Why America Is Uniquely Unsuited to Dealing With the Coronavirus

President Donald Trump has characterized the coronavirus crisis as “a time of shared national sacrifice,” but here’s the hard truth: The nation has never in living memory had to collectively sacrifice quite like this.

Geography has bestowed upon the United States the blessing of being surrounded, as a former NATO chief once put it to me, by friends and fish: Canada, Mexico, and two oceans. Even when the homeland has come under attack—at Pearl Harbor, on 9/11—we responded by fighting the enemy over there so we would not have to fight it back here. When it comes to national-security threats, here has long been a refuge, a fortress. Hence, perhaps, the impulse in the U.S., when the coronavirus began spreading, to prioritize keeping the threat there (via travel restrictions) over preparing for when it got here (by bolstering the health-care system to withstand a surge of cases).

Now, for the first time in generations, the homefront has become the battleground, in this case for the fight against an invisible foe undaunted by borders and oceans and America’s traditional defenses.