The coronavirus pandemic is a moment for leadership. In politics, every crisis is also an opportunity. So it was interesting to read Nahal Toosi’s latest in Politico about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo finding his voice after weeks of staying way below the radar. According to Toosi, “America’s top diplomat has been hitting the phones to chat with a slew of foreign counterparts about the virus. He’s been on Fox News to boast about the ‘amazing work’ of the State Department in bringing back Americans stranded abroad. He wrote a letter to State Department staffers last week primarily focused on the pandemic.”

He has also been tweeting about it.

Oh, wait, not that tweet, which riled a lot of State Department employees for its cavalier attitude. More like this:

As Toosi notes, this comes after an awful lot of criticism of Pompeo’s handling of the crisis. For example, my Post colleague Jackson Diehl penned a stinging indictment of the secretary of state this week. Diehl wrote, “Has any secretary of state been worse in an emergency? It’s impossible to think of a more feckless performance since World War II. Pompeo’s dreadful week followed a month in which he has been all but invisible on the coronavirus issue.”

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Contrarian takes are all the rage while under quarantine, but it is hard to disagree with Diehl’s brief. As the global situation has worsened, Pompeo has focused like a laser beam on China and Iran. The secretary of state has endeavored to cast blame on China for its numerous errors of omission and commission during the outset of this pandemic.

Pompeo is not wrong to highlight China’s culpability, but the tactics he has pursued to do this have not yielded results. His attempt to insert the phrase “Wuhan virus” into communiques resulted in nothing more than stories about Pompeo’s failure to accomplish his task. It also raises the rather important question of whether this should be at the top of Pompeo’s priority list right now.

Similarly, Pompeo has doubled down on the containment of Iran. Again, as with the Communist Party of China, it would be hard to defend Iran’s theocratic regime as the paragon of good governance. It is possible that the pronounced spread of the infection in Iran, on top of punishing sanctions, could cause the government to collapse. Still, it seems unlikely. (And, by the way, if it does not happen soon, then it will never happen, as no sanctions will bite as much as the pandemic.) In the process, ordinary Iranians continue to suffer from the cruelty of two regimes.

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Another question to ask is whether Pompeo’s State Department has any plan in place if Iran’s government does collapse in the middle of a pandemic. What would the United States do in response? That is exactly the kind of longer-range question the policy-planning staff would ordinarily handle. The head of that staff is instead busying himself with book reviews for RealClearPolitics.

Since 1941, the United States has been very good at exercising leadership in response to major shocks, even when those shocks emanated from within. During World War II, U.S. diplomats convened conferences at Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods to map out the postwar order. During the Asian financial crisis, the United States created a panoply of new structures, and “The Committee to Save the World” graced the cover of Time. Even in response to 2008, the United States exercised leadership to ensure that the system worked.