The world is closing its doors

Straws in the wind: recently I ran across a post by the CEO of a countrywide professional association in Canada. People like him are used to hopping across the U.S. border for various meetings several times a month, but he was remarking on what people had been talking about at the association’s recent annual conference in a big Canadian city.

What his post said was: “Consensus here is that it’s risky to travel to (U.S. flag emoji) but if you have to go, bring a burner phone. Have a plan in case you get detained. Watch what you say. Who you meet.” And I thought “Yeah. Me too.”

I’m a journalist so I will still go to the U.S. if I absolutely have to, but not for pleasure, not for paid lectures and things, and yes, please on the burner phone.

Back when I started out in this trade half the world was off limits, especially for freelance journalists. The Cold War reached a second peak in the early ‘80s and you couldn’t go to the Soviet Union unless you had a big media organisation negotiating for you. Even then it took months for a visa, and you were followed everywhere.

The communist-ruled “satellite” countries in Eastern Europe were a little easier, and China was letting tourists into some parts of the country (but not stray journalists). Albania, North Korea and Iran were completely closed, and most of southeast Asia and much of Central and South America were ruled by military dictators who ran death squads.

Then non-violent democratic revolutions began all over the “third world,” the communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed, and the old Soviet Union itself followed suit. Soon almost the whole world opened up.

It was a nice ride while it lasted, but then the whole process went into reverse.

You won’t feel the effects much if you travel as a tourist or even do business abroad, but journalists (including foreign journalists) are the canaries in the coal mine on this and I’m certainly feeling the change. The number of countries I won’t go to any more is growing every year.

It started, weirdly enough, with Turkey, a place I thought I knew well. I’ve lived there, I speak the language (or at least I used to), and I even thought President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was a welcome change from a militantly secular government that ignored the rights of the pious half of the population.

Then the editor of the newspaper that ran this column in Turkey was jailed, the publisher went into exile, and the new regime turned the paper into a government propaganda outlet. I know there’s a fat file on me somewhere in Ankara and I’ve seen the inside of a Turkish jail (as a visitor), so I don’t go there any more. Twenty years now.

Next was Russia, where I had been practically commuting in the early 90s. Vladimir Putin was elected in 1999 and it was still all right for a while, but by 2005 he was killing opposition leaders and I started reporting from afar. Note, by the way, that these changes were happening after more or less free elections — although they tended to be the last fair elections.

Then came a round of non-violent pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East, most of them drowned in blood. That set off a whole cluster of civil wars, and the whole region became very hard to work in. It still is.

Next was China, where they arrested, tried and jailed two random Canadian businessmen in 2018, really as hostages to exchange for a Chinese citizen in Canada whom they wanted back.

It wasn’t aimed specifically at journalists and the victims were freed after a thousand days in prison, but I and many other people took it as a signal to do your Chinese business from afar.

However, I never thought that I would be adding the United States to the list. Even during Donald Trump’s first term foreign journalists were no more at risk of arbitrary imprisonment than the average American citizen, and nobody followed you around or listened to your phone calls. (Well, no more than they listen to everybody else’s calls.)

Now, quite suddenly, the United States has become just another great power where foreigners watch what they say, try to minimize contacts with official bodies, or just stay away. The thought even occurs that, as in so many other cases, there will still be elections but we will know the outcome in advance.

It sounds almost hysterical to talk like this and many non-journalist travelers won’t even notice it, but the world is closing down again. I have no idea if and when it will reopen.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.