Hunter Marston and Ali Wyne, ‘America’s Post-Coronavirus Diplomacy Needs Middle-Powers Alliances’, Foreign Policy, 17 July 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed nearly 600,000 lives, infected well over 13 million people, and threatened to send the global economy into its worst downturn since the Great Depression. This human tragedy is occurring against the backdrop of a strategic one. Precisely when the need for emergency coordination between the United States and China is most self-evident, their relationship has reached its lowest level since normalization, with no bottom in sight. Even those observers who hesitate to speak of a ‘new cold war’ concede that Washington and Beijing view each other in increasingly adversarial terms.