Neville Chamberlain AND the Wuhan Lab

 “There is a great danger in refusing to believe things you do not like” was Winston Churchill’s response to Neville Chamberlain’s, “Peace for our time” comment, following his return from Munich Germany on September 30, 1938 (Ref.1). One would think that the outbreak of W.W.II a short year later would teach the liberal democracies that nations, especially dictatorships, do not change their stripes regardless of their statements or testimonials. Yet, we hear our leaders put forth the idea that improving the living standards of an autocratic nation will ameliorate their aggressive behavior and they will eventually become non-threatening. We in the U.S. and other western nations have repeated this naïve belief with China, which has maintained an aggresive posture in the region and worldwide.  The U.S. has facilitated China’s economic growth at the expense of our own working class.  U.S. citizens have invested over a trillion dollars in Chinese companies (Ref.2,3). We have also allowed China to steal advanced technological information via multiple nefarious means (Ref.4.).  China has used these resources to build a massive military presence (Ref.5).
China wished to develop its own advanced viral molecular biology capability and the west, in this case France and the U.S., were anxious to comply. In 2004 China and France initiated the building and training in Wuhan China of an advanced, BiosafetyLevel-4 viral facility. This effort was supported by the French political class to help China join the family of nations (Neville Chamberlain-like), over the objections of their security and defense establishment fearing military use. In 2014 the lab received level 4 accreditation by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment. At a ceremony in 2017 the French Prime Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, lauded the lab as an example of French Chinese collaboration.  However, within a year French scientists were no longer welcome and the laboratory become strictly a Chinese operation with France warning the U.S. about the facility.  That same year American diplomats found the lab safety programs inadequate (Ref.6).  Despite the warnings, in this same spirit of collaboration with a dictatorial nation, the U.S. helped fund the laboratory. The U.S. Agency for International Development provided $1.1 million, The NIH, $600,000 and the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Agency an amount that needs further investigation (Ref.7).
China is a threat to the U.S. and France, yet this urge to believe that a dictatorial nation will decrease its belligerence with economic sucess seems to be a lesson not learned. If the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is a result of a Wuhan Lab leak as evidence is accumulating, France along with the U.S., by providing the means to create and run the lab, share some of the responsibility.