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" You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model. "
― Fareed Zakaria , Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
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" IN OCTOBER 2019, just a few months before the novel coronavirus swept the world, Johns Hopkins University released its first Global Heath Security Index, a comprehensive analysis of countries that were best prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic. The United States ranked first overall, and first in four of the six categories—prevention, early detection and reporting, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms. That sounded right. America was, after all, the country with most of the world’s best pharmaceutical companies, research universities, laboratories, and health institutes. But by March 2020, these advantages seemed like a cruel joke, as Covid-19 tore across the United States and the federal government mounted a delayed, weak, and erratic response. By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism? "
― Fareed Zakaria , Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
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" Twenty years after D-Day, Walter Cronkite interviewed Eisenhower on a bench in the US military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, where 9,000 American bodies were buried. Gazing at the gravestones, Eisenhower explained to Cronkite, “These people gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have before. . . . So every time I come back to these beaches, or any day when I think about that day 20 years ago now, I say once more we must find some way to work to peace, and really to gain an eternal peace for this world. "
― Fareed Zakaria , Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
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" That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China’s expansionism but America’s abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation. As the scholar Walter Russell Mead has pointed out, Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are always swindling the United States, including and especially its allies. Trump is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he is an isolationist who has abandoned the field. Trump has withdrawn the United States from more organizations, treaties, and accords than any president in American history. Not only has he slow-rolled a trade deal with the European Union but he has also started a trade war against the bloc and moved to pull troops from European bases—seemingly heralding the end of a seventy-year Atlantic partnership. "
― Fareed Zakaria , Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
