Foreign desk: China’s Post-Corona Scheming

The Chinese regime, which has “hated” the Trump administration’s “tariffs, negotiations and measures to protect US industries” from the start, is “preparing to use” the coronavirus crisis to get its revenge, warns The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, and, “We better start taking notice.” Beijing is “planning to overproduce various goods to flood the market and increase its market share,” setting itself up as “a haven for foreign capital” and “calling for post-coronavirus expansion of Chinese companies abroad.” Yet some US politicians, including Republicans, “are pushing for the administration to remove steel and aluminum tariffs” — which will just “help Beijing.” Instead, we have to keep up the pressure on China — because, while we’re dealing with “this serious but temporary health crisis,” Beijing is already playing the “longer game.”

Historian: Remember the Lady

One of the “valiant women” we should celebrate this Women’s History Month, as Jane Hampton Cook reminds us at The Hill, is Abigail Adams, who famously asked her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” in the new United States. While women couldn’t earn wages or go to school in Abigail’s time, she managed the family farm after John, who “saw his wife as his intellectual equal,” gave up his law practice to help the Patriots. She predicted a “rebellion” if “John didn’t remember the ladies” — which “came true” with the Women’s Rights movement, which gained women the right to vote in 1920. That’s why we should remember Abigail Adams this Women’s History Month: “Looking at her life provides a big-picture perspective on the progress and promise of America.”

Culture critic: Compassion’s Death Exaggerated

While the New York Times’ David Brooks predicts doom and gloom because of coronavirus, we’re actually going to see “a narrowing of class divisions and an amazing outbreak of compassion,” argues Ira Stoll at The New York Sun. After all, the “basketball game is equally canceled” for “the billionaire with floorside Final Four seats” as for “the low-wage worker who was planning to watch it on television,” and it’s “the people with the biggest retirement accounts” who “took the largest losses.” Meanwhile, “many individuals and institutions” have “chosen dramatically to modify their normal routines, at great cost,” and “necessary employees” are still “showing up for work.” Not only is Brooks wrong, but our need to fight the pandemic may even “add to a sense of common purpose and compassion.”

Science desk: Test More and Smarter

It’s “welcome news” that “1.4 million tests for the novel coronavirus will become available this week,” but “officials are about to make a mistake,” warns Neeraj Sood in The Wall Street Journal. Only “people who believe they may be infected” will be tested, which won’t provide “accurate information on the virus’s infectivity and mortality rates.” To understand why, “consider the flu. Its mortality rate is around 0.1%.” But “if we only tested people who are hospitalized with flu-like symptoms, the mortality rate jumps 75-fold. Similarly with the coronavirus, testing only sick and symptomatic people will result in an overestimate of mortality.” Instead, we should “test a random sample of the population in major cities with an outbreak.” And “if the true rates for the coronavirus are similar to those of the flu, then it isn’t necessary to shut down the global economy and lose trillions of dollars.”

Legal beat: ICC’s Attack on US Sovereignty

The International Criminal Court’s attempt to prosecute US troops for “alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Afghanistan will “likely fail” — but, John Yoo and Ivana Stradner note at National Review, it represents “another effort by a global elite” to “threaten American sovereignty.” In fact, ICC officials have been “attacking” the US for years, in large part because the US never signed the Rome Statute, which set up the court. In response, the Trump folks should take steps against the ICC and defend “the rights, not just of the United States, but of all sovereign nations.” If the ICC really wants to protect human rights, after all, “the last thing it should do is prosecute American troops when they take on the difficult jobs that no other nation can or will do.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance