The U.S. rattles its sabers to protect a capital Americans can’t pronounce while they die by the thousands from a virus they refuse to fight.

(Originally published Jan. 26 in “What in the World“) U.S. President Joe Biden says he warned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin that he’ll send troops to Europe to honor the United States’ obligations to fellow members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if Moscow keeps building up forces around Ukraine. But Biden said he won’t send troops into Ukraine, which is not a NATO member and whose potential membership is why Russia began amassing troops around it in the first place.

Accusing the West of escalating tensions by beefing up forces in Eastern Europe, Russia has launched a misinformation campaign on social media accusing the West of planning genocide against the Russian speakers who dominate the eastern half of Ukraine. (If there’s any upside to all of this, it’s that we all might stop mispronouncing the capital of Ukraine’s name, Kyiv).

Meanwhile, North Korea on Tuesday launched what appeared to be cruise missiles, its fifth missile test this month. With the West on the back foot over Covid, Kim Jong-un has determined along with Russia that this is the perfect time to improve his military position and, with it, his negotiating position.

U.S. Covid deaths have risen back above 2,100 a day, in what the American media will likely interpret somehow as the beginning of the end of the pandemic. It’s not. The pandemic is getting much, much worse and the U.S. is largely to blame for doing so little to stop it. Only 40% of Americans have bothered to get a booster shot (though by other estimates the figure is even lower). And courts have decided that individual liberties take precedence over the public good. Even something as basic as a mask mandate, much less a vaccine mandate, requires legal largesse in the U.S.

What Americans and Europeans have chosen to forget is that the virus doesn’t stop at their borders—especially not borders they insist on keeping open. Even if Omicron infections subside at home, therefore, they’re still rising everywhere else, which means the virus will eventually come home to roost (again) once it’s found a new variant to evade any immunity left over from its last visit. That’s also why Asia’s lockdowns have to persist to the apparent glee of the Western media: because no matter how low Asian nations get their domestic transmission rates, the West keeps harboring the virus and sending it back to Asia in the body of an infected traveler.

To repeat a mantra from early in the pandemic that seems to have been forgotten: we can’t beat the virus here until we beat it everywhere.