This looks like a standard Department of State advisory message. A fairly moderate one to “exercise caution”. The purpose of these advisories is to make sure travelers are aware of any situation. The article on France, for example, has messages about Covid-19, terrorism, and civil unrest, along with advice.
Yeah, I went through the CDC site and most places are 3 or 4 with the same message (the NZ message is currently a 1). It may seem silly to just put that warning for basically any country at first but really when you think about it yes, you shouldn't be traveling during a pandemic. I.e. "warning on traveling to <x>" does not mean "because traveling inside the US is a good idea" it means "exercise caution when traveling during a pandemic".
It's unfortunate both the article and comments instead only talk about the most polarizing interpretations rather than look into the story.
Correction, NZ is a 2 (it is a CDC level 1 advisory, which makes it a State Dept. level 2). Still, only Taiwan and Macau have level 1 (the safest level) advisories, so the State Dept. is calling NZ one of the safest 11 countries in the world, rather than the safest 3.
And in turn most Americans don't know or care about the rest of the world.
It's been this way my entire (relatively long) life. The only new thing that is the last couple decades brought the internet where many of us can learn about what's going on out there.
True I'm not really familiar with what gets covered on Telemundo and such. But I'd still bet Trump/Obama/Bush have gotten far more coverage in other countries than, say, Xi or Abe get in the US.
I could see that being true. I think there are reasons for it.
I would argue that in many cases, American foreign (incl trade) and domestic (incl fiscal) policy have a greater impact on other countries' economies than do their own respective heads of state/government. Whether you like it or not, the strength of the relationship with the US is a major factor for the prosperity of many nations.
I think this is a big part of why people like Bolsonaro and Netanyahu use Trump's imagery when they campaign. Externally, it signals receptiveness to US interests. Domestically, it signals prosperity and security.
Also, the USA exports its culture to the rest of the world via TV, film, music, and the internet. Politics is a natural offshoot of that.
Some countries circulate US currency. Others peg their currency to the dollar. Petrostates do business in the dollar because that's the base currency for crude oil trading.
My girlfriend's father in Malaysia watched CCTV and a few other Chinese language broadcast news stations that had stories on what was happening in the US every day, so if the family in Xiamen has a TV then they might not "follow" US politics, but they definitely get informed about what's happening here.
I hope America can recover out of the damage the current administration has done. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, he is going to be busy meeting leaders of the world apologizing the mess Trump has created.
> Trump won because the Democrats railroaded their best candidate in favor of someone who is profoundly unlikeable and untrustworthy. Regardless of if she is truly a criminal, or not, the Democratic party choose a candidate who is under investigation by the FBI instead of a candidate that had real honest to god connection with the working people of the country. The voters have literally said that even Trump is better than what the Democrats have tried to ram down their throats this election. This election was lost, not won.
I think we all would have been singing a different tune at this time if Hillary Clinton was the president. Remember, she lost by a small margin, and I really truly blame her for the complete mess. She trusted the polls too much, didn't raise empathy for people and she hadnt got the charisma of Obama to win people. Hillary even had the popular vote.
The course of history, and consequently the tunes of non-Americans and Americans' view of America would be different if small perturbations in short term had not caused profound changes in the outcome of history.
NZ press would be praising Hillary in one way or the other. It is simply that powerful.
I would say, during this pandemic half-measures do not work. As an expat in Vietnam, I witnessed successful handling of the first wave. 3 months we were living like there's no virus, economy was reopen. Now the second wave, after the first case more than 10 thousand people were quarantined and intensive testing started over the country. My colleague was complaining, just several cases, why that overreacting. Next morning it was 35 cases, and after one more day there were 216 - and no more. Looks like second wave also contained. As practice showed, there are no "too tough" measures, if you want to stay safe during world pandemic.
The NZ border is, for all intents and purposes, completely closed. They're largely only letting in NZ citizens (a bit of nuance there, but that's more or less the case).
Those 23 cases are in managed isolation or quarantine, and New Zealand is otherwise back to normal.
I'm trying to get to my partner in NZ. She's having meals in restaurants with friends, working a non-essential retail job, going to pub usergroup meetups.
100 days without community transmission today (Sunday) so there's talk of loosening restrictions for "essential skilled migrants". Hope your application goes well.
We're letting in film crews, so this could be seen as a brain drain of Hollywood. James Cameron moved his family here from LA before Covid so that's more to do with Weta Digital and lifestyle etc.
One of the trump administration’s goals is to isolate America and weaken its stature among its allies. Whether or not this particular action is a result of that is unclear.
Because he views the world transactionally and as a zero sum game, “America first” has to come at the expense of other nations. It doesn’t hurt that his benefactor feels threatened by NATO and was expelled from the G7
Because Trump's base thinks that trade with those allies is the reason they can't get a manufacturing/extraction job that will support their desired lifestyle.
This is not the equivalent of weakening the US's stature among allies. And even if that were the only possible outcome of that policy, it still wouldn't be the administration's goal, only an unintended side effect.
It's just a warning that NZ is not covid free. We are not yet. Yes it's under control but we are not out of the woods yet. I don't think this will impact diplomatic relations.
Look to individual people's motives, not the US' interests. US Sec of State Pompeo knows Trump, who fires cabinet members that don't tow the line and act loyally to him, wants the US to appear no worse impacted by COVID than other countries to prevent general election weakness. Pompeo therefore does whatever he can to generate news articles about how much worse other countries are.
Trump has been attacking US states, US federal agencies, US allies, and many subsets of American citizens since he took office. By most accounts he is not working in the interest of the US. Who is he working for? That's an open question.
He is working for himself only. Too self-centered to put anyone/anything else above his interests, which makes him oblivious and predictable, with a massive amount of people profiting off that fact.
This Russia-Trump conspiracy theory is one of the left's intellectual failures. You might as well believe Obama is a Muslim spy or the Illuminati controls the world or whatever. You've just been worked up into a frenzy by the media and don't realize it.
I wouldn't equate Trump-Russia collusion with birtherism and other anti-Obama smears, for many reasons. Here are five.
* Russia systematically influenced internet forums, Twitter, etc, to help Trump in the 2016 election. This influence campaign is documented in the Mueller report, and several individuals and companies have been indicted. American intelligence says that Russia currently continues this activity.
* Mueller stated in his report that a lack of candor from several people interviewed as part of his investigation impeded the collection of evidence about coordination between Trump and Russia. Failure to bring charges against a person does not exonerate that person.
* Mueller did not set out to address the question of whether Trump "colluded" with Russia, and even if he addressed that topic in his report, there's no way for the public to know that, because the report is still heavily redacted.
* Manafort, Donald Jr., and Kushner met with representatives of the Russian government in Trump Tower. They did not disclose this to officials until Kushner was forced to revise his SF-86 because he failed to include information about his relationships with several key foreigners.
* Trump has sought election assistance from other foreign governments, including using missile defense as leverage over the Ukrainian president, as well as (according to Bolton) using a meeting with Xi Jinpeng to ask repeatedly for help with his re-election campaign.
You realize all that is the same level of evidence that conspiracy theorists use, right? It's like saying 9/11 was a false flag operation because the US did one before in Cuba and would benefit from an excuse to invade Iraq and the CIA had warned the president in advance and there's some classified information that the public isn't allowed to know. There's a reason this stuff isn't accepted in court and shouldn't be accepted by people trying to understand things.
It isn't just Trump, it's an entire subset of the GOP who are actively pushing Kremlin propaganda, just to hold onto power. Senators, including Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), in the middle of an egregiously poor pandemic response, accepting and spreading Russian propaganda, wants to yet again start up investigations of Biden and his son, in September. It's soooo important he has to wait until September, to release this urgently important report. Well timed, however, to try and influence an election. He clearly think his own constituents are gullible morons, or else he'd be more worried about getting punished at the polls. But in fact, he thinks this will work.
It's impossible for me to know who he thinks he's working for. But I can clearly see, from his words and his actions, who he might-as-well-be working for.
Don’t read too much into it.