“I actually think this is an inflection point, a kind of seminal event, in the 21st century that people will be thinking and writing about from a political point of view 50 and 100 years hence,” he said.
Stephens was highly critical of the virus response in the United States. “I think it has revealed in a very big way that we have a system that is hobbled by bad decision making, incompetence, overlapping authorities and the inability to simply make consistent, coherent and intellectually defensible decisions,” Stephens said.
According to Stephens, this has exposed aspects of American political and cultural life that were there to see previously but were masked by a relatively robust economy and placid international circumstances.
“It’s hard for me, despite all of China’s weaknesses and woes, not to see this as a moment when, if I were in the Chinese leadership I would feel relatively emboldened by seeing the extent to which the United States has simply been incompetent in the face of this crisis,” he said.
“And it’s another reason why I think that the geopolitical side of the coronavirus will be perhaps more consequential in the long term than the epidemiological and the health aspects,” said Stephens.
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