Crunch Time

The U.S. embassy in Kyiv ordered American family members to leave the country on Sunday. 

The Department of State authorized the voluntary departure of U.S. direct hire employees (USDH) and ordered the departure of eligible family members (EFM) from Embassy Kyiv due to the continued threat of Russian military action. https://t.co/esXkJ6h0Nt

— U.S. Embassy Kyiv (@USEmbassyKyiv) January 24, 2022

Realization shifted last week from “surely he wouldn’t?” to “he’s really going to, isn’t he?” This is that moment when Wile E. has run off the cliff but not yet begun to fall. 

Two years ago Covid crowded out everything but the most immediate, everybody but family. The viral invader’s audacity shocked us. We scrambled to adjust to new facts, all unfamiliar. We couldn’t turn away from the ugly, daily blow-by-blow. Everything was frightening. Events gave us little time to reflect. 

This week we see the malign intent of a different, non-viral, real-life invader. Except unlike Covid, Ukraine is not exactly appearing out of nowhere. Russia has been moving toward military aggression for months, and today the majority of all Russian Battalion Tactical Groups surround or are nearing Ukraine. There’s been enough time for the US president to commit high profile gaffes about Ukraine. Russian landing craft are halfway around Europe en route from the Baltic to threaten Ukraine in the Black Sea. 

The moment we’re in this week, our current reactive moment, will pass. It won’t even last long. We’ll muster allies, defenses, polish our strategy, ready our readiness. Today the US is floating new troop deployments to Europe. We’ll react, and one way or another, as with Covid, the world will change. When we look back here from two years on, today may look less complicated, even quaint. I invite you to pause and enjoy the good old days.

If Russian military hardware enters and remains in Ukraine then Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania will join Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as frontline, newly hostile border states. Russian troops already occupy Moldova’s border with Ukraine, a region called Transnistria. Depending on Russian intent, Moldova may face existential questions, but in any case it will acquire a newly threatening border. 

A fundamental geopolitical realignment is hurtling our way that will not simmer down for years. By spring, tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees – or more – could be storming the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, and how can they, how could they hold them back? Across those borders Russia, or it’s newly installed Ukrainian puppet, will try to stare down four new NATO neighbors. 

Current NATO borders in Estonia, Latvia and Norway will be reinforced, and depending on the depth of the next couple of months’ ill will, Finland’s border may be too. With sudden new face-to-face NATO/Russia exposure, all sides will want substantial, fortified borders. Each country will surely want its own sovereign border backed by its own conventional forces. Here come concrete barriers, anti-vehicle trenches, mesh fencing, electronics, guard towers, barbed wire, electronic and other defenses. Suddenly, it’s a good bet that Schengen’s best days are behind it.

Once we’ve had time enough to consider the longer term, we may find ourselves in a new, raw standoff across war embittered battlefields. Russia v NATO eye-to-eye across borders bristling with weapons and evil intent will be a sight to see. Once again.

As the Covid darkness drew across the world in the early weeks of 2020, I thought, ‘remember this, remember how things are right now, hold on to this moment, to how good you have it, in case this thing gets out of hand.’ 

Now I wonder if we might not ought to stop and appreciate early 2022 in the same way. Here we are in the twilight moments just before the great mid-twenties European realignment. Remember these fleeting good old days, when our grasping at the remnants of democracy is not quite yet a wry memory.

The Pleasures of Flying to Hong Kong, Covid Version

“A PPE-covered worker sent me to a series of stations. First, I pulled my mask down for a nurse to swab my nose and throat for a PCR test. Then I presented my documents — preflight negative COVID-19 test, proof of hotel booking, Hong Kong resident ID and vaccination card — to an officer who scrutinized them before declaring me up to par. The worker at the next station checked for a functioning phone, test-dialing my U.S. number. Then I was presented with a sandwich and water bottle and directed to a waiting area with chairs and desks placed in a grid as though ready for an exam. I checked my lanyard to find my seat: G205.”

Welcome to Hong Kong, Covid time. It gets better. Wait till you get to the 21 day quarantine part. Read all about it right here.

Don’t Try This at Home. Or Anywhere Else.

This is a “steam therapy booth” in Dar es Salaam, a  method Tanzanian authorities touted to protect against Covid. The President, John Magafuli, declared the virus a “satanic myth.”

“By this spring, the president was dead, along with six other senior politicians and several of the country’s generals. The official cause of Mr. Magufuli’s death was heart failure. The details remain secret. Diplomats, analysts and opposition leaders say he had Covid-19.”

Read about it here.

(Photo from the article)

It’s About Time

At last the US will lift its travel ban on vaccinated EU & UK travelers, from November. A ban on vaccinated people never made much sense. but better late than never.

New 3QD Column

Here’s my latest travel column as it ran at 3 Quarks Daily last week: 

On The Road: Fighting Your Way To Holiday

by Bill Murray

It wasn’t effortless but we managed to mollify, sidestep and defy enough authorities to be legally resident in Finland for the month of July. Never mind shoes and belts off and toothpaste in a plastic bag. No, do mind; do that too. But add PCR test results, Covid vaccination cards and popup, improvised airport queues. And a novel Coronavirus variant: marriage certificates on demand. 

The pandemic shines stark light down into the engine room, onto the unoiled grinding of international gears. A year and a half in, the lack of coordination between countries is everywhere on woeful display.

The Finnish parliament, unambiguously and unanimously, declared that “Anyone who has proof of being fully vaccinated or having recovered from Covid within the previous six months will be able to travel to Finland without having to undergo a Covid test.”

But then a Delta Airlines official peered into her screen and told us, “it says here no one is allowed to go to Finland, period.” Whereupon the haggling began, and it turns out production of a Finnish passport and our marriage license was sufficient qualification for access to our seats, payment for which was happily accepted with no questions long ago.

Claire Bushey writes “There are some things too stupid to humour, and that includes spending time and money hunting down a Covid-19 test while I’m on vacation, even though I am already fully vaccinated.”

Both her complaint and my grousing are problems for the fortunate, it’s true, but she is still right. The TSA has had us putting liquids in clear plastic bags since 2006, though, so I’m afraid we might be in for a long haul on this Covid testing thing.

It has been striking how some governments start out more xenophobic than others, and how detached that is from political ideology. All along, clearly, the British Tory government just hasn’t wanted its citizens to travel abroad. But neither does the center-left Trudeau government in Canada want its citizens mixing with us damned foreigners. The Aussie conservatives, the center-left in New Zealand, ditto.

Barriers to entry and overdone testing regimes are frustrating for those of us who are lucky enough to be fully vaccinated, but they are transitory measures and they will change. I think, though, that this virus has changed the world more deeply than all that and more profoundly than we realize.

You can read economic scholars who argue that the pandemic “spurred businesses in practically every sector to radically rethink their operations, often accelerating plans for technological and organizational innovation that were already in the works. Overwhelmingly, firms adopted new digital technologies….” You can read social scientists who have decided that  promoting positive societal response to pandemics depends on “aligning the message with recipients’ values or highlighting social approval….”

Increased productivity, social approval, economic adjustments, progress over time. It’s all sturdy scholar talk, abstract and incremental and reassuring. But maybe what we have here is less a ripple on a Nordic lake than a rip ‘em up convolution of space-time, a gravitational wave of change.

“Hammerson (a shopping centre operator) said on Tuesday it has submitted plans to convert a former Debenhams store into new homes for rent, amid a steep fall in valuation of properties focused on the retail sector due to the COVID-19 crisis.” 

Suddenly housing prices are very high; office and retail prices are very low. That languishing suburban strip mall surrounded by a square mile of asphalt out on the highway? Maybe it’s soon to be a live/work community with a post office in Spencer’s Gifts and a cluster of Pelotons up on the second floor of Macy’s. What we have here is a 33 trillion dollar perturbation of the commercial real estate field. For one.

Generations hand off their collective knowledge one to the next in a wobbly relay of progress. The World War II fighting generation may not have had it exactly in mind, but received wisdom for would-be hippies was, after all that overseas death and dying, give peace a chance. (Sometimes there are happy side effects, like nationalism being left by the wayside, but only, as it turns out, for a time.)

There hasn’t been a pandemic in living memory. Here, we don’t have a generational passing of the baton. We have Camus’s The Plague and John Barry’s The Great Influenza, but we have no actual, living, breathing people to pass on their visceral knowledge of how the 1918 pandemic changed things. We jump ahead now without the tempering wisdom of living memory. It’s not generational change.

There is the obvious parallel of the uninhibited, roaring 1920s, and many are predicting it, but I don’t buy it. Look around and these 2020s don’t feel like letting their shoulders down about anything anytime soon. More accurate predictions call for bigger thinking.

Adam Tooze has written that after the Great War “It took geostrategic and historical imagination to comprehend the scale and significance of (World War One’s) power transition.”

The radical reordering of land use and the vast capital attached to it, the continuing legacy of the 2008 economic crash, ever increasing inequality and proliferating, widespread displays of climate change. All are conspiring to make untenable the way we’ve lived the 21st century so far, and sooner than we think. The status quo holds, until it doesn’t.

•••••

The Nordic countries have been grappling with a heat wave this summer like in western Canada:

“Extreme heat in the Arctic Finland,” FMI researcher Mika Rantanen tweeted two Mondays ago, “Utsjoki Kevo just recorded 33.5°C (92.3°F), which is not only the station’s new all-time heat record, but also the highest reliably measured temperature ever in the whole Finnish Lapland.”

For two weeks, four latitudinal degrees shy of the Arctic Circle, we’ve enjoyed an astonishing unbroken string of brilliant, dry, 30C/86F or warmer days. Lake Saimaa is warm enough that you can jump off the dock without scrambling right back out. Looking around, it makes sense to wonder when people will begin to migrate north to live among these quiet lakes and boundless spruce, birch and pine forests. It’s perfect up here this summer.

And don’t tell anybody, but even better, this summer’s heat seems to have chased away most of the mosquitoes, the brawny ones, the ones with actual weight, the ones you can feel when they land on your shoulder. The bane of Nordic summer seem to have gone north for the summer.

Praise climate change for its small favors. But pity the Lapps.

You Can Make It if You Try. Maybe.

It wasn’t effortless but we managed to sidestep, defy and satisfy enough bureaucracy to find ourselves stamped into the Schengen zone and legally resident in Finland for the month of July. Forget about taking off your shoes, belts and putting liquids in a zip lock bag. No, do that too. But add to the travel shakedown PCR test results, Covid cards (Whoever cautioned against laminating them, that was an error. They are much more resilient when laminated.) and extra, improvised popup queues at airports. In one case, add the required production of a marriage certificate. 

Now we’re back in the Schengen zone after being barred in 2021. We needn’t quarantine on the strength of our two jabs plus two weeks, so we’re in and we have been granted a one month holiday at our Mökki on Lake Saimaa. We are open for business as usual although subject as always to having to juke around the seven hour time difference. Let me hear from you. 

We’re still in Uusimaa tonight but Finland makes the trains run on time and one of them will deliver us here tomorrow. Where I will await hearing from you.

Bill

What a Mess

Friday morning the UK Guardian reports that  “Germany has removed several countries and regions including the US, Canada, Switzerland, Austria and some regions in Greece from its coronavirus travel risk list, the Robert Koch Institute … for infectious diseases has said. The new classifications apply from Sunday, the RKI said. Earlier this week, the US also eased its warning against travel to a number of the most developed nations including Germany.”

Yet the German government advises “Entry into Germany remains restricted and is possible only in exceptional cases. This applies regardless of whether the traveler is fully vaccinated or not.”

If you are American and want to travel to Germany: the American government says “Germany will currently only allow EU citizens, EU residents, and residents of certain other specific countries to enter. The United States is not one of those countries. U.S. citizens traveling to Germany from the United States will not be permitted to enter unless they meet one of only a few narrow exceptions.”  

The US State Department is easing recommendations for outbound travel, but as of today, if you are German and want to travel to the US: “The U.S. government does not allow entry if a foreign traveler does not have U.S. citizenship and has stayed in one of the following countries within 14 days before its planned entry into the United States: 26 countries of the Schengen Area: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.”

Could the governments of the world maybe do a little bit better job of making themselves clear?

They’re Not Making It Easy. Especially Canada.

It looks like travel-ready Americans’ first trip won’t be to the north, where it looks like all those damn foreigners aren’t welcome.

“Canadians support border closures more than residents of any country in the world. A full 86% of Canadians said they strongly or somewhat support closing the border to anyone from another country, while 76% said they support the idea of closing the border to anyone from another province, state or region.”

• from CanadianTravelNews.ca

They’re Not Making It Easy

The Covid AVDaily newsletter reacts to the UK’s “green list” of countries approved for travel without the requirement for travelers to quarantine on their return. They’re unimpressed.

They note that “it includes a number of remote islands such as South Georgia, as well as countries that are right now not welcoming tourists (e.g. Australia, New Zealand and Singapore).”

Then there is talk of passengers facing immigration queues of up to seven hours. The newsletter opines that “Governments like the UK are sending signals that they’d rather people didn’t travel. One of the most revealing parts of Friday’s announcement was when … Paul Lincoln from the UK Border Force (talked) about significant border delays. Lincoln said that each officer would be taking up to ten minutes to check every passenger … listening to him talk the message seemed to be ‘these are the consequences of you choosing to travel.’

Nobody needs that. So we’ve routed ourselves through Amsterdam Schiphol for our July visit to Finland. 

 

New Travel Column Today at 3QD

My monthly travel column went up this morning on 3 Quarks Daily. Read it there for now, and soon I’ll post it here, too.