When Your Country Speaks for You

I have been watching videos lately from a young woman who travels around Russia.

She goes to places I would like to see myself someday: Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Ural Mountains. Her videos are quiet and beautiful. There are trains, snowy roads, apartments, forests, meals, conversations, long stretches of landscape.

What struck me most recently, though, was something almost completely unrelated to the scenery.

She cannot monetize the videos.

Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, and YouTube still says that creators with Russia-based AdSense accounts cannot monetize their channels. The restriction is one of a long series of measures connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

That makes sense at the level where we usually discuss international affairs.

Russia invaded Ukraine. Other countries and international companies responded. Sanctions and restrictions followed.

But then the abstraction travels downward.

Eventually it reaches somebody filming Lake Baikal.

That is where the situation starts to feel different.

A Country and the People Inside It

It is easy to talk about countries as though they were people.

Russia invaded.

America threatened.

China wants.

France objects.

Iran retaliates.

We do this because it is useful shorthand. Governments really do act on behalf of states, and those actions have consequences.

But nations contain millions of people who may have had almost nothing to do with those decisions.

Most Russians are not sitting in rooms discussing military strategy.

Most Americans are not negotiating trade agreements or deciding where troops should go.

They are working.

They are taking children to school.

They are fixing things around the house.

They are worrying about rent.

They are walking dogs.

They are dating people, losing people, making dinner, going to the gym, getting annoyed with their neighbors and trying to figure out what to do over the weekend.

Meanwhile, somewhere far above the scale of ordinary life, their country is doing history.

Sometimes those two realities collide.

The Russian travel vlogger is one example.

Her government made a decision. Other governments and companies reacted. Several steps later, a woman making hiking videos discovered that her nationality had changed what she was allowed to earn from them.

She did not become a different person.

Her videos did not become different videos.

But the international meaning of "Russian" had changed around her.

The Passport Acquires a Personality

I have started wondering whether Americans are experiencing a milder version of the same phenomenon.

The last time I traveled outside the United States was in the summer of 2024.

At the time, telling somebody I was American felt mostly descriptive.

It was information about where I lived.

I could certainly travel abroad now. There is no practical reason I could not.

But I notice that I would feel more self-conscious about it than I did then.

The United States has become extraordinarily prominent again in international political conversation. Views of the country have deteriorated in many places. In a 2026 Pew Research Center survey spanning 36 countries, attitudes toward the United States were negative overall, particularly in much of Europe.

That does not mean an American walking into a café in Amsterdam or Mexico City is likely to be confronted about foreign policy.

Probably nothing would happen at all.

But something has changed internally.

You become aware that when somebody asks where you are from, your answer may arrive carrying considerably more baggage than you packed.

"I'm American" can suddenly feel as though it requires an asterisk.

Not because you are ashamed of being American.

Not necessarily because the person asking thinks badly of Americans.

Simply because you know that your country has been speaking very loudly on your behalf.

Being Represented Without Being Consulted

There is a strange loss of control in this.

Nationality is partly personal.

It can mean food, accent, childhood, landscape, humor, family, music, language and memory.

But nationality is also political.

And the political version is largely beyond an individual's control.

A government can spend years constructing an international reputation that millions of ordinary people then inherit.

They inherit it while traveling.

They inherit it online.

They inherit it when applying for visas or jobs.

Sometimes they inherit it financially.

Sometimes they simply inherit it in the brief hesitation before answering a question as innocent as:

"Where are you from?"

For Russians, that burden is especially severe right now.

Russia is an authoritarian state in which political power is highly concentrated and genuine political opposition is heavily constrained. It would therefore be particularly strange to treat every Russian citizen as though Russian state policy were an expression of his or her personal will.

But the psychological problem exists even in democracies.

A citizen can vote against a government and still be represented by it.

A citizen can protest a policy and still be associated with it abroad.

A citizen can dislike a president and nevertheless find that president occupying much of the world's mental picture of the citizen's country.

The state speaks in the first-person plural.

We have decided.

But the "we" is doing a remarkable amount of work.

The National Reputation Tax

I sometimes think of this as a kind of national reputation tax.

A government earns a reputation collectively.

The consequences are distributed individually.

Usually the tax is small.

It may only mean answering an extra question.

Explaining a political opinion.

Making a joke to defuse an assumption.

Feeling vaguely embarrassed by something happening back home.

Occasionally the tax becomes concrete.

A Russian creator loses access to monetization.

A business loses access to an international service.

A student finds travel more complicated.

A person discovers that some bureaucratic door has quietly closed.

None of this means sanctions or international pressure are necessarily wrong.

That is a separate and much harder question.

Governments do things that demand responses. Economic pressure is one of the tools countries use precisely because the alternatives can be worse.

But economic pressure is sometimes discussed as though it operates on a diagram.

A sanction goes here.

A restriction goes there.

Pressure increases.

Eventually the state changes its behavior.

Real life is messier.

Pressure has to land somewhere.

Sometimes it lands exactly where policymakers hope.

Sometimes it lands on powerful institutions.

And sometimes it keeps traveling until it reaches somebody editing a travel vlog.

Two Different Russias

Watching those videos has also reminded me how different a country looks when you encounter it through a person rather than through international news.

Russia on the geopolitical stage is Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, sanctions, missiles, NATO, oil and territorial conflict.

Russia in a travel video is a frozen lake.

It is a train compartment.

It is someone trying to find something warm to eat.

It is an apartment block with laundry hanging inside.

It is a mountain trail.

Both are Russia.

Neither cancels the other.

The same is true of the United States.

America viewed from abroad can become presidents, aircraft carriers, tariffs, wars, billionaires, sanctions and diplomatic threats.

America from inside is a guy walking his dog through a neighborhood in North Carolina.

It is somebody closing a coffee shop after a shift.

It is a teenager learning guitar.

It is a family arguing about what to eat for dinner.

It is millions of lives that barely resemble the creature called "America" that appears in international headlines.

There is something disorienting about realizing how little control ordinary people have over which version gets exported.

The Unofficial Diplomacy of Ordinary Life

This may be one reason I like watching ordinary people in other countries.

Travel videos are ostensibly about places.

Sometimes they are also small acts of diplomacy.

Not official diplomacy.

Almost the opposite.

They bypass governments entirely.

A Russian woman carries a camera through Siberia.

Someone in North Carolina watches.

For twenty minutes, neither person needs to represent anything.

I do not have to explain the United States.

She does not have to explain Russia.

There is just snow, a train, a mountain, a meal, a joke, a badly timed bus, whatever happens to be in the video.

The enormous national identities recede slightly.

The people become visible again.

Perhaps that matters most precisely when relations between countries are bad.

Governments have tremendous power to determine how nations encounter one another.

They control borders, treaties, armies, sanctions and diplomacy.

But they do not completely control the smaller channels running underneath all of that.

People still listen to one another's music.

They watch one another's videos.

They learn languages.

They make friends.

They become curious.

They discover that somewhere inside a country they have mostly encountered as a geopolitical problem, somebody else is also having a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

That does not solve international conflict.

It does not excuse governments.

It does not make political differences imaginary.

It simply restores a distinction that politics has a way of erasing.

A government is not a population.

A population is not a person.

And a person should not have to carry an entire country's foreign policy through customs.

Countries will continue speaking for us.

Sometimes loudly.

Sometimes badly.

The rest of us can still find quieter ways to speak to one another.