THE battle to contain coronavirus is a war. The metaphor may be crude and a virus not a foreign army, but it does strike people down in the random ways that bombs do, even if buildings are all still standing. And as in real wars, it is the working class and minorities who face the brunt of danger and death.

Wars are brutal tests of societies and governments — historically they have marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, especially the great wars that defined the last century.

Coronavirus is a world pandemic and it has the quality of a total war too — all of economic and social life is affected and reorganised around fighting it.

Governments must make fateful, strategic decisions — or fail to make them. Old social and political orders that have survived despite obvious frailties and problems are suddenly exposed by the brutalities of the struggle. It happened to Russia, Turkey and Austria in WWI.

And this is what has happened with coronavirus now, a century later. But the big losers this time are, so far, the victors of WWII: the USA and Britain.

The winners so far are the losers of World War II — Germany, Japan and the newly industrialised nations of East Asia, including Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan and, yes, communist-led China, where the virus was born.

Despite its faltering start, China, which was occupied by Japan in World War II, mobilised all the resources of the state to suppress and defeat the virus.

US attempts to deny China’s success in containing the virus by claiming it is not telling the truth is transparently feeble propaganda to distract from the disastrous handling of the crisis at home.

For decades the West’s leading powers have basked in historic victories — against fascism in 1945 and against communism in 1989.

The US, Britain and the EU have held themselves to be the paragons of liberal economy and political democracy, the unassailable “end of history” model that the world aspires to reach (at least that is the story the West tells itself).

What happens when the West, in relative decline at least since 2000, confronts its most serious challenge since the last world war, but flounders and fumbles, allowing tens of thousands to die, through failures of healthcare, planning and economic protection?

This is the situation that the US, Britain and other countries are facing. The neoliberal laissez-faire model, which has been upheld as the most flexible, resilient and stable in the world, is suddenly exposed as chaotic and unable to protect its populations.

Germany has come out relatively well under former research-scientist Prime Minister Angela Merkel, deploying mass testing to contain the virus.

But as the leading nation in the EU, it has failed to provide concrete solidarity to the European countries first hit by the virus, Italy and Spain.

This could be a death knell for the EU, French President Macron has warned, as much as Brexit was a serious blow — especially if Italy heads towards the bankruptcy analysts have been predicting for years.

Over coming weeks and months we will see whether the health and economic disasters facing the governments of Trump, Johnson and Macron, who has apologised to the nation for failings on tackling the virus, will become political disasters too, destroying their credibility permanently and ultimately bringing them down.

The unfolding disaster in the US is a direct threat to Trump’s second term, but it is also a massive indictment of the country’s private healthcare system — and of a political class that has allowed millions of workers to be thrown on the scrapheap by the virus.

The image of hundreds of homeless people left to sleep out in the open in a concrete parking lot in Las Vegas, while 70,000 hotel rooms lie empty all across the city, is the most obscene indictment of the stupidity and cruelty of US capitalism.

Trump has used his first three years to trash US “leadership” in the world, but now the world can see America stripped naked, the emperor with the world’s biggest military and bases in every corner of the globe, brought low by an invisible bug. Trump’s inflated stock market has crashed and his claims to economic leadership lie in tatters.

But whoever wins in November, the US can never go back to “business as usual” and must somehow rebuild from this epic defeat, the worst at least since Vietnam.

For Johnson in Britain, his own close brush with the virus may preserve public sympathy — and perhaps a scapegoat can be found for his government’s failure to protect frontline health staff and the wider public in the shape of hapless health secretary Matt Hancock. We will see.

If not, coronavirus will be Johnson’s “ERM moment” — the economic fiasco and recession that ended the Tories’ credibility in the early ‘90s.

Johnson just won a whopping majority on the Get Brexit Done mantra, but now coronavirus has eclipsed all memory of that three-year struggle. Brexit still has to be completed, but the real test for Johnson and the Tories is happening now and it is not looking good.

They may have to rely on the British people’s apparently unquenchable forbearance for Conservative failure and hope all will be forgiven. But for all the families who have lost loved ones — British deaths are now in reality as bad as Italy’s and we had a month to take action but failed to do so — that could be a forgiveness too far.

As for Macron, he says the virus could remake capitalism — and hopes countries will begin, in the aftermath of the pandemic, to prioritise people over profit and start to address socioeconomic inequality and environmental issues. A little late for a conversion to socialism.