Cadence of Conflict: Asia, March 2, 2020

Wuhan 2019-nCoV will not end the world. But, it is throwing the world into panic. The long-time NIAID director steps out of lock with the president and gives a sobering warning about how viruses actually spread. Bad as the truth is, the stock market is drastically overreacting and Trump is trying to prevent a panic—or that’s at least what we’re all supposed to think. We can’t have the truth of both bad and good news told to a public that dwells on the bad and ignores the good. Presidents know that, disease directors not so much. So, the director should get the muzzle, right?

That will cause more panic. Where panic and fear of China weren’t enough to keep Americans from making China rich at Walmart for decades, fear of China’s virus spreading at Walmart is making up for lost panic.

This is the perfect storm for those who chose not to prepare. The virus won’t kill the world, but the world is panicking and will carry a grudge for what a Chinese virus did to the stock market. Once the virus passes, the world will have time to clean house. China will be blamed, as it should for it’s mismatched priorities, then the world will cut China down to the size it never should have been allowed to grow past.

But in the meantime, the Chinese people are re-evaluating their own priorities, deciding whether their president has his own priorities in order. We could be looking at more killing fields, where citizens who fell for the games of self-censorship and spreading Communist propaganda are executed as cowards. Hopefully it won’t come to that. But, China will face the enemies that it made on the inside while it also faces the enemies that made it big from the outside.

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