This story is a little bit one-sided. If you read right-wing media, you'll get stories one-sided in the other direction. States in the US had placed orders for

This story is a little bit one-sided. If you read right-wing media, you'll get stories one-sided in the other direction. States in the US had placed orders for masks, in some cases more than a month ago, and have not received them even after having paid for them. They were getting outbid after having a contract in place, and companies (including 3M distributors) weren't honoring orders after higher-grossing orders came in. Florida-bound masks were being diverted to other countries. A whole bunch of countries had already stopped exports of medical equipment. The US was getting outbid on exports AND couldn't import, so was getting stripped of medical equipment. This was a response. Was it a thoughtful, reasoned, reasonable response? No. But some sort of rapid response was needed since there was a flood of equipment out of the US. There are also many disappearing orders in different ports, where shipments apparently just vanish in a poof of smoke. It's not clear who is to blame (but usually everyone assumes it is the US, with no clear evidence). I'm not sure where this is going, but we're seeing escalation on many different sides. We want a deescalation. I'm not sure how to get to there from here. Without deescalation, these are the sorts of things which tend to escalate to war.