By James Pethokoukis
It wasn’t so long ago that some folks on hot-take social media were calling America a “failed state.” Why? Too many Americans were contracting and dying from COVID-19, at least as compared to other rich nations. And the most recent numbers show that disparity continues. The United States has the highest death rate in the OECD at 3,038 per million as compared to 2,469 in Europe and 245 in Japan. Why is the US rate so high? “While the reasons for the U.S. rate aren’t well-understood, widespread obesity, less mask-wearing, disparities in access to healthcare and a lower vaccination rate than some other OECD countries likely played a role,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
But those unfortunate statistics hardly mean the US is a failed state, except to those who either want the US to fail or think it never really succeeded. For example: Washington’s Operation Warp Speed was so successful at accelerating vaccine development and manufacture that it has become the go-to reference for an effective public-private partnership. One could also point to the pandemic-era success of the Paycheck Protection Program at keeping many smaller businesses afloat during the economic tumult of 2020. Over the past few years, we’ve also seen America return to space thanks to the combined efforts of SpaceX and NASA. None of these are signs that the US is a failed state.
Oh, almost forgot: There’s that 10,000-pound telescope now parked a million miles from Earth, allowing humanity to see deeper into space and further back in time than ever before. As one NASA scientist put it, “The James Webb Space Telescope can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes.”
Did I mention it was a million miles from Earth? The Hubble Space Telescope, by comparison, is 340 miles above Earth’s surface. History may judge President Biden’s introduction of the first JWST image as his most significant announcement. If so, it’s not a bad legacy—as well as a pretty good achievement for the Indispensable Nation.
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