EDITORS' PICK|2,374 views| Mar 30, 2020,09:37 am EDT Forbes Coronavirus Highlights U.S. Strategic Vulnerabilities Spawned By Over-Reliance On China Loren ThompsonSenior Contributor Aerospace & Defense I write about national security, especially its business dimensions. President Trump has been criticized for highlighting the Chinese origins of the current coronavirus crisis. Whether such comments are constructive or not, the crisis has provoked a broader debate about the role that China plays in the American economy. In the two decades since Beijing was admitted to the World Trade Organization, it has gradually eclipsed America’s preeminence as a manufacturing nation. For instance, the U.S. had two dozen aluminum smelters within its borders when the new century began; by the time President Trump took office, only five remained of which two were functioning at full capacity. Chinese smelters have no inherent pricing advantage, so critics have correctly concluded that China became the world’s largest producer (and exporter) of aluminum through the use of subsidies and other trade-distorting practices. A similar pattern prevails in steel, which explains why both industries became early targets of Trump tariffs. More broadly, China has tended to dominate production of every new technology in recent years, from smart phones to wind turbines to solar panels to commercial drones. U.S. officials are unanimous in agreeing that at least part of the reason China has become the world’s biggest manufacturing center is traceable to the kind of mercantilist practices supposedly banned by WTO rules. What brought coronavirus into this discussion was Washington’s realization early in the pandemic of how dependent the U.S. has become on Chinese sources of drugs. The South China Morning Post reported in December that almost all of the ibuprofen and hydrocortisone, and most of the acetaminophen, consumed in the U.S. originates in China. So do many generic prescription drugs; even when they are manufactured in India or other countries, they often require active ingredients made only in China. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration admits it lacks the capacity to track the supply chain of imported drugs. The value of those pharmaceutical imports, at $350 million per day, exceeds the value of cell phone imports. The U.S. thus may have developed vulnerabilities in the availability of drugs needed during wartime without knowing it. This is not a xenophobic fantasy. The last penicillin producer in the U.S. closed over a decade ago after facing price competition from heavily subsidized Chinese companies. The South China Morning Post found 80% of antibiotics consumed in the U.S. are made in China. There is no indication this occurred with a military purpose in mind, but that doesn’t mean Beijing wouldn’t leverage what one author calls its “global chokehold” on drugs and their constituent compounds in a conflict. But drugs are just the beginning of the problem. The U.S. h.

1. EDITORS' PICK|2,374 views| Mar 30, 2020,09:37 am EDT
Forbes
Coronavirus Highlights U.S. Strategic Vulnerabilities Spawned
By Over-Reliance On China
Loren ThompsonSenior Contributor
Aerospace & Defense
I write about national security, especially its business
dimensions.
President Trump has been criticized for highlighting the
Chinese origins of the current coronavirus crisis. Whether such
comments are constructive or not, the crisis has provoked a
broader debate about the role that China plays in the American
economy.
In the two decades since Beijing was admitted to the World
Trade Organization, it has gradually eclipsed America’s
preeminence as a manufacturing nation. For instance, the U.S.
had two dozen aluminum smelters within its borders when the
new century began; by the time President Trump took office,
only five remained of which two were functioning at full
capacity.
Chinese smelters have no inherent pricing advantage, so critics
have correctly concluded that China became the world’s largest
producer (and exporter) of aluminum through the use of
subsidies and other trade-distorting practices. A similar pattern
prevails in steel, which explains why both industries became
early targets of Trump tariffs.
More broadly, China has tended to dominate production of
every new technology in recent years, from smart phones to
wind turbines to solar panels to commercial drones. U.S.
officials are unanimous in agreeing that at least part of the
reason China has become the world’s biggest manufacturing
center is traceable to the kind of mercantilist practices
supposedly banned by WTO rules.

2. What brought coronavirus into this discussion was
Washington’s realization early in the pandemic of how
dependent the U.S. has become on Chinese sources of drugs.
The South China Morning Post reported in December that
almost all of the ibuprofen and hydrocortisone, and most of the
acetaminophen, consumed in the U.S. originates in China. So do
many generic prescription drugs; even when they are
manufactured in India or other countries, they often require
active ingredients made only in China.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration admits it lacks the
capacity to track the supply chain of imported drugs. The value
of those pharmaceutical imports, at $350 million per day,
exceeds the value of cell phone imports. The U.S. thus may
have developed vulnerabilities in the availability of drugs
needed during wartime without knowing it.
This is not a xenophobic fantasy. The last penicillin producer in
the U.S. closed over a decade ago after facing price competition
from heavily subsidized Chinese companies. The South China
Morning Post found 80% of antibiotics consumed in the U.S. are
made in China.
There is no indication this occurred with a military purpose in
mind, but that doesn’t mean Beijing wouldn’t leverage what one
author calls its “global chokehold” on drugs and their
constituent compounds in a conflict.
But drugs are just the beginning of the problem. The U.S. has
relinquished leadership in so many industries over the last two
decades that it now incurs non-energy merchandise trade
deficits bigger than those of any other nation in history.
Numerous vulnerabilities in militarily-relevant technologies are
hidden in the statistics, and increasingly those vulnerabilities
result from over-reliance on Chinese sources. Here are just
three of them.
Shipping.In its bicentennial year of 1976, the United States was
the biggest builder of commercial oceangoing vessels in the
world. Dozens of ships were under construction at domestic
shipyards. The Reagan Administration wiped out the industry

3. (and 40,000 jobs) by eliminating construction subsidies without
seeking reciprocal action from other shipbuilding nations.
That was a self-inflicted wound. But then in 2006, Beijing
designated commercial shipbuilding as a strategic industry and
began channeling massive state subsidies to the sector. End
result: China has become by far the biggest producer of
commercial ships in the world, while fewer than 200 ships in
the global fleet of 44,000 oceangoing vessels are American.
The U.S. today barely manages to rank among the top 20
commercial shipbuilding nations (it’s number 19), and all of the
oceangoing ships built recently in America were for use on
protected domestic routes. Industry experts say without that
protection, the commercial shipbuilding sector and the U.S.
merchant marine would literally cease to exist.
The collapse of U.S. commercial shipping has created a looming
shortfall in sealift for moving military supplies in wartime.
China has secured control of numerous foreign ports as its
maritime footprint expands (including at both ends of the
Panama Canal), and shippers in other nations have increasingly
declined to carry U.S. military cargo for fear of offending
Beijing. Meanwhile, U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea
are consolidating their shipyards to meet the challenge posed by
subsidized Chinese yards.
Semiconductors.Semiconductors such as memory chips and
processors lie at the heart of modern electronic hardware. The
U.S. leads the world in semiconductor design and fabrication,
including development of equipment for manufacturing chips.
However, the shift from analog to digital technology was
accompanied by a migration of electronics manufacturing to
Asia. According to The Economist, most of the world’s
electronic manufacturing capacity now resides in China.
As a result, U.S. chip companies like Intel and Qualcomm are
heavily dependent on China for their revenues and returns. In
2018, 36% of U.S. semiconductor sales were to Chinese
customers, with revenues exceeding $80 billion. The Trump
Administration’s efforts to limit Huawei’s role in implementing

4. 5G technology around the world have provoked fear that U.S.
semiconductor makers could be cut off from a vital source of
income.
Although the U.S. is ahead of China in many 5G technologies, it
does not have a domestic provider for key hardware. Thus, if
U.S. chip companies are shut out of the China market, their role
in global adoption of 5G will be limited. That would have major
military implications, given the myriad ways in which 5G can
be applied to communications, logistics, robotics and other
activities.
China has accelerated efforts to expand its indigenous
semiconductor sector, with an eye to replacing U.S. suppliers.
In 2017 plans were announced for a $30 billion semiconductor
factory, and Huawei is investing heavily in developing chips for
its smart phones. As these initiatives unfold, the outlook for the
U.S. semiconductor industry will dim.
Batteries.Lithium-ion batteries are arguably the most important
technology used in designing and building electric vehicles. The
same technology figures prominently in smart phones and laptop
computers, thanks to the unique conductive properties of
lithium. Relative to size, the batteries are efficient and
affordable ways of storing energy, a fact well recognized by
military planners.
This is another cutting-edge industry that Beijing has subsidized
in pursuit of market dominance, and the assistance—which
began in 2013—has worked. Forbes senior contributor Robert
Rapier notedin an August 4 commentary that 73% of global
lithium cell manufacturing capacity is located in China. The
United States is in second place with 12%. Even if China was
not a leading producer of lithium, this disparity in market
shares would guarantee its industry a pricing advantage.
China’s edge will likely grow with time, because the country’s
electric vehicle market is bigger than America’s and growing
faster. If recent patterns in the adoption of new technology
repeat, U.S. car companies will be tempted to turn to Chinese
sources for their batteries rather than sustaining domestic

5. production that lacks economies of scale. That is what has
happened in other industries.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about all of the
aforementioned vulnerabilities—drugs, ships, chips and
batteries—is that they emerged without most of official
Washington noticing. President Trump is the first chief
executive to see the growing gap between Chinese and
American manufacturing capabilities as a strategic challenge
requiring long-term policy changes. He said as much in an
executive order issued on July 21, 2017.
Tariffs may not be the optimum response, but it is no
coincidence that America’s rise as an industrial colossus
unfolded behind the highest tariff walls in the world—walls
first erected by Abraham Lincoln that remained in place until
after World War Two. With a defense posture grounded in the
assumption of technological superiority, it is hard to see how
America can remain a military superpower if current industrial
trends continue.
Loren Thompson
I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of
defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-
profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive…Prior to holding
my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Security
Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-
level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at
Georgetown. I have also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy
School of Government. I hold doctoral and masters degrees in
government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of
science degree in political science from Northeastern
University. Disclosure: The Lexington Institute receives
funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors,
including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and United
Technologies

6. Defense One
The COVID-19 Models Probably Don’t Say What You Think
They Say
By Zeynep Tufekci
April 2, 2020
The Trump administration has just released the model for the
trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in America. We can
expect a lot of back-and-forth about whether its mortality
estimates are too high or low. And its wide range of possible
outcomes is certainly confusing: What’s the right number? The
answer is both difficult and simple. Here’s the difficult part:
There is no right answer. But here’s the simple part: Right
answers are not what epidemiological models are for.
Epidemiologists routinely turn to models to predict the
progression of an infectious disease. Fighting public suspicion
of these models is as old as modern epidemiology, which traces
its origins back to John Snow’s famous cholera maps in 1854.
Those maps proved, for the first time that London’s terrible
affliction was spreading through crystal-clear fresh water that
came out of pumps, not the city’s foul-smelling air. Many
people didn’t believe Snow, because they lived in a world
without a clear understanding of germ theory and only the most
rudimentary microscopes.
In our time, however, the problem is sometimes that people
believe epidemiologists, and then get mad when their models
aren’t crystal balls. Take the United Kingdom’s drastic COVID-
19 policy U-turn. A few weeks ago, the U.K. had almost no
social-isolation measures in place, and according to some
reports, the government planned to let the virus run its
course through the population, with the exception of the elderly,
who were to be kept indoors. The idea was to let enough people
get sick and recover from the mild version of the disease, to

7. create “herd immunity.”
Things changed swiftly after an epidemiological model from
Imperial College London projected that without drastic
interventions, more than half a million Britons would die
from COVID-19. The report also projected more than 2 million
deaths in the United States, again barring interventions. The
stark numbers prompted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson,
who himself has tested positive for COVID-19, to change
course, shutting down public life and ordering the population to
stay at home.
Here’s the tricky part: When an epidemiological model is
believed and acted on, it can look like it was false. These
models are not snapshots of the future. They always describe a
range of possibilities—and those possibilities are highly
sensitive to our actions. A few days after the U.K. changed its
policies, Neil Ferguson, the scientist who led the Imperial
College team, testified before Parliament that he expected
deaths in the U.K. to top out at about 20,000.
The drastically lower number caused shock waves: One
former New York Timesreporter described it as a “a remarkable
turn,” and the British tabloid the Daily Mailran a story about
how the scientist had a “patchy” record in modeling. The
conservative site The Federalist even declared, “The Scientist
Whose Doomsday Pandemic Model Predicted Armageddon Just
Walked Back the Apocalyptic Predictions.”
But there was no turn, no walking back, not even a revision in
the model. If you read the original paper, the model lays out a
range of predictions—from tens of thousands to 500,000 dead—
which all depend on how people react. That variety of potential
outcomes coming from a single epidemiological model may
seem extreme and even counterintuitive. But that’s an intrinsic

8. part of how they operate, because epidemics are especially
sensitive to initial inputs and timing, and because epidemics
grow exponentially.
Modeling an exponential process necessarily produces a wide
range of outcomes. In the case of COVID-19, that’s because the
spread of the disease depends on exactly when you stop cases
from doubling. Even a few days can make an enormous
difference. In Italy, two similar regions, Lombardy and Veneto,
took different approaches to the community spread of the
epidemic. Both mandated social distancing, but only Veneto
undertook massive contact tracing and testing early on. Despite
starting from very similar points, Lombardy is now tragically
overrun with the disease, having experienced roughly 7,000
deaths and counting, while Veneto has managed to mostly
contain the epidemic to a few hundred fatalities. Similarly,
South Korea and the United States had their first case diagnosed
on the same day, but South Korea undertook massive tracing
and testing, and the United States did not. Now South Korea has
only 162 deaths, and an outbreak that seems to have leveled off,
while the U.S. is approaching 4,000 deaths as the virus’s
spread accelerates.
Exponential growth isn’t the only tricky part of epidemiological
models. These models also need to use parameters to plug into
the variables in the equations. But where should those
parameters come from? Model-makers have to work with the
data they have, yet a novel virus, such as the one that
causes COVID-19, has a lot of unknowns.
For example, the Imperial College model uses numbers from
Wuhan, China, along with some early data from Italy. This is a
reasonable choice, as those are the pandemic’s largest
epicenters. But many of these data are not yet settled, and many
questions remain. What’s the attack rate—the number of people
who get infected within an exposed group, like a household? Do

9. people who recover have immunity? How widespread are
asymptomatic cases, and how infectious are they? Are there
super-spreaders—people who seemingly infect everyone they
breathe near—as there were with SARS, and how prevalent are
they? What are the false positive and false negative rates of our
tests? And so on, and on and on.
To make models work, epidemiologists also have to estimate the
impact of interventions like social isolation. But here, too, the
limited data we have are imperfect, perhaps censored, perhaps
inapplicable. For example, China underwent a period in which
the government yanked infected patients and even their healthy
close contacts from their homes, and sent them into special
quarantine wards. That seems to have dramatically cut down
infections within a household and within the city. Relatively
few infected people in the United States or the United Kingdom
have been similarly quarantined.
In general, the lockdown in China was much more severe.
Planes are still taking off from New York, New Jersey, and
everywhere else, even as we speak of “social isolation.” And
more complications remain. We aren’t even sure we can trust
China’s numbers. Italy’s health statistics are likely more
trustworthy, but its culture of furbizia—or flouting the rules,
part of the country’s charm as well as its dysfunction—
increases the difficulty of knowing how applicable its outcomes
are to our projections.
A model’s robustness depends on how often it gets tried out and
tweaked based on data and its performance. For example, many
models predicting presidential elections are based on data from
presidential elections since 1972. That’s all the elections we
have polling data for, but it’s only 12 elections, and prior to
2016, only two happened in the era of Facebook.
So when Donald Trump, the candidate that was projected to be

10. less likely to win the presidency in 2016, won anyway, did that
mean that our models with TV-era parameters don’t work
anymore? Or is it merely that a less likely but possible outcome
happened? (If you’re flipping a coin, you’ll get four heads in a
row about one every 16 tries, meaning that you can’t know if
the coin is loaded just because something seemingly unusual
happens). With this novel coronavirus, there are a lot of things
we don’t know because we’ve never tested our models, and we
have no way to do so.
So if epidemiological models don’t give us certainty—and
asking them to do so would be a big mistake—what good are
they? Epidemiology gives us something more important: agency
to identify and calibrate our actions with the goal of shaping
our future. We can do this by pruning catastrophic branches of a
tree of possibilities that lies before us.
Epidemiological models have “tails”—the extreme ends of the
probability spectrum. They’re called tails because, visually,
they are the parts of the graph that taper into the distance.
Think of those tails as branches in a decision tree. In most
scenarios, we end up somewhere in the middle of the tree—the
big bulge of highly probable outcomes—but there are a few
branches on the far right and the far left that represent fairly
optimistic and fairly pessimistic, but less likely, outcomes.
An optimistic tail projection for the COVID-19 pandemic is that
a lot of people might have already been infected and recovered,
and are now immune, meaning we are putting ourselves through
a too-intense quarantine. Some people have floated that as a
likely scenario, and they are not crazy: This is indeed a
possibility, especially given that our testing isn’t widespread
enough to know. The other tail includes the catastrophic
possibilities, like tens of millions of people dying, as in the
1918 flu or HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The most important function of epidemiological models is as a
simulation, a way to see our potential futures ahead of time, and

11. how that interacts with the choices we make today.
With COVID-19 models, we have one simple, urgent goal: to
ignore all the optimistic branches and that thick trunk in the
middle representing the most likely outcomes.
Instead, we need to focus on the branches representing the worst
outcomes, and prune them with all our might. Social isolation
reduces transmission, and slows the spread of the disease. In
doing so, it chops off branches that represent some of the worst
futures. Contact tracing catches people before they infect
others, pruning more branches that represent
unchecked catastrophes.
At the beginning of a pandemic, we have the disadvantage of
higher uncertainty, but the advantage of being early: The costs
of our actions are lower because the disease is less widespread.
As we prune the tree of the terrible, unthinkable branches, we
are not just choosing a path; we are shaping the underlying
parameters themselves, because the parameters themselves are
not fixed. If our hospitals are not overrun, we will have fewer
deaths and thus a lower fatality rate.
That’s why we shouldn’t get bogged down in litigating a
model’s numbers. Instead we should focus on the parameters we
can change, and change them.
Every time the White House releases a COVID-19 model, we
will be tempted to drown ourselves in endless discussions about
the error bars, the clarity around the parameters, the wide range
of outcomes, and the applicability of the underlying data. And
the media might be tempted to cover those discussions, as this
fits their horse-race, he-said-she-said scripts. Let’s not. We
should instead look at the calamitous branches of our decision
tree and chop them all off, and then chop them off again.
Sometimes, when we succeed in chopping off the end of the
pessimistic tail, it looks like we overreacted. A near miss can
make a model look false. But that’s not always what happened.
It just means we won. And that’s why we model.

12. By Zeynep Tufekci // Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor
at the University of North Carolina, and a faculty associate at
the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She
studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial
intelligence, and society.
April 2, 2020
The Wall Street Journal
Will the Coronavirus Bring the End of Globalization? Don’t
Count on It
The Covid-19 pandemic is closing borders and disrupting supply
chains, but it can’t stop our long-term movement toward a more
interconnected world
By Zachary Karabell
Over the past week, the coronavirus has gone from an Asian
contagion with ripple effects on international supply chains to a
global pandemic that will plunge the whole world into
recession. Travel has been halted across the globe. Borders are
shut. Hundreds of millions of people are in effective lockdown
in the European Union, and the U.S. is heading in that direction.
The crisis has erased trillions of dollars from global stock
markets and imperiled the future of millions of small businesses
around the world, along with the livelihoods of vast numbers of
wage earners.
In the months ahead, we are likely to see one of the sharpest
economic contractions on record, and the downturn will
undoubtedly serve as yet more evidence for those who have
argued in recent years that globalization is coming to an end, or
at least being rolled back. Nicolas Tenzer, chair of the Cerap
think tank in Paris, argues that the rising barriers in response to
the virus will strengthen “the populist and nationalist forces
that have long called for reinforcing borders. It is a true gift for
them.” The veteran U.S. market commentator Gary Shilling

13. recently wrote, “The coronavirus’s depressing effects on the
global economy and disruptions of supply chains is…driving the
last nail into the coffin of the globalists.” Ian Bremmer, founder
of the risk-consultancy Eurasia Group, sees a starker era ahead,
including more palpable tension between the U.S. and China.
“Globalization has been the biggest driver of economic growth,”
he says. “Its trajectory is now shifting, largely for geopolitical
reasons, and that will be accelerated by the coronavirus crisis.”
A Chinese container ship in the port of Hamburg, Germany,
March 3.
PHOTO: KRISZTIAN BOCSI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
In the midst of our current spiral, it is hard to resist such dire
forecasts. But we should. There is every reason to think that our
post-coronavirus future will see not an end to the globalizing
trend of recent decades but a new chapter in that story. The
sudden halt in commerce and travel precipitated by the outbreak
will not snap back overnight, and the next few years will see a
re-nationalization of some industries for countries that can. But
when this crisis passes, we are likely to find fresh confirmation
of what we already know about globalization: that it’s easy to
hate, convenient to target and impossible to stop.
Even before the virus, there were indications of both a pause
and a modest pullback in globalization. Last year, global trade
contracted a smidgen, by less than 1%, but at $19 trillion, it was
still higher than any year before the record-setting 2018. As for
China and the U.S., the dual effect of the Trump
administration’s tariffs and the assertive nationalism of Xi
Jinping put a brake on further integration. Data from the U.S.
Census Bureau show that the total value of trade in goods
between the two countries declined from $630 billion in 2017 to
$560 billion in 2019. Even so, this pullback just puts the U.S.
and China back at the trade level of 2013. And that amount, it
should be noted, is almost five times what it was in 2001. In
short, even after two years of trade war and diplomatic
acrimony, the key axis of globalization was dented, but only

14. barely.
As the U.S. was erecting tariffs, the Chinese government, for its
part, was ramping up spending abroad. Since 2014, China’s Belt
and Road Initiative has invested almost $1 trillion in Latin
America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and
elsewhere. According to the consulting firm Gavekal
Dragonomics, the rate of new Chinese investment slowed to just
over $100 billion last year, but the initiative remains an
incontrovertible example of China-driven globalization.
China appears committed to more engagement with the outside
world, not less.
Nor is the coronavirus likely to reverse that trend. A recent
report from the Carnegie Endowment notes that, as China
emerges more swiftly from the crisis than other parts of the
world, its leaders are hinting that they plan to increase
investments abroad in a world that will be hungry for capital. In
recent weeks, Beijing has delivered medical supplies, equipment
and doctors to Italy and other EU countries. As the crisis
expands, China appears committed to more engagement with the
outside world, not less.
The same has been true for the private sector in the U.S. Even
before the eruption of the coronavirus, there was considerable
discussion of the need for economic decoupling from China. But
displeasure with the bilateral relationship hasn’t meant any real
retrenchment away from globalization for American firms; they
have instead tried to diversify and establish connections to
other parts of the world.
Apple, for instance, had bet heavily on China as a
manufacturing and distribution hub as well as a burgeoning
market, which made the company vulnerable when tensions and
tariffs flared. As The Journal recently reported, Apple is now
looking to move some of its China-based operations elsewhere,
in reaction to both the trade war and the supply chain havoc
caused by the coronavirus. But the company’s likeliest move
will be to other locations in East Asia, not to American shores.

15. The recently rejiggered North American free-trade agreement is
another instance of continued U.S. commitment to globalization,
even on the part of the skeptical Trump administration. The
agreement is designed to facilitate more trade, and the scale of
continental trade is indeed increasing. Mexico is now the largest
U.S. trading partner, outstripping both Canada and China.
Data compiled by the Organization for International Investment
show that foreign direct investment in the U.S., although down
in 2019 after reaching a peak in 2015 and 2016 of $500 billion,
was still above the level of every other prior year. On the other
side of the equation, U.S. investment abroad decreased to just
under $6 trillion at the end of 2018 (the last year for which data
is available) due to repatriation of earnings held by companies
abroad. But to put that number in perspective: It was barely $1
trillion in 2001.
The same pattern pertains everywhere. In Europe, Brexit
notwithstanding, economic integration continues apace. In fact,
Brexit spurred a substantial increase in cross-border
investments within the remaining eurozone countries. The shock
of one of its key members leaving seems to have redoubled the
efforts of the remaining 27 nations to draw closer, with a 43%
increase in 2019 alone, according to data firm FDI Markets. A
study from the London School of Economics shows that Brexit
even spurred more British investment in Europe, with an
increase of 12% between the 2016 referendum and the end of
2018.
With the coronavirus now hitting the whole continent with
growing force, Europe’s north-south divisions will subside.
The post-coronavirus recovery is certain to bring increased
spending from individual European governments and the EU
itself. Europe’s recovery from the financial crisis of 2007-08
was hampered by north-south divisions. With the coronavirus
now hitting the whole continent with growing force, those
divisions will subside. The European Central Bank has already
announced a €750 billion ($810 billion) bond-buying program;
in the worst phase of the last financial crisis, it took months of

16. acrimonious debate for the ECB to do much at all.
Post-virus investment is likely to pick up as well throughout
Latin America, Africa and especially East Asia, where the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (absent the U.S.) has streamlined
economic relations. Such connections will expand in the wake
of the present crisis, for reasons not of altruism but of self-
interest.
The coronavirus pandemic is, obviously, a negative byproduct
of our hyper-connected world, and it has brought about a nearly
complete halt of global travel and tourism. When countries were
truly more like islands, diseases had less opportunity to skip
from population to population. The scale of travel today for
tourism, trade and business has made it far harder to contain a
pandemic. In 1950, according to the U.N. World Tourism
Organization, there were 25 million tourist arrivals; last year,
there were 14 billion.
And tourism has become a booming business across the world.
Between 2006 and 2019, it grew from $5 trillion in direct and
indirect value to more than $9 trillion. The continuing collapse
of demand for travel will be acutely felt and ripple around the
world, from Cambodian resorts to Mexican beaches and New
York musicals.
Yet tourism and travel, along with the related phenomenon of
millions of students from dozens of countries studying abroad,
are among the more potent symbols of how deeply
interconnected the world has become. The alarming spread of
the coronavirus in recent weeks has indeed provoked a
drawbridge reaction in many countries, but the response also
suggests that the only reliable inoculation against future
pandemics will be transnational cooperation.
The only reliable inoculation against future pandemics will be
transnational cooperation.
By all accounts, such coordination is already in play in the
medical and scientific community, as they race to understand
the virus and create cures and treatments. More international
partnerships will be necessary as we assess the economic

17. wreckage that the pandemic will leave. Enlightened self-interest
in working together to prevent such a crisis from happening
again could well trump the knee-jerk reaction to retreat to
national fortresses that are anything but secure.
Though months without familiar modes of travel may forever
change patterns of behavior, judging from how people have
snapped back after previous crises, that seems unlikely. Once
the worst has passed, we may find waves of pent-up demand for
millions of people to venture once more into the world, this
time with coordinated health screening across countries akin to
what emerged in the post-9/11 world to prevent the flow of
people, money and goods that might support terrorist
organizations.
And then there is the flow of capital. Markets in the past few
weeks have crashed globally, in sync and almost
simultaneously. In the U.S., as much as $10 trillion has been
erased from markets. Every major market in the world saw
equities lose 20% to 30%, and bonds have swung wildly and
destructively.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Do you think globalization will—or should—survive the
coronavirus crisis? Join the conversation below.
But it isn’t just goods and people that have circled the world in
ever more energetic motion over the past two decades; money
has too. In the past 15 years, according to the Federal Reserve,
U.S. holdings of foreign securities rose from $6 trillion to more
than $12 trillion, and similar explosive growth occurred for
countries around the world. That has gone hand in hand with
loosening rules on capital flows. China alone, among major
economic players, has meaningful capital restrictions, and only
its domestic markets move out of sync with the financial
markets of the rest of the world.
The absence of any real capital controls and the vastly increased
appetite to invest everywhere is why financial markets began
crashing once the coronavirus leapt from China. It took weeks
for the disease itself to move from South Korea to Europe to the

18. U.S., but it only took days for the financial contagion to spread.
That is the pain of the moment for investors, but it is also
provides a glimmer of the possible pace and scale of the global
recovery when it arrives. Money can evaporate in a heartbeat
and flow in an instant.
It is easy to imagine the demise of our massively interdependent
world at a moment when it comes to a rapid, vertiginous halt.
But a sharp contraction caused by a pandemic is not the same as
a permanent reversal of the deep and complicated global
integration of supply chains, markets and daily life built up
over the past two decades. Those relationships are durable and
beneficial and will be difficult to sever. Some are ready to try,
but most of the world isn’t eager to renationalize industry, make
trillions of dollars of global investment worthless and suppress
the appetite for easy travel and free movement of people, goods
and capital. The coronavirus is unlikely to be the moment when
we see the collapse of a broad historical trend that has endured
through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and
innumerable other crises, from 9/11 to the financial upheaval of
2007-08.
The months ahead will feel like the presumptive end of an era
of globalization. And it may be the end of globalization’s first
phase, with its heady optimism and corresponding ideological
and economic backlash. But there will be a next phase, one less
rosy-eyed and less sour as well.
As citizens emerge from various forms of sheltering in place,
they will confront the days of spring with the relief and
bewilderment of our predecessors in World War II emerging
from a bomb shelter the morning after. They will find a changed
world of travel limitations and viral testing but also a massive
global system that remains structurally intact, if on the
defensive philosophically. But the sheer scale of what has been
created over the past several decades, to say nothing of the
enormous benefits that have flowed from it for billions of
people, will preclude a lasting reversal. We will discover that
we are indeed all in this together.

19. Is it possible that we are truly at the end? Yes, but not likely.
Globalization is dead. Long live globalization.
—Mr. Karabell is the author, most recently, of “The Leading
Indicators:
A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World” (Simon
& Schuster).
National Security
The Washington Post
U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned
about a likely pandemic
Shane Harris,
Greg Miller,
Josh Dawsey and
Ellen Nakashima
March 20, 2020 at 8:10 p.m. EDT
U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified
warnings in January and February about the global danger posed
by the coronavirus, while President Trump and lawmakers
played down the threat and failed to take action that might have
slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials
familiar with spy agency reporting.
The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might
land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public
health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the
intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the virus
in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese
officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.
Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early
picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-
encircling pandemic that could require governments to take

20. swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of
reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down
the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did
not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month, as
officials scrambled to keep citizens in their homes and hospitals
braced for a surge in patients suffering from covid-19, the
disease caused by the coronavirus.
Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since
January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence
reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and
their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration,
and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of
anonymity to describe sensitive information.
Coronavirus cases rose as Trump said they were under control
At least seven times over the past two months, President Trump
said the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. were falling or
contained even as they rose. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin
Botsford/The Washington Post)
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of
other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get
him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was
blinking red.”
Spokespeople for the CIA and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence declined to comment, and a White House
spokesman rebutted criticism of Trump’s response.
“President Trump has taken historic, aggressive measures to
protect the health, wealth and safety of the American people —
and did so, while the media and Democrats chose to only focus
on the stupid politics of a sham illegitimate impeachment,”
Hogan Gidley said in a statement. “It’s more than disgusting,
despicable and disgraceful for cowardly unnamed sources to
attempt to rewrite history — it’s a clear threat to this great
country.”

21. Public health experts have criticized China for being slow to
respond to the coronavirus outbreak, which originated in
Wuhan, and have said precious time was lost in the effort to
slow the spread. At a White House briefing Friday, Health and
Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said officials had been
alerted to the initial reports of the virus by discussions that the
director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had
with Chinese colleagues on Jan. 3.
The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in
volume toward the end of January and into early February, said
officials familiar with the reports. By then, a majority of the
intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers and
digests from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who have read
the reports.
The surge in warnings coincided with a move by Sen. Richard
Burr (R-N.C.) to sell dozens of stocks worth between $628,033
and $1.72 million. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Burr was privy to virtually all of the highly
classified reporting on the coronavirus. Burr issued a statement
Friday defending his sell-off, saying he sold based entirely on
publicly available information, and he called for the Senate
Ethics Committee to investigate.
A key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine
whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of
an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis,
according to current and former officials familiar with the
process.
At the State Department, personnel had been nervously tracking
early reports about the virus. One official noted that it was
discussed at a meeting in the third week of January, around the

22. time that cable traffic showed that U.S. diplomats in Wuhan
were being brought home on chartered planes — a sign that the
public health risk was significant. A colleague at the White
House mentioned how concerned he was about the
transmissibility of the virus.
“In January, there was obviously a lot of chatter,” the official
said.
Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him
to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with
knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the
president.
Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the
virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration
officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president
interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping
products would be back on the market, the senior administration
officials said.
On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief
of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior
officials to pay more attention to the virus, according to people
briefed on the meeting. Joe Grogan, the head of the White
House Domestic Policy Council, argued that the administration
needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost the president
his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely to
dominate life in the United States for many months.
Mulvaney then began convening more regular meetings. In early
briefings, however, officials said Trump was dismissive because
he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout
the United States.
By early February, Grogan and others worried that there weren’t
enough tests to determine the rate of infection, according to

23. people who spoke directly to Grogan. Other officials, including
Matthew Pottinger, the president’s deputy national security
adviser, began calling for a more forceful response, according
to people briefed on White House meetings.
But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the
coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other
countries.
“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I
think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a
very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.”
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,”
Trump tweeted five days later. “Stock Market starting to look
very good to me!”
But earlier that month, a senior official in the Department of
Health and Human Services delivered a starkly different
message to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a classified
briefing that four U.S. officials said covered the coronavirus
and its global health implications. The House Intelligence
Committee received a similar briefing.
Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and
response — who was joined by intelligence officials, including
from the CIA — told committee members that the virus posed a
“serious” threat, one of those officials said.
Kadlec didn’t provide specific recommendations, but he said
that to get ahead of the virus and blunt its effects, Americans
would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives,
the official said. “It was very alarming.”
Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his
relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump
believed was providing him with reliable information about how
the virus was spreading in China, despite reports from
intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being

24. candid about the true scale of the crisis.
Some of Trump’s advisers told him that Beijing was not
providing accurate numbers of people who were infected or who
had died, according to administration officials. Rather than
press China to be more forthcoming, Trump publicly praised its
response.
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,”
Trump tweeted Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates
their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In
particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank
President Xi!”
Some of Trump’s advisers encouraged him to be tougher on
China over its decision not to allow teams from the CDC into
the country, administration officials said.
In one February meeting, the president said that if he struck a
tougher tone against Xi, the Chinese would be less willing to
give the Americans information about how they were tackling
the outbreak.
Trump on Feb. 3 banned foreigners who had been in China in
the previous 14 days from entering the United States, a step he
often credits for helping to protect Americans against the virus.
He has also said publicly that the Chinese weren’t honest about
the effects of the virus. But that travel ban wasn’t accompanied
by additional significant steps to prepare for when the virus
eventually infected people in the United States in great
numbers.
As the disease spread beyond China, U.S. spy agencies tracked
outbreaks in Iran, South Korea, Taiwan, Italy and elsewhere in
Europe, the officials familiar with those reports said. The
majority of the information came from public sources, including

25. news reports and official statements, but a significant portion
also came from classified intelligence sources. As new cases
popped up, the volume of reporting spiked.
As the first cases of infection were confirmed in the United
States, Trump continued to insist that the risk to Americans was
small.
“I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine,” he said
on Feb. 10.
“We have a very small number of people in the country, right
now, with it,” he said four days later. “It’s like around 12.
Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered
already. So we’re in very good shape.”
On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC official, sounded
perhaps the most significant public alarm to that point, when
she told reporters that the coronavirus was likely to spread
within communities in the United States and that disruptions to
daily life could be “severe.” Trump called Azar on his way back
from a trip to India and complained that Messonnier was scaring
the stock markets, according to two senior administration
officials.
Trump eventually changed his tone after being shown statistical
models about the spread of the virus from other countries and
hearing directly from Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the
White House coronavirus task force, as well as from chief
executives last week rattled by a plunge in the stock market,
said people familiar with Trump’s conversations.
But by then, the signs pointing to a major outbreak in the
United States were everywhere.
Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.
This story has been updated to note that the House Intelligence

26. Committee received a similar briefing on coronavirus from a
senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services
as did the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Due april 17, 2020
The (Mid-term) paper should be at least 5 pages andno more
than 6 pages. (That count does not include your title page, if
you have one; or a list of sources.)
Professional papers tend to be short, concise and clear.
Academic writing, which you are likely to be assigned in other
classes, sometimes measures quality by the number of pages.
Topics should be in the national security area. Please reach out
to me if you have trouble choosing a Topic or an interested
Reader.
This is a typical college paper. With a few exceptions:
· The FIU library is a good place to start to look for credible
sources on your topic. Find time to sit with a librarian to
discuss!
Possible format could include a Summary and a Conclusion.
Another hint: I certainly understand and appreciate passion, and
I allow you to choose a national security topic to be sure this
issue is one you care about. However, this mid-term Policy
Analysis paper should contain serious critical thinking, such
that when necessary you are able to examine various sides of
an issue, even if you disagree with the viewpoint. Seriously,
how can you know any issue, if you only know one perspective?
Professional writing requires that you provide your Reader with
sound, accurate information that considers various perspectives
even while making a choice of one alternative over another

27. Additional Tips:
· Proofread carefully! Nothing deducts from the score more than
missing words and unclear sentences. Read your final paper out
loud; or allow someone trusted to read it. If an outside reader
has difficulty understanding the main points, you are not being
clear!
· Do the research. You are not a credible writer if you write
about immigration, for example, and do not bother to look up
the president’s latest executive order on the issue. If you write
on US relations with Cuba, for example, be sure to look at the
president’s latest speech. Such documents can be found easily
on congressional research service and whitehouse.gov websites.
You must review primary or original documents in order to
oppose or defend.
· The fantastic FIU library staff can help guide your research.
· Consider bullet points to convey essential data. Graphics help
to make a paper more professional.
· Include a map if you write about a country and name several
locations.
· Cite sources, using whichever style you prefer.
· Watch grammar, and especially sentence and verb agreement.
· Make sure sentences are precise and accurate; avoid long
sentences.
· Focus on what you have learned from the credible research.
· Think about using sub-headings that help to organize your
research.
· Writing guides, such as Research on the Internet, are posted
on Canvas
More Writing Tips
· Accurate: be sure your research is thorough and complete
· Be sure your paper reflects more than one perspective, when
appropriate. This assignment is not about personal beliefs.
Rather the assignment is intended to demonstrate your ability to
search for and use credible research. In the follow-on Position
Memo you will recommend a position.

28. · Grammar, sentence syntax, and punctuation matter most. I am
especially disappointed with run-on sentences. Be consistent
with punctuation throughout the paper, starting with the title.
· Avoid slang, contractions, and grandiose statements.
· Avoid posing questions to the Reader. You are the “expert”
and should be informing the Reader. This is not to ignore that
all good research papers usually begin with questions. Who is
the Reader (Policymaker), and what does she need to know and
why.
· Sources should be credible. Opinion sources are fine, but
should be supported by credible sources: Academic Journals;
scholarly papers; Think Tanks; official government documents,
etc. Even if you ultimately disagree with a policy, you must
first understand the policy.
· Charts, sub-headings; and graphics give your work a
professional look and help the Reader highlight key data.
· Use short paragraphs that contain a single main idea, and
sentences that are short, concise, and precise.