Coronavirus has soured bilateral relations, reaffirming the link between a catastrophe and international game theory. The United States of America has this week ratcheted up the pressure on the People’s Republic of China, with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping being the main actors.

For the first time and six months ahead of Election 2020, Trump has linked Beijing to his re-election prospects in November. “China will do anything they can to have me lose this race,” he said, adding that he believed China wants his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, to win to ease the pressure on US-China trade relations. He is aware that he is, at the end of the day, accountable for the relentless spread of coronavirus in America.

On the face of it, he might have sounded presumptuous, even cynical, in his interview to Reuters. He has let it be known that he was looking at different options in terms of consequences for Beijing over the virus. “I can do a lot,” he is reported to have said without being explicit.

Having said that, he ought to be acutely aware that he has shot himself in the foot, most recently with his quirky prescription on the use of a “disinfectant injection”. Trump’s response has come under strong scrutiny with just 43 per cent of Americans approving of his handling of the pandemic, according to an opinion poll on 27-28 April, days after the President’s discredited comments on the disinfectant “antidote”. At sixes and sevens over the pandemic that has already claimed more than 60,000 lives in America, Trump has increasingly blamed China for the disaster.

On Wednesday, he iterated that Beijing should have let the world know about the coronavirus much sooner. He has speculated about retaliation, saying that China could have stopped Covid-19 and even suggested that the US will seek damages. Clearly, ideological certitudes prompted China to be economical with the truth. Beijing’s belated revelation that the toll was 50 per cent higher than what was initially calibrated is faily concordant with the Communist country’s state policy of keeping matters under the hat. At another remove, a bumbling US President has stumbled in his response to Covid-19. President Trump said that the trade deal he had concluded with President Xi Jinping was aimed at reducing the chronic US trade deficits with China.

However, this had been “upset very badly” by the economic fallout of the virus. The sniper attack on China appears to mirror leaked Republican party memos, which have advised candidates to aggressively target Beijing in their public remarks on the pandemic, as part of their re-election strategy. The nub of the matter must be that the world is under risk, and what matters most of all is international cooperation, a scarce quantity at this juncture. There is likely to be a dramatic paradigm shift in the Democratic campaign this year. Joe Biden might be enjoying a quiet chuckle, and not least Nancy Pelosi.