Critics of the World Health Organization aren't wrong to point out the organization's misplaced trust in China's government early in the pandemic. More skepticism about the misinformation coming out of Beijing might well have allowed the world to better prepare as the coronavirus spread around the world.

But President Donald Trump's threat to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO is clearly just another attempt to divert attention from his own continuing leadership failure. This is a global emergency that requires a global response, not more Trumpian isolationism and distraction.

The WHO relies on information from member nations about health issues within their own borders. That presents a problem in the case of a closed society like China, with an authoritarian government and no free press to fulfill a watchdog function. We know now that the Chinese government suppressed or downplayed the severity of the outbreak early on.

This included a crucial six-day period in mid-January in which Beijing knew it was facing a pandemic but didn't make it public. During that time, an Associated Press investigation would later reveal, the city of Wuhan — ground zero for the coronavirus — hosted a mass banquet. By the time Beijing finally began warning the public, thousands were infected and the virus had migrated overseas.

The WHO's unreasonably credulous treatment of information coming out of China included echoing a false assessment that the virus couldn't be spread by human-to-human contact. The organization's response deserves the scrutiny it's now getting.

But that didn't justify Trump's decision last month to suspend U.S. payments to the WHO. America provides more of the organization's funding than any other country, and suspending it during a global pandemic was the height of irresponsibility.

He escalated the conflict Monday, threatening to withdraw from the WHO completely unless it commits to "substantive improvements within the next 30 days." Tellingly, Trump's ultimatum doesn't specify what those improvements should be. It's not hard to figure out why: The point of the threat isn't to improve the WHO. It's to distract from Trump's own failures.

Except for a poorly conceived travel ban that allowed thousands of Americans to return unimpeded from China, Trump did nothing but deny the threat until March. He failed to ramp up the testing that could have reduced the need for an economic shutdown. He failed to help coordinate equipment requirements between states and has repeatedly contradicted his own administration's pandemic guidelines. Everyone else is to blame but Trump himself for the more-than 92,000 deaths to date, by far the most of any nation.

It's clear that Trump's effort to make the debate all about what the WHO did or didn't do is just part of his strategy of distraction. But it also threatens to worsen the pandemic, eviscerating a key global resource at a time it's needed most.

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