Aerial photo taken on July 2, 2020 shows workers laying tracks on a bridge as they put final touches on the Altay-Fuyun section of the Afuzhun (Altay-Fuyun-Zhundong) Railway in Fuyun County, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Ding Lei)
The United States has failed to take on its leadership role in the COVID-19 pandemic while scrambling to shift the blame away from its own incompetence.
BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other like-minded American politicians are playing up the blame game in an increasingly barefaced way, which reveals their incompetence at home and irresponsibility on the international stage.
Pompeo has been spreading misinformation about human rights in China's Xinjiang, threatened new sanctions after China's legislature adopted a national security law to safeguard Hong Kong and has been slandering China's sincere support for Africa to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a critical moment when the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States and the rest of the world is extremely grim, Pompeo is wasting his energy on conjuring cliches, peddling rumors, sowing hatred, and becoming a genuine destroyer of global cooperation.
Photo taken on May 24, 2020 shows the front page of the day's New York Times, which features the names of people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States, at the Times Square in New York, the United States. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)
An important lesson the coronavirus has taught us is that the world is a global village, and we can live better lives only by taking care of each other. Thus, cooperation is not only an ethical imperative but also an existential one.
Throughout human history, cooperation and solidarity have always been powerful weapons against disasters -- natural or man-made.
But, a few U.S. politicians are clearly running against the trend and moving towards isolationism, unilateralism, xenophobia, and disrupting the current world order. They shift blames to divert attention on their incompetence in the election year, putting political expediency above people's interests and challenging the bottom line of human conscience.
The United States has failed to take on its leadership role in a pandemic as severe as COVID-19. It did not embark on protecting the world from the virus but is obsessed with narcissistic supremacy.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a press briefing in Washington D.C., the United States, on March 5, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
A poll of 11,000 respondents across nine European countries, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, found there was an increasingly negative perception of the United States amid the coronavirus outbreak.
It's deplorable that some U.S. politicians have been busy with inciting conflicts and widening social division during the pandemic, instead of assuming leadership role in anti-pandemic efforts.
It's time for responsible U.S. politicians to oppose the Cold-War mindset and ideological bias of their domestic peers, take an open and objective view on China's development and achievements and play their role in cementing global solidarity in the face of crisis before the trouble gets out of control. ■
