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I've been thinking about this every single day for months on end. (A thread...)
One explanation is racism: in the first two cases these framings legitimated US military aggression against non-white foreigners, in the third, it is mostly non-white American who are victims.
Another is to focus on the aggression itself. The first two legitimated building up the military-industrial complex, while the third would require building up the medical-welfare state.
A third explanation is factionalism: taking COVID seriously would require the GOP to criticize Trump.
A fourth explanation is psychological. Even though thousands are dying a day now, these deaths are slow in a way that isn't as dramatic as a single attack. It is well known that humans tend to prioritize risks in ways that are more emotional than logical.
A fifth explanation is that Americans and Europeans simply don't understand that it doesn't need to be like this. They assume that places that have done well (Vietnam, Taiwan, New Zealand, China etc.) have done well because of some exceptional factors...
(island, Confucius, dictatorship, etc.) that doesn't apply to them. (This is not true, as can be seen from the differences between Euro-American countries, or even different states/regions within those countries - where some have done much better than others.)
Obviously, all these factors are in play to various degrees - and many of them are mutually reinforcing. For instance, the same racism that sees non-white lives as less important, also refuses to learn from the experience of countries where the pop. are predominantly non-white.
Update: I completely overlooked masculinity as a factor: https://twitter.com/blogkerim/status/1338752948994760704
