Fierce competing rhetorical barrages from Washington and Beijing about the coronavirus outbreak threaten to turn an already tense bilateral relationship utterly toxic. In a new Aspenia Online article, I discuss how both sides have acted in an irresponsible, inflammatory fashion.

An increasingly prominent narrative in the United States is that not only did the pandemic originate in China, but that Chinese officials withheld key information for weeks that could have enabled other countries to adopt measures impeding the spread of the deadly virus. Key conservative opinion leaders, such as Fox News host Sean Hannity and Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, made that allegation early on. It even gained some traction with media outlets that spurn more extreme accusations about China’s behavior. Indeed, the assertion has acquired enhanced credibility now that the U.S. intelligence community apparently reached the same conclusion. In late March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo charged that China’s government was still withholding important information.

Beijing’s American critics also routinely refer to the coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus,” or even the “Chinese virus,” in an effort to whip-up greater public resentment against Beijing. President Trump himself used the latter label, which enraged Chinese leaders. Beijing demanded that Trump apologize. He declined to apologize, but he has now agreed to refrain from using that term.

The bilateral war of words has been escalating on multiple fronts. In an attempt to shift the blame for the global pandemic onto the United States, the Chinese government and state media began to promote the ugly assertion that Washington may have initiated the pandemic as part of a bioweapons program. Stories appeared in China’s media emphasizing the attendance of U.S. Army personnel at athletic games in Wuhan in October 2019, just before the first signs of the coronavirus began to appear. A furious Secretary of State Pompeo denounced the Chinese government for making such allegations.

The propaganda war is just one layer of the mounting animosity between Washington and Beijing about coronavirus issues. In a mid-March article published in Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, one PRC official both alarmed and infuriated Americans when he seemed to threaten that his country might impose export controls to withhold antibiotics and other life-saving drugs from American consumers. Those controls, he stated, would plunge America “into the mighty sea of coronavirus.” His threat focused public attention in the United States about how the country is heavily dependent (in excess of 80 percent) on pharmaceutical ingredients from China. The heightened realization is driving a concerted media and congressional campaign to reduce that dependence on a less-than-friendly foreign power—and to reduce America’s dependence on foreign suppliers generally.

If there is a bright spot in the war of words between Washington and Beijing, it is that substantive bilateral cooperation on the coronavirus problem has continued despite the rhetorical fireworks. Still, it is likely that the highly public acrimony has done additional damage to an already fragile bilateral relationship that was deteriorating because of growing quarrels over such issues as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and trade policy. Both sides deserve blame for cynically seeking to score cheap propaganda points regarding a global public health crisis. The coronavirus pandemic should have underscored the need for and advantage of greater cooperation. Unfortunately, it appears to have done the opposite.

Most people find competition exciting. We are constantly organizing individual and team competitions, with rankings and winners and prizes. We do it by city, by college, and by country. An upset by an underdog can be particularly thrilling, but nothing beats seeing the top two go head to head: The biggest and the best fighting it out for supremacy. It could be chess, it could be gymnastics, it could be football. Whatever it is, it is great entertainment.

Foreign policy is prone to the same human instincts. Countries around the world are “competing” for supremacy. Which one is the wealthiest? Which one has the strongest military? Which has the most influence? Who is number one?

For decades, the United States and the Soviet Union were battling it out on many fronts. It kept the foreign policy community occupied, and the people of each nation following closely, if a bit tensely. After the Cold War ended, Radical Islamic Terrorism was eventually put forward as the new rival for the United States to take on, but it did not live up to the hype and (many) people eventually decided to move on.

Now there seems to be a true rival out there: China, with its growing economic and military power. At long last, there is Great Power Competition again!

But a dose of reality has just set in, as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world. As it turns out, if we are looking for rivals to fight, there are much more powerful ones out there. We could pick a country to compete with, but do we really need to? Nature itself is giving us plenty of competition.

There were plagues and flus in the past, but they seemed so distant, and the more recent ones never quite landed their punches. Ebola, SARS, MERS, mad cow disease, etc., got us worried, but all sputtered out before causing too much damage in the United States.

Now COVID-19 is showing us the reality of these threats, with upward sloping curves of sickness and death. And let’s be honest with ourselves: it could be a lot worse. An even more deadly virus is sure to come along at some point.

The lesson from all this for the foreign policy community is that there is no need to construct a competition with other countries: There are plenty of life or death competitions already out there. Instead of picking out other nations as rivals that we need to beat, what we should be doing is cooperating in a fight against external (i.e. outside of humanity) threats.

Let’s beat COVID-19 together, and then start preparing for the next virus. What are all the communicable diseases that might attack humanity? Let’s map out all the possibilities and start preparing now.

There are also natural disasters. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and, every now and then, asteroids hitting the earth. Against, let’s spend time working together in preparation for these sorts of problems.

One flaw in this suggestion is that it’s hard to come up with rankings. With a U.S.-China Great Power Competition, we could put together charts showing how many battleships each country has and how much each country’s GDP has grown since 2001. That’s harder with nature. Perhaps we can rank the threats, as the Colbert Report used to do with the ThreatDown?

More seriously, what we should do is push the foreign policy community to focus more on these external threats. In particular, we should shift funding away from Great Power Competition towards threats from nature. To help brand the effort, we could give it a name: Global Pandemic Cooperation, for example, offers a smooth transition. People’s interest follows the money, and if there are jobs in the area of pandemic prevention, more people will pursue that field instead of conflict-oriented ones. (Of course, there are real threats from other countries, but thinking of them as a Great Power Competition tends to harm rather than help in addressing them).

We all want the excitement of competition, but we have learned something these past few weeks. As much fun as it can be to build up a rivalry in your head with a sports team in another city or with a far off country, there are more serious threats out there and if we don’t address them properly we will have to stay inside for months and we might even die. That means it’s time to stop worrying about country rankings for a while and work together to stay alive.

Lots of very important stories are going to get passed by, very understandably, due to the ongoing COVID-19 national emergency we’re all trying to survive. Here’s one story that I hope does not get permanently subsumed by our public health crisis: the total debacle that is the FBI Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance application process.

Today, the Department of Justice Inspector General released a Management Advisory Memorandum (MAM) about its follow up audit work in the wake of its Crossfire Hurricane (i.e., Carter Page FISA surveillance scandal) report from December 2019. Even though the DoJ IG is still relatively early in its follow up audit of FBI FISA application practices with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for applications to spy on U.S. Person, the DoJ IG’s preliminary findings were so alarming that they felt compelled to issue MAM now.

Regarding the FBI’s existing factual accuracy review procedures (known internally as “Woods procedures”), the IG stated (pp. 2–3):

(1) we could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has notbeen able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed;

(2) our testing of FISA applications to the associated Woods Files identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed, and interviews to date with available agents or supervisors in field offices generally have confirmed the issues we identified;

(3) existing FBI and NSD oversight mechanisms have also identified deficiencies in documentary support and application accuracy that are similar to those that we have observed to date; and

(4) FBI and NSD officials we interviewed indicated to us that there were no efforts by the FBI to use existing FBI and NSD oversight mechanisms to perform comprehensive, strategic assessments of the efficacy of the Woods Procedures or FISA accuracy, to include identifying the need for enhancements to training and improvements in the process, or increased accountability measures.

Bottom line: none of the relatively small sample of FISA applications reviewed were likely worth the paper they were written on. And based on this relatively random sample, I’ll be very surprised if the IG doesn’t find exactly the same state of affairs for FISA applications at every one of the 56 FBI field offices in the country.

All of which leaves us with a very simple, and damning, question: Exactly how many Americans were wrongly targeted for FISA surveillance–and possibly prosecution–on the basis of bogus FISA applications? Hopefully, the final IG report, which likely won’t be out for many months, will tell us. The questions then will become whether Congress will actually do anything about it and will anybody at the Justice Department and FBI get sacked over this. If history is any guide, the answers are likely to be “no” absent a fundamental change in attitude by House and Senate members towards the Bureau and DoJ.

Last week, three Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorities expired after a watered-down reauthorization and reform bill that had been hastily approved by the House ran into opposition in the Senate. Though the Senate ultimately agreed to a short-term 77 day extension, the House has yet to act on it. Since the authorities are grandfathered for investigations already underway, or for potential offenses a temporary lapse is unlikely to have much operational impact, and an extension soon seems inevitable. When Congress does finally take up the issue again, this most recent compromise bill will be the baseline for further improvements—and improvements are sorely needed.

There are certainly some things to approve of in the failed compromise bill, but it ultimately falls well short of what’s necessary—and includes a lot of cosmetic tweaks designed to mollify a president outraged over the mishandling of the Carter Page investigation, without actually effecting substantive change.

Let’s review both the good and the not-so-good. The bill would finally put an end to the misbegotten “call detail records program” initially exposed by Edward Snowden nearly seven years ago, and preserved in a diluted form under the USA Freedom Act of 2015. Though more limited than its predecessor, which indiscriminately vacuumed up nearly all domestic call records, the USA Freedom version of the CDR program nevertheless led to the government collecting hundreds of millions of call detail records each year, based on just a handful of orders. Like its predecessors, it was both plagued with compliance problems and errors, and essentially useless operationally, as the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board confirmed in a recent report. Though NSA itself decided to mothball the program, the administration formally requested that the authority for it be renewed, just in case they saw a need for it in the future. Rejecting that idea, as this latest bill does, should be a no-brainer.

There are also welcome–if inadequate–changes to the broader business records provision, also known as Section 215, which (as the name suggests) enables the government to obtain business records, or any other “tangible thing,” that is deemed “relevant” to a national security investigation. Because the bar for obtaining §215 orders is far lower than the probable cause required for a full-blown FISA warrant, the new bill closes a potential loophole by clarifying that the authority may not be used to obtain any record that would otherwise require a full search warrant in an ordinary criminal investigation—and that this includes location information, which the Supreme Court brought under the protection of the Fourth Amendment in Carpenter v. United States (2018).

Yet this bill does not go nearly as far as Sen. Ron Wyden’s Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act, which would similarly require a warrant to obtain a target’s Web browsing history and other categories of particularly sensitive records. Nor, perhaps more importantly, does it address the underlying breadth of §215: The trivially low bar of “relevance to an investigation” compounded by a requirement that the FISA Court approve orders for individuals with any connection to the target of an investigation. In the now notoriously botched investigation of former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, for instance, the FISA Court would have been presumptively obligated to issue an order for the financial or telecommunications records of anyone “known to” or “in contact with” Page, since he was the target of a foreign intelligence investigation believed to be acting as an agent of a foreign power, and all such records are defined as automatically “relevant” by the statute. In principle, that would have made the records of virtually the whole of the senior Trump campaign staff available to the FBI without any further basis for suspecting them individually,

Also in the positive column are expansions of the role of the FISA Court’s amici curiae—expanding their ability to provide the Court with an independent perspective from the government’s, and assuring them access to files and evidence needed to do their job effectively—as well as a firmer deadline for the publication of significant rulings by the Court. But these are ultimately efforts to compensate for a deeper defect in the FISA process: Unlike ordinary criminal wiretaps, FISA surveillance is normally permanently covert by default, with only a tiny fraction of those spied on every learning about it. Eliminating that back-end notice to the target of surveillance—notice that is normally considered constitutionally necessary to make a search “reasonable”—also eliminates an important incentive to be scrupulous in seeking applications. There may often be compelling national security reasons to delay notice to individual targets, perhaps even for quite extended periods of time, but at least in the case of U.S. persons, there is no good justification for making secrecy the universal, uniform default: The government should have to make the argument once surveillance terminates. In cases where surveillance has ultimately failed to support the government’s belief that a U.S. target had acted as a foreign agent, then there will often be no compelling national security rationale for failing to disclose.

Finally, there are what I think of as the “Carter Page provisions” of the bill. These are fairly clearly calculated to persuade Donald Trump that serious reforms have been enacted which will prevent a repeat of the grossly flawed investigation of his erstwhile advisor. As one might expect, they are largely cosmetic—sounding “tough” but with little real chance of making much practical difference. Criminal penalties for misuse of FISA are increased somewhat, which doesn’t add up to much if, in practice, nobody is ever actually criminally prosecuted for FISA misuse. Even in the Page case, only one of the attorneys involved in reviewing the application faces even the slenderest chance of prosecution. FBI agents are not thinking “well, I’ll falsify an application if I risk a three year prison term, but eight is too much!” They don’t believe they will be prosecuted, and they are well justified in that belief.

There’s also a provision requiring the “attorney general” to approve in writing of investigations targeting candidates for federal office before certain FISA tools can be employed. “Attorney general” is in quotation marks there, because for FISA purposes “attorney general” is actually defined as a cluster of senior Justice Department officials who must already sign off on any full-blown FISA surveillance. And given the narrowness of this provision, it’s not clear it would have applied even to the investigation of Page—not himself a candidate for any office.

These aren’t necessarily inherently objectionable, but they are ultimately Potemkin reforms designed to persuade an audience of one to sign an otherwise relatively weak bill.

In short, the FISA reauthorization bill qualifies as a promising start, but falls fall short of the fiery rhetoric we’ve heard lately about the need to overhaul the system. But it remains a stronger baseline than many civil libertarians would have thought possible a few years ago, and if amendments offered before a final vote address some of the shortcomings identified here, reality might actually live up to the rhetoric.

Cross posted to the Just Security.

Much of the discussion about policy designed to deal with the corona virus has stressed the need to “flatten the curve.” But it might better be labelled, “reach the plateau.”

Important and illustrative are the cases of China and South Korea. After two or three weeks of rapid increases in the number of deaths and of new cases, both numbers ceased to rise much and that condition has persisted. Most impressive in this is the case count. Its rapid rise was substantially due to improvements and expansion of efforts to detect cases, and plateauing took place even as those efforts continued to improve and expand.

Although there is no way to know at present whether the hiatus in China and Korea will prove to be permanent, the experiences suggest that the epidemic can be contained, and that extrapolations concluding that the number of cases will soar into the hundreds of thousands or even millions in a country are not necessarily sound.

The virus came to the United States later, and the country seems only now to be in the early portion of the rapid-increase phase. The China and South Korean comparisons would suggest, then, that for the next two or three weeks the US will continue to experience substantial increases in the death count and in the number of cases detected. The latter count will likely be greatly enhanced by improvements in case detection, an important enterprise in which the US has previously been comparatively slow. After that, there would be the plateau with only small increases in deaths and in the case count.

Total deaths in China, which was caught by surprise, stand at over 3,000 and in South Korea, which was not, at upwards of 100. A comparison might suggest that there might be thousands of deaths in total in the United States. This would be a tragedy of course, but one that should be kept in context: last year there were 61,000 influenza deaths in the United States. That was a peak year over the last eight, but even in the low season for the period, 2011–2012, there were 12,000 influenza deaths.

Whether the United States will follow the same pattern as China and South Korea has yet to be determined of course. In those countries, the problem was substantially concentrated in limited areas—in China’s case, a rather large one containing some 60 million people—and in both, deaths from the virus outside those areas have been substantially lower. That is not so much the case in the United States—though there are considerable regional differences. Also of concern is that the U.S was slow to institute testing, particularly compared to South Korea. And some worry that the dire experience in Italy, where death rates are exceptionally high and where the medical system has been overwhelmed, is more relevant to the American case.

We should know in a few weeks.

The U.S. Marine Corps wants to make some very big changes over the next decade. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the Marines plan to get rid of all their tanks, cut back on their aircraft, and shrink in total numbers from 189,000 to as few as 170,000.” While these capabilities are cut, the Marines plan to expand their long-range missile and rocket batteries and unmanned aerial vehicle squadrons.

Supporters of a U.S. grand strategy of restraint should greet the Marine Corps’ push to transform itself with cautious optimism. The USMC’s plan does not indicate a broader shift in U.S. strategic thinking, but if the change is successful it would put the military in a better position to implement a different grand strategy in the future. The military doesn’t determine America’s grand strategy, but if the other branches follow the USMC’s lead they will be better positioned to carry out a restraint-oriented grand strategy enacted by a future president.

Strategic prioritization is perhaps the most heartening thing to come out of the Corps’ transformation plan. Military quagmires in the Middle East and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 have eaten up attention and resources for nearly two decades with little benefits to show for the lives and treasure spent. Yet during these conflicts the United States also tried to counteract other great powers like China and Russia. Presidents have paid lip service to prioritization but have done little to turn rhetoric into reality.

The Marine Corps’ plan is a welcome departure from this pattern. The service’s leadership has made it clear that these changes are intended to counter China’s growing naval power and keep the service relevant in a potential conflict in East Asia. Focusing on one adversary will force the Marines to become less flexible, in both force structure and doctrine, but prioritization necessitates decreased flexibility.

The pro-restraint community should welcome strategic prioritization for two reasons. First, it helps narrow the range of threats that the U.S. military is trying to counter. Reducing the number of threats the U.S. military is expected to address is a major goal of a restraint grand strategy.

Second, a less flexible military means that Washington will have to rely on other tools of statecraft to deal with lower-level threats. If the military is handling fewer threats, then other institutions like the State Department need to pick up the slack. This in turn should help the United States move away from the militarization of foreign policy.

The scope of the proposed adjustments to the Marine Corps is also noteworthy. The Corps’ leaders don’t want to fiddle at the margins, they are pushing for serious changes. The 2019 Commandant’s Planning Guidance and the measures outlined by the Wall Street Journal will alter the appearance and warfighting approach of the Marine Corps in deep, fundamental ways. This will certainly rub parts of the service and some members of Congress the wrong way, but it sends a powerful signal about what sacred cows a military branch is willing to sacrifice in order to be better prepared for new threats. If other services follow the USMC’s lead, the U.S. military could look substantially different in a decade or two.

The Marine Corps is not transforming itself to implement a grand strategy of restraint and there is much work that still needs to be done to put the United States on the right path. However, by encouraging strategic prioritization and showing that services can consider radical adjustments to how they are organized and think about armed conflict, the USMC could move the military closer toward restraint.

The pro-freedom and anti-war movement lost one of its most dedicated champions this past weekend. Jon Basil Utley was born in the Soviet Union in 1934. His British-born mother, Freda, had gone there as a pro-communist intellectual and writer. But after his father was spirited away to one of Stalin’s gulags (where he was executed in 1938), Freda fled with young Jon and became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union, including in several bestselling books. They eventually emigrated to the United States where Freda hosted meetings of prominent anti-communists in their home. That is where Jon met many leading intellectuals and activists of the Cold War era, connections that lasted a lifetime. He became an accomplished writer in his own right, as well as a successful businessman. He traveled extensively.

Jon was a nearly ubiquitous presence at DC gatherings and globally. He attended many events at Cato, as well as Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings at Americans for Tax Reform. He supported Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation, and many other libertarian causes. And he was proud to be associated with The American Conservative magazine, where he served on the board of directors, and as publisher.

Whenever I encountered Jon at one of these meetings, he would always greet me with a warm toothy smile and a firm handshake. He made me feel so welcomed at these gatherings – but he did the same for everyone else as well, as though he appreciated every single person in attendance.

But his warmth and affection for those around him concealed a deep and abiding hatred of America’s wars, and a related sadness at his fellow Americans’ apparent disinterest in the suffering these wars caused for innocent men, women, and children all around the world. In meetings, he would often ask questions, or make comments, in his soft, almost lyrical, voice. Most of the time, his remarks conveyed his skepticism of these wars, even as he knew that many of those around him (mostly conservatives, but also some libertarians) wished desperately that he would just sit down and shut up. But that just wasn’t his style.

Jon was a peacemaker within the often-fractious liberty movement, too. His sadness about America’s wars was perhaps only exceeded by his disappointment that his friends in the anti-war movement were fighting with one another. He was a natural bridgebuilder with a very wide circle of acquaintances and always on the lookout to make introductions and build alliances.

Last year, when it presented Jon a lifetime achievement award, The American Conservative prepared a fitting tribute video. I know and respect many of the people who offered their reflections on why Jon was worthy of such an award. TAC’s Executive Editor Kelly Beaucar Vlahos called him “one of the bravest people that I know in Washington.” To Ambassador C. Boyden Gray, Jon was “one of the most gentle, generous men I’ve ever met.” My friend John Henry declared, simply, “Jon is America.”

This was particularly true in the post‑9/​11 era, when conservatives, in particular, really didn’t want to hear one of their own questioning the wisdom of George W. Bush’s various foreign wars—especially the war in Iraq. Jon would “be the only person to stand up and say the Iraq war made no sense,” John Henry recalled, when “everybody else was saluting, [and chanting] USA! USA!”

The Heritage Foundation’s Lee Edwards counted Jon’s willingness to stand “up for the truth as he sees it, regardless of what others say” as his greatest achievement.

“All of the wise men of the conservative movement,” Edwards explained, believed that the United States should be waging war in Iraq. They would listen as Jon would question why. Then he’d sit down. A few moments of awkward silence typically ensued before the meeting moved onto the next topic.

“But, after the luncheon was over,” Edwards continued, “people would come up to him and say ‘Jon, keep saying that. Keep asking those questions…I haven’t got enough guts to do it, but you have.’”

Edwards noted that when the weapons of mass destruction weren’t found in Iraq, and most Americans came to realize that the war had been a terrible mistake, Jon didn’t go around saying “I was right. I told you so” —and that, too, was to his great credit. Edwards congratulated Utley for speaking up when others were timid.

Jon was a long-time generous donor to the Cato Institute, and for that we are all grateful. But his influence ran much deeper that that. He was a warm and wonderful friend, and an inspiration to those of us who followed in his footsteps.

During this period of COVID-19, when all public gatherings have been postponed or canceled, we have more urgent things to attend to. But, when things return to normal, and I for the first time attend one of those meetings where I would have expected to see Jon’s kind smile and reassuring presence, I fear that that is when the true depths of this loss will really be felt.

Rest in peace, my friend. Your legacy lives on.