This has been paralytic for the United States.

It's been paralytic for the Western world,

for excellent reasons, right?

We are trying to protect our vulnerable populations.

But what it has exposed is there is a very effective way of rapidly bringing the west to its knees

through the creation of pathogens like this. You know, for us half a million fatalities from COVID, it's a calamity. In China, is it a calamity?

Welcome to post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics.

I'm Dan Cenor. It seems like analysts of foreign affairs and superpower politics are always worrying that,

quote, the world is a mess, But has the international order, to the

extent it existed in recent years, become even more disorderly due to the

pandemic, what effect has COVID had on great power politics? Well as a new president assembles his

national security team and hopefully develops a grand strategy, I thought it'd be

good to sit down with Brett Stevens of the New York Times to take a quick tour around the world.

Brett's a Pulitzer Prize winner, he's an op-ed columnist for the Times, where his column appears

on Thursdays and Saturdays. He came to the Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal,

where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and for over a decade of

foreign affairs columnist. Before that he was editor-in-chief of the

Jerusalem Post where he was based in Israel.

That's when I first got to know him.

Prior to moving to Israel, he worked in the Brussels Bureau of the Wall Street Journal.

He's literally reported from all over the world and interviewed

scores of world leaders. Brett is the author of a terrific book called America in Retreat,

...