kind of regret
insurance. If they do everything the other
parents do, and something happens to their
child, they will still feel unimaginably aw-
ful. But they won’t have the added pain of
feeling it happened because they were
irresponsible.
To give themselves a margin of error,
parents tend to take cues as to what’s
“responsible” from parents who are slightly
more anxious than they are. Since those
parents are doing the same thing, this
means standards are increasingly set by the
most neurotically overprotective mothers
and fathers around.
Even “free-range parents” who resist that
psychological pressure often find them-
selves forced to comply when government
authorities adopt the narrowing standards.
Authorities, too, are being driven by loss-
averse logic: The results of missing one case
of neglect or abuse loom much larger than
the consequences for parents who are
forced to hover like helicopters, or for
children who end up caged like a canary.
That’s the environment in which we’re
asking districts to reopen schools. In defer-
ence to Trump, those in the reddest states
may resist the pressure toward safety at all
costs. But in blue states, near megacities,
the effect is more likely to go the other way:
The more Trump insists, the more parents
will resist.
Of course, policy should not be set by
doing whatever Trump recommends, or its
opposite. Nor should policymakers blindly
pursue safety over every other public good.
But if we wanted a different process, some
careful weighing of costs against benefits,
then that’s a conversation we probably
should have had several decades back.
Twitter: @asymmetricinfoMEGAN MCARDLESorry, parents
and kids, school
probably won’t
open this fall
BY RICHARD HAASSS
ecretary of State Mike Pompeo
delivered a blistering speech
about China last Thursday. The
problem was not simply that
the nation’s chief diplomat was decid-
edly undiplomatic. Worse were his
misrepresentation of history and his
failure to suggest a coherent or viable
path forward for managing a relation-
ship that more than any other will
define this era.
The secretary asked what Ameri-
cans have to show for 50 years of
“blind engagement” and said the an-
swer was little or nothing. He instead
erected a straw man: U.S. policy
failed, he said, because China did not
evolve into a democracy when, in fact,
the purpose of the policy developed by
Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissing-
er was to use China as a counter-
weight to the Soviet Union and shape
China’s foreign policy, not its internal
nature.
What’s more, their efforts largely
succeeded. In cementing China’s split
from the Soviet Union, the United
States gained leverage that contribut-
ed to the Cold War ending when and
how it did.
Yes, China continues to flex its
muscles in the South China Sea, but
Pompeo failed to note it has not
fought a war with another country
since its 1979 border conflict with
Vietnam. Importantly, China has not
used force against Taiwan, which has
emerged as a thriving democracy.
Pompeo also sought to commit the
United States to a path that is bound
to fail. It is not within our power to
determine China’s future, much less
transform it. To be sure, the country
faces enormous challenges: an aging
society that will soon start shrinking
dramatically, a badly damaged envi-
ronment, an inadequate public health
system, an unsustainable economic
model that relies on massive amounts
of investment for growth, and a top-
heavy leadership that stifles creativity
and has difficulty correcting its mis-
takes.But all this and more — including
the role of the Chinese Communist
Party — will be for the Chinese people
and their leaders to determine. For
now, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld,
Pompeo and his colleagues need to
negotiate with the Chinese govern-
ment they have.
What the United States can and
should try to do is shape China’s
choices, to bring about a China that
acts with a degree of restraint at home
and abroad and that works with us to
deal with regional challenges, such as
North Korea and Afghanistan, and
global challenges, such as nonprolif-
eration and climate change.
Unfortunately, the Trump adminis-
tration is undermining prospects for
moderating China’s behavior. The first
foreign policy decision of the then-
new administration was to pull out of
the emerging Trans-Pacific Partner-
ship. This grouping, which represent-
ed about 40 percent of global gross
domestic product, had the potential to
force China to change the very eco-
nomic behavior the secretary criticiz-
es. Instead, the United States focused
on negotiating a bilateral trade agree-
ment with China that has achieved
little more than a Chinese commit-
ment (so far not realized) to import
slightly more U.S. products while
shelving larger structural issues.
An administration committed to
changing Chinese economic behavior
would be spearheading reform of the
World Trade Organization, rather
than paralyzing its appellate body.
An effective U.S. policy toward Chi-
na would work with, not against, our
allies and partners. Instead, under
this administration, we treat the Eu-
ropean Union as an economic foe,
bash South Korea and Japan over how
much they pay to offset the costs of
our stationing soldiers on their terri-
tory and regularly raise doubts as to
our reliability, be it by unilaterally
canceling military exercises on the
Korean Peninsula or threatening to
withdraw some of our troops from
South Korea, as we are doing from
Germany. It is not realistic to expectallies to stand up to a powerful neigh-
bor if they cannot count on us.
Similarly, we should be working
with countries of the region to pro-
duce a collective front against Chi-
nese claims and actions in the South
China Sea; instead, it took 3½ years
for the State Department to produce a
tougher but still unilateral U.S. policy.
Meanwhile, we press our allies not to
use China’s 5G technology but have
failed to work with them to develop an
alternative.
It is ironic, too, that an administra-
tion that embraces “America First” is
doing so little to make this country
more competitive vis-a-vis China. A
real strategy would include the feder-
al government spending more on ba-
sic research, modernizing infrastruc-
ture and making it possible for the
most talented people in the world to
come and stay here, rather than push-
ing them away.
Pompeo spent a good deal of his
speech highlighting China’s human
rights failures, which are many and
deserve U.S. condemnation. But our
standing for criticizing China would
be immeasurably greater if we were
equally tough on Russia, Turkey and
Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, our words
appear to be nothing so much as
opportunistic.
America’s voice would be even
stronger if we practiced at home what
we preached abroad. President
Trump and those who work for him
have forfeited much of their credibili-
ty as democracy advocates with their
repeated descriptions of the U.S. me-
dia as an enemy, their attacks on an
independent judiciary and their use
of federal forces to repress dissent in
our cities. Here and elsewhere, for-
eign policy begins at home.
Theodore Roosevelt advised the
United States to speak softly and carry
a big stick. This president and his
chief diplomat are perilously close to
getting it backward.Richard Haass is president of the Council
on Foreign Relations and author of “The
World: A Brief Introduction.”What Pompeo doesn’t get
about China and foreign policy
ASHLEY LANDIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library last week in Yorba Linda, Calif.BY REGINA E. DUGANT
he global pandemic is a hinge in
history. Hundreds of thousands
of lives lost globally; trillions in
economic damage. It is as if the
1918 flu and the 1929 crash happened in
the same year. It is the kind of event
that alters the course of history so much
that we measure time by it: before the
pandemic — and after. It is a Sputnik
moment.
Humanity is no stranger to such
moments. And though we cannot al-
ways choose the circumstances, we do
get to choose how we respond. In 1957,
the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a
beach-ball-size satellite that surprised
the world — and changed it. Today, as
the novel coronavirus circles the earth,
we find ourselves with the rarest of
opportunities: the chance not just to
defeat a virus but also to spark one of
the greatest periods of advancement in
science and medical history. Just as
Sputnik ignited the Space Age, so, too,
could the coronavirus inspire a
Health Age.
The necessary foundation exists. A
2020 McKinsey study on the revolution
in biological sciences estimates that “45
percent of the global disease burden
could be addressed using science that is
conceivable today.” Biology and engi-
neering are converging. It is already
more science than fiction to cultivate
human tissue in a lab, even cardiac
tissue with cells that beat in synchrony
with each other for days. We could
choose to build a future where no one
must wait on an organ donor list.
Where the mechanistic underpinnings
of mental health are understood and
treatable. Where clinical trials happenin months, not years. Where our health
span coincides with our life span and
we are healthy to our last breath.
This is just a sliver of what the Health
Age could deliver. And there is no better
playbook than the one that put a man
on the moon.
Periods of vast transformation re-
quire will. It’s not an accident that these
periods most often coincide with hard-
ship. Crisis has a way of synchronizing
our commitment to a mission; it
strengthens our resolve. The Space Age
was characterized by the imperative of
space exploration. And by leaders will-
ing to name it, catalyze it and inspire us
to reach it.
Igniting a new age requires trans-
formative organizations capable of
executing bold, risky programs with
speed and scale, which, in turn, re-
quires large and concentrated invest-
ments. Between 1959 and 1969, the
United States dedicated 2.2 percent of
all federal spending to exploring the
frontier of space, 80 percent of which
went directly to research and develop-
ment, calculations from NASA records
show. NASA and the Defense Ad-
vanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) were created and filled with
engineers and scientists working to-
gether to solve problems they could
not solve alone.
Science became something every-
one could support and participate in.
Decades later, what had begun as a
race between rivals became a coopera-
tive effort to build the International
Space Station. The Space Age didn’t
just put a man on the moon; it also
ushered in a new technology age. The
organizations and technical founda-
tions established to explore space gaverise to decades of breakthroughs, from
GPS to the Internet.
This might sound impossibly ambi-
tious, but new ages are not new.
Whether harnessing the power of
seeds to give birth to an agricultural
age or harnessing the power of steam
to ignite the industrial age, humans
have proved at critical moments that
we have the ability to set a new course
with new tools and new technology,
resilience and tenacity.
Change has already begun. In the
battle against covid-19, the secrecy and
pace of academic research have
changed, and we are seeing collabora-
tion in real time. Tens of thousands of
viral genome sequences have been
shared. More than 2,000 clinical trials
are underway to understand, treat and
vaccinate against the disease.
It is a noble start. To build a Health
Age, however, we will need to do more.
We will need an international coalition
of like-minded leaders to shape a
unified global effort; we will need to
invest at Space Age levels, publicly and
privately, to fund research and devel-
opment. And critically, we’ll need to
supplement those approaches with
bold, risk-tolerant efforts — something
akin to a DARPA but for global health.
None of this work is beyond our
capacity. At this moment in time, at
this hinge in history, there is little
question of whether we can build a
Health Age. The question, instead, is
whether we will.The writer is chief executive of Wellcome
Leap, a nonprofit that seeks breakthroughs
in human health. Fr om 2009 to 2012, she
served as director of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.A Sputnik moment for the Health Age