While the world is in the midst of this coronavirus outbreak, few are talking about accountability. There isn’t even a consensus on what to call it. Early on, CNN and NBC referred to it as “China Flu” or “Wuhan Flu,” until someone warned this could be a racial slur. In horror, those news networks realized they had walked into their own identity politics trap and had been “hoisted by their own petard.” So, those same reporters brazenly began calling Mr. Trump a racist for repeating the same terminology ? as Fox News host Tucker Carlson has since reminded them. The Chinese government’s view is that, although the flu virus may have started in Wuhan, this doesn’t mean it was “made in China.” This was then ramped up by a surprisingly undiplomatic claim from within the Chinese foreign ministry that the virus was created by the U.S. Army. In contrast, some very brave scientists at the South China University of Technology claimed it escaped from a disease research laboratory in Wuhan city after one of the workers there got infected. But there could be an altogether different reason for China wanting to distance itself from owning the virus. In America, BP was forced to pay around $65 billion in compensation after it was found guilty of negligence for the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. Volkswagen has already paid around $30 billion around the world for cheating on emissions tests and that figure is set to grow substantially due to claims now being heard in Germany.

To anyone who followed what happened as the SARS scare mounted in 2003, the events of the last couple of months seem like “deja vu all over again” with potentially far more deadly consequences. When the dangers inherent in the emergence of the COVID-19 or coronavirus sank in, the WHO sprang into action, convening an emergency meeting attended by health professionals from around the world ? with the exception of Taiwan. More than a million Taiwanese were in China at the end of the year. They’ve had a hard time getting home and Taiwanese officials believe their citizens stranded in China aren’t getting the treatment they need. Their pleas for transparency and offers to help, however, are ignored by Communist authorities seemingly more interested in their political position than the health of people they claim to care about so much. The world had mostly forgotten China’s lack of transparency and willingness to fully cooperate with the effort to defeat the SARS epidemic, but if the current coronavirus proves itself as dangerous as some suspect, no one is likely to forget or forgive a nation that doesn’t put politics aside to save lives. SARS was a coronavirus, too, but a seemingly weaker cousin of the current virus. Minimizing its impact will require a politics-free international response. If China wants to be remembered as part of that response Beijing should let the world know that to that end it will no longer object to Taiwan’s membership in the WHO regardless of two nations’ continuing political differences ? and if it won’t, the rest of the world should ignore China’s objections.

It goes almost without saying that it is foolhardy to play politics with a impending pandemic. Rising above politics, however, is tough for politicians and almost impossible for China’s Communist rulers who always and in every way put their ideological interests above all else regardless of the consequences to others. Nowhere are the potential risks of putting politics above all else more acute than in dealing with the various flu-like pandemics that have a tendency to emerge first in China and then spread to surrounding countries and the rest of the world. Perhaps the best example of China’s willingness to ignore any risk to promote its political agenda can be seen in Beijing’s continuing opposition to Taiwan’s membership in the World Health Organization or WHO. The United States and other nations argued that excluding Taiwan from the WHO was a danger not just to the Taiwanese, but to the world. As one health expert said at the time, its exclusion would leave “a hole” in the international safety net protecting the world from diseases that cross international borders. Obviously, Beijing’s leaders were risking much for purely political reasons and had to realize that by doing so they might, sometime in the future, put their citizens and the world in danger, but considered it a risk worth taking. That cost of putting ideology above all else first became jarringly apparent during the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS that migrated from China to much of the rest of the world. Beijing kept the WHO from working with Taiwan. The outbreak was contained, but nearly 350 people died on the Chinese mainland and another 37 lost their lives in Taiwan.

The battle against COVID-19 is reaching into every facet of American life ? as churches and corporations, events and business strategies are disrupted, and leaders are required to adjust in ways similar to a national mobilization effort for a major war. In its wake, this will radically change how Americans think, engage with the world and behave. Since World War II, economists have promoted globalization governed by rules for equitable competition as an enlightened policy to raise living standards Foreign policy experts embraced economic interdependence as a pillar of defense against aggression. Nations that depend on one another for their critical necessities and prosperity were posited to be less likely to launch missiles and send troops across national frontiers. Much like the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, disruption in the supply chains for automobiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals and other industries threaten a “supply-side recession” that orthodox demand-boosting stimulus spending and monetary policy can’t address. Revelations about dependence on China for essential ingredients in life-saving drugs lay bare the folly of intense integration with an authoritarian regime that suppressed warnings from doctors who first detected COVID-19 and enabled the disease to spread through weeks of denial. Great self-sufficiency ? or at least reliance limited to competent allies for critical materials ? should now be a national security imperative. The blind worship of globalism and multilateral institutions among the academics and other thought leaders who influence American foreign policy should now be discarded for a more sophisticated realism.

The author argues that international federations and institutions, equipped with abstract, universalist ideals, are inherently imperialist, even when they take subtle, non-military and seemingly benign forms. No less than openly aggressive imperialism, what Mr. Hazony terms the liberal construction of the world spreads dogmatism, fanaticism, hate and intolerance. Mr. Hazony is keen to redeem nationalism from its current ill repute. He argues for “a world of independent national states [as] the best political order to which we can aspire.” Religion plays a central role, with the idea’s origins located in the Hebrew Bible and its fulfillment in what he calls the Protestant construction built in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. In those countries, a cacophony of divergent voices competing with each other drove improvement in all fields of human endeavor, creating unprecedented wealth. Americans should easily understand the benefits of pluralism, for the United States, states famously serve as 50 laboratories of democracy. So, too, are the 44 sovereign countries of Europe, where a positive breakthrough in one (say, religious tolerance) is often emulated by others, while a terrible idea (welcoming a million unvetted non-European migrants) is shunned. “It is only through the many national experiments that we can learn, over historical time, what is in fact best.” Seeing national states as vulnerable, Mr. Hazony welcomes the turn to nationalism manifested by Brexit, Donald Trump, seeing this as a necessary popular revolt against the liberal construction, a testimony to the common-sense nationalism of the masses versus the self-interested imperialism of the experts.

Yoram Hazony’s breathtakingly counterintuitive book, “The Virtue of Nationalism”, corrects a simple but colossal mistake: The Nazi monstrosity, he argues, did not result from nationalism but from imperialism. Hitler aspired not to make Germany great in education, justice and industry, but to create a thousand-year Reich (empire) and conquer the world. This fact, obvious to everyone during World War II, soon thereafter disappeared from sight because post-war Germans, especially Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (in office 1949-63), believed that demonizing nationalism and transforming Germans into model Europeans would best serve to normalize their country and hinder yet another German drive to brutal conquest. Or, in Mr. Hazony’s more pungent formulation, the Germans decided to pursue their imperial dream not through invasion but through the gentler mechanism of what today is called the European Union (EU). He relentlessly distinguishes virtuous nationalism (“nations ... able to chart their own independent course”) from evil imperialism (“An imperial state … is always a despotic state”). Today, imperialism is rampant: Most obviously, China’s wealth enables Xi Jinping’s global ambition, with Russia and Iran similarly ambitious. Less obviously, liberal imperialism has wide appeal in the West. It includes George H.W. Bush’s “new world order,” and Barack Obama’s “American leadership.” In a striking historical analogy, Mr. Hazony compares rival European and American would-be imperial orders to those of the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, with the former pair claiming moral pre-eminence and the latter pair boasting military might.

2018 was a year of hope, with a historic summit in Singapore between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un. An agreement was reached, with the United States committing to eventually normalizing relations with the North and ending the Korean War with a Peace Treaty. The North committed to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. A subsequent U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi in February 2019 failed to move the process forward. So, where do we go from here? It’s obvious that North Korea will do its best to retain some if not all of its nuclear weapons and facilities. Sanctions alone will not get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and facilities especially if sanction enforcement is problematic. Mr. Kim’s survival depends, in great part, on his nuclear and missile programs. However, a potential package of deliverables possibly could get Mr. Kim back to the negotiation table. These deliverables could be provided, in an action-for-action process, as North Korea dismantles all nuclear weapons and facilities and returns to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state. This process possibly could proceed smoothly if China is supportive, which means the United States will have to work closer with China on a strategy for the dismantlement of nuclear weapons and facilities in North Korea. Currently, North Korea appears confident that it will prevail and eventually be accepted as a nuclear weapons state. The challenge now is to convince North Korea that the United States and China, with the international community, will never accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state.

Iran’s health care system, to the extent it has one, is totally overwhelmed. Last week, Iran’s government said it had deployed 300,000 “health care workers” to fight the disease. None of Iran’s actions have helped slow the spread of the disease. China has reportedly slowed the spread of the disease through quarantines, but that news is government-created. In contrast, Israel, which is not yet suffering a large outbreak of the disease, has announced that it will have a vaccine developed in a matter of weeks. Israeli scientists, like ours, are not burdened by government control of their research and news blackouts. Scientists in Israel and the United States reportedly have the ability to “print” viruses. They may also be able to “print” the coronavirus using massive computer power, 3-dimensional printers and some sort of organic material. By that means, it may be possible to develop a vaccine in far less time than by normal means. President Trump has put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of a multi-agency task force that promises openness and a “whole of government” response to the disease. Mr. Pence announced that tests for coronavirus infection are already available for all Americans. Some people returning from China have been quarantined here. Other measures should be imposed to restrict travel to nations where the disease has spread widely and quarantine people coming from them. It is far too soon to predict whether our government’s response to the coronavirus will prevent a deadly epidemic in the United States. It’s a pretty safe bet that it will do far better than the despotisms of China and Iran.

Since then, China has managed to do little to fight the deadly disease except for quarantining whole cities to stop its spread. People were - and are - forbidden to leave their homes except for one designated family member who is allowed out a couple of times a week to buy food. The lockdowns have expanded with the Chinese seeking to protect Beijing. News has been censored by the Chinese government - reporters arrested for trying to report on the Xi Jinping regime’s failures - and there are reports of a force like Mao’s “Red Guards” being sent out to beat people who protest against the government’s handling of the crisis. Mao’s “Red Guards” were an irregular army of high school and college students mobilized in 1966 to fight “counterrevolutionaries” - i.e., reformers - who threatened Mao’s power. They conducted a reign of terror that killed hundreds of thousands. China’s economy has flatlined. In February, production in Chinese factories was the lowest on record. As a result, Mr. Xi’s government has ordered everyone to go back to work around March 16. It’s entirely unclear how effective that order will be. Iran - where the coronavirus killed many people - is both less able to deal with the disease than even China and is lying about the number of deaths and infections. Like China, Iran’s response to its coronavirus has been to prevent publication of news about it and take pointless actions such as sending drones to spray streets with disinfectant. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, which has been a reliable source of news from Iran, reported that cases of infections number about 20 times those reported by the regime.

Medical scientists are learning a great deal from the COVID-19 epidemic, and there are lessons for all of us. Perhaps the most compelling is the lesson that the best responses to any major health crisis cannot come from totalitarian governments. China, which was ground zero for the coronavirus, has forcibly quarantined tens of millions of its people, lied about the disease’s spread and suffered the highest numbers of deaths. Its scientists are doing research, but there is no news about what they have done or what successes they may have achieved. The Xi Jinping regime will hide the news until there are major successes, if such ever occur. The nation which also has suffered a great many deaths, Iran, has similarly lied about the epidemic there. Its health system, to the extent it exists, is incapable of a significant response. The coronavirus has spread to many nations in Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. India expects a major outbreak. The disease can kill, but most people suffer no more than they would from a normal case of flu. The only good thing about the coronavirus outbreak is the relative stability of the virus. Neither of its two identified strains apparently have (yet) mutated into a deadlier disease. Democracies are better than despotisms at fighting disease, as my friend John Batchelor and I discussed on his radio show. Contrast the ways China and Iran are dealing with the coronavirus with the methods and means being employed by the United States and Israel. China is Communist, and, derivatively, totalitarian. When the outbreak of the coronavirus began in the city of Wuhan, the first thing China did was to bury the news. For about six weeks, the Chinese government concealed the problem.