UK's Guardian newspaper hits back at Trump's assault on WHO

The Guardian published an article on July 23 criticizing US president Donald Trump's assault on the World Health Organization as damaging to global health. It revealed that American diplomacy is shaped around its own interests, and now risks lives and undermines America's standing in the world.

The author, Peter Beaumont, a senior reporter on the Guardian's Global Development desk, pointed out the Trump administration's campaign against the WHO seems absurd.

Over the months of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump and his allies repeatedly crafted lies to distract attention from the US's catastrophic response to COVID-19, which has claimed almost 140,000 lives in the US and devastated the economy.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, one of Trump's allies, portrays the WHO as a sort of Chinese-influenced stooge. He denounced Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the global health body's head, as an agent of Beijing at a private meeting of British MPs, even suggesting the WHO was responsible for British deaths.

In addition, the Trump administration has succeeded in pressuring the Chinese company Huawei out of the UK's 5G network. The author thought there the US could be lobbying the UK to support its disruptive stance toward the UN health agency.

"Perhaps that should not be surprising given Trump's own largely unthinking history on public health," the author said, adding "most serious of all is the continued and misguided assault on any notion of multilateral institutions and the rejection that there is any reciprocal benefit to wealthy nations from organisations whose substantial function is helping the world's poorest".

The American diplomacy in the Trump era is "ugly, dishonest, bullying and cruel, a pathetic trade in self-serving tittle-tattle that damages not only public health around the world, but undermines American's claim to global leadership," the author said in a sharp critique.