COVID-19’s origins maybe in Asia but its breaking point has been in the West

Geographic laws are simple: the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. But yet in the geopolitical imagination of countries, at least in the last two hundred years or so, from technological innovation to Westphalian sovereignty and to liberal democratic norms, all have allegedly flown from the West to the East.

There has been a perception of “utopianism” around western democracies, that sense of “first worldness” that gets codified with nations in Western Europe and North America. These countries…