Obama and Bush Put China In The Drivers Seat........

Whos fault is it?

Like a broken record the answer is ALWAYS the same.

Bush and Obama. Obama and Bush.

Most of the time you can throw in Clinton too.

Those 24 years of horrendous leadership is costing lots of people their lives and livelihoods.

It is a disgrace.

The overarching diplomatic strategy toward Beijing for both Obama and Bush was "strategic engagement." That meant allowing China to gain more clout in international institutions such as the WHO. The thinking was that Beijing's economic rise merited those rewards. But more important, the influence would help Beijing immerse itself into existing institutions, allowing it to grow into a "responsible global stakeholder," as former Bush administration trade representative Robert Zoellick famously called it.

The U.S. and its allies would allow Chinese representatives—or allies of Beijing, like Tedros—to run organizations such as the WHO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the U.N. Industrial Development Organization. They believed little harm could come of it. "It was benign neglect," says Lanhee Chen, Director of Policy Studies at Stanford University's public policy program. Some current and former U.S. officials believe Washington's policy went well beyond benign neglect. Referring to China's enhanced clout inside a variety of U.N agencies, including the WHO, Joseph Bosco, former China country director at the Pentagon says, "We encouraged it."

Xi Jinping's ascension to the top political office in Beijing. His iron-fisted rule as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party makes the idea that China would soon follow in the democratic footsteps of Taiwan and South Korea seem farcical.

the coronavirus-WHO-Beijing scandal—makes that obvious. It shows just how costly previous U.S. and allied assumptions about China can be.

The belief that allowing Beijing to maneuver its favored candidate into the directorship of the WHO carried little risk was, arguably, a lethal misjudgment. If the WHO had insisted early on that Beijing share live strains of the virus with medical researchers in the outside world—and to date there is no evidence that it did—then a diagnostic test could have been developed much sooner, Gottlieb says. And had the Chinese "been more forthcoming about what was happening [in December] this might have been an entirely avoidable world event."

https://www.newsweek.com/how-bush-obama-ceded-world-health-organization-china-increasing-risk-pandemics-like-coronavirus-1497667