Duffman

The vaccine race isn't a "winner take all," you have to find a way to distribute it to your entire domestic population, which is over 1B people in China. If they can do that AND distribute it to the world, then yeah, we're probably effed and all of the isolationists will get exactly what they wanted. You can't 'lead' the world only when it's convenient and we've done a lot geopolitically to alienate ourselves lately. Foreign aid for example, doesn't exist because our government is warm, fuzzy, I-saw-a-kid-starving-to-sad-music, nice guys, it's because giving Country A that money is cheaper than military, economic, or diplomatic actions to get them to do what we want, which monetarily benefits us more than doing nothing. To think otherwise is just naive. And that's just foreign aid. We also ****ed off NATO, Japan's SDF, withdrew from the WHO, Paris Accords, etc. What message does that send to the rest of the world? Hopefully, not that their 'leader' has decided to hold everyone back and needs to be replaced or ignored, because you personally may not take the Paris Accords, or WHO, or NATO seriously, but the majority (if not all) of the rest of the developed world does.