Time & Perspective Quote by Mike Johanns

Momentum is an oddly bloodless word for something as emotionally charged as reopening borders, and that is exactly why it works. Mike Johanns, speaking as a politician, frames a fraught public-health and economic decision as a physics problem: once the first domino tips, the rest are pulled by force rather than choice. It’s a neat rhetorical move. “Certain amount” sounds measured, even cautious, while “momentum” suggests inevitability. Together they soften accountability. If reopening accelerates, it’s because the system is moving, not because any single leader is rushing.

The subtext is international peer pressure dressed up as pragmatism. “One country after another” hints at a chain reaction of reputational risk: stay closed too long and you look fearful, protectionist, or economically out of step; reopen and you can claim you’re merely keeping pace. Johanns is also speaking to domestic stakeholders-businesses, travelers, border communities-who experience borders less as symbols and more as chokepoints. Momentum, here, becomes a promise that relief is coming and that resistance will soon be costly.

Contextually, the line fits the pandemic-era politics of coordinated reopening, when border policy was never just epidemiology. It was optics, trade, migration anxieties, and the quiet competition to be “open for business” without owning the downside. By invoking momentum, Johanns sidesteps the messy question of what conditions should govern reopening and replaces it with a narrative of catching a wave. The wave may be real, but it’s also convenient: it makes the political choice feel like natural motion.