Deirdre Shesgreen and Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY
President Donald Trump has accused China of a coronavirus cover-up, suggested the government may have allowed the disease to spread, and threatened to extract a “substantial” price from Beijing for the pandemic.
Chinese officials have charged the Trump administration with willful ignorance,dangerous mismanagement and even attempted “blackmail.”
The near-daily bomb-throwing between Washington and Beijing has alarmed national security experts who fear a new “Cold War” is brewing between the two superpowers at a moment of global crisis.
"This is such a dangerous dynamic for the world," said Rachel Esplin Odell, a China expert with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which advocates restraint in U.S. military policy.
“Both governments are trying to profit domestically off the other's failures," she said, fighting fire with fire as the world burns.
The fallout could be far-reaching – prolonging the pandemic, deepening the global economic crisis, jeopardizing delicate trade talks and opening new geopolitical rifts, Odell and others said.
"This is kind of the archetypal issue on which you would hope to have cooperation among the whole world – but especially among leading powers – because the downside is so high when you don’t have it," said Jacob Stokes, a senior China policy analyst with the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan institute.
U.S.-China relations are "the worst they’ve been in nearly 50 years," said Stokes, a former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.
One of the first casualties could be the much-touted trade deal Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed at the White House in January – a "phase one" agreement that White House officials said would be followed by a broader pact dealing with more contentious issues.
It's unclear if China will be willing or able to follow through on its commitments in phase one, which included a promise to buy an extra $200 billion in American goods and services over the next two years – from agricultural products to cars to medical instruments.
Stokes said that pledge was going to be hard to fulfill in normal economic times. With China's economy now shrinking because of the pandemic, President Xi Jinping's government may seek to renegotiate or renege on the deal.
"And can you have phase two if phase one didn’t work?" Stokes said. "That’s a big challenge."
On Monday, Trump's treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he expected Xi to follow through on the January agreement despite the increased tensions and the economic crunch.
If Trump follows through on threats of new tariffs or other economic retaliation, it could dramatically worsen the economic crisis, Odell.
"It would have a chilling effect on the global economy and markets," she said.
A senior Chinese official, Executive Le Yucheng, dismissed Trump's remarks as a "farce" and likened the idea of reparations to "blackmail." In an interview April 29 with NBC News, Le accused the Trump administration of doing nothing for 50 days after China locked down the coronavirus' epicenter and warned of its deadly spread.
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