Cold War: Made in China 

March 2020 will go down in history as the month when coronavirus spread across the world, killing thousands and halting most economic activity. But in the world of geopolitics, it may also mark the point at which relations between China and the West plunged into a deep freeze, ending a half century of ever-growing integration.

As intensive care units from Italy to New York struggled to cope with unprecedented numbers of sick people, a desperate scramble began for life-saving medical equipment and ventilators. At that point foreign capitals discovered that — like most industrial goods — essential devices were made in China. As Beijing apparently held COVID-19 casualties to a few thousand, the country pulled off a PR coup by so-called “mask diplomacy,” shipping tons of protective equipment to virus-stricken Europe, in what European Union foreign policy chief Josip Borrell called “the politics of generosity.”

At the same time President Trump began calling the virus, whose official name is severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) the “China virus,” amid growing international calls for compensation in the trillions of dollars for Chinese negligence in covering up the extent of the threat.

The United States and China were already engaged in a trade war before coronavirus struck, and over the last decade Beijing has made no secret of its global political and military ambitions. The pandemic has only heightened the tension between the world’s two great superpowers, leading US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, among others, to describe the conflict with China as a kind of new cold war.