This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 1st, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The spread and lethality of the

personality of the coronavirus should help reshuffle priorities when it comes to threats faced by Americans, but what would that look like in practice?

Cato's Chris Prevel details how defense priorities might shift and why they should.

How has this pandemic changed the way foreign policy people view threats?

Well I think it's a little too soon to say that everyone's changed their mind, but I can see how it could change people's

minds. First of all, that, you know, for a long time, Americans were accustomed to not being

in grave danger from foreign threats.

This is one of our great advantages over a lot of other countries around the world is

our neighbors to the north and south are friendly and

weak and we have fish to the east and west and so the kinds of traditional

security threats that most countries worry about basically all the time we

don't worry about those things and precisely for that reason that over time US foreign

policy professionals and elites have sort of defined how we deal with danger at a greater and greater distance.

We don't want to be dealing with potential invasion from, you know, through Mexico or

through Canada.

We want to deal with these problems far away.

Well, in some respects that was a luxury that we took advantage of for as long as we could, but then

we see this disease, which is claiming, you know, 54,000 today, as of today, and it's a kind of thing

that we haven't experienced in a very long time, over 100 years basically, since the Spanish flu.

So in that sense, we can see how a proximate danger has superseded the most recent great danger which is terrorism after 9-11.

The other thing I'd add is that precisely the nature of this threat, this disease, has revealed certain vulnerabilities in the US military response.

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