On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” author and Nonresident Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security Jamie Metzl said that the U.S. isn’t demanding an investigation into the origins of COVID because “we are so completely dependent on our trade with China.” And that if we correctly extend the logic that we’ve used to criticize Europe for its continued purchase of Russian energy, “we are funding the genocide in Xinjiang, mass human rights abuses in Tibet, behaviors in the South China Sea, and the blocking of an investigation into COVID by our continued trade with China.”
Metzl stated, [relevant remarks begin around 4:50] “So, the two reasons that we don’t have an investigation: One, China is blocking it. And, two, we aren’t demanding it. And the reason we’re not demanding it is we are so completely dependent on our trade with China. Right now, people around the world, myself included, are criticizing Germany and Austria and others in Europe for being totally dependent on Russia for their gas and oil. They’ve made — they are starting a process of that decoupling. And what we’ve said to the Germans and Austrians and other Europeans is that you are funding the mass murder in Ukraine, which you are, yourselves, condemning. And if we extend the logic of that argument, as we should, we are funding the genocide in Xinjiang, mass human rights abuses in Tibet, behaviors in the South China Sea, and the blocking of an investigation into COVID by our continued trade with China. I’m not saying we need to end it, but we need to recognize that globalization has to be led by values.”
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