Donald Trump calls the Chagos deal ‘stupidity,’ but it feels more like fatigue. In this personal exploration, we look at why the West is eager to trade strategic assets for moral comfort, and what this tells us about our collective exhaustion.
Do You Feel the Weight of the Map Slipping?
I find myself looking at the maps of the world differently these days. They used to feel like granite—immovable assertions of who owned what, and why. Now, they feel like sand. The news that Britain is handing over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius was met with a shrug by most, and scorn by Donald Trump. But what I felt was a distinct sense of exhaustion. It wasn’t the exhaustion of the negotiators, but the exhaustion of a civilization that has simply tired of maintaining its perimeter. We are told this is justice, a correction of colonial wrongs. And perhaps, on a legal ledger, it is. But deep down, does it not feel like we are simply offloading baggage we are too weak to carry?
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
– Arnold J. Toynbee
Are We Mistaking Weakness for Virtue?
It is comfortable to dress up our retreats in the robes of morality. It feels good to say we are doing the “right thing” by stepping back. But I worry that we are deceiving ourselves. Trump, in his blunt and often abrasive way, identified the core issue: you don’t give up the keys to the fortress and expect to be thanked for it; you get laughed at. We are in a moment where we desperately want to believe that the world runs on rules and politeness, because the alternative—that it runs on power and will—is too terrifying to contemplate. We are substituting the hard work of strategy for the easy endorphin hit of moral posturing. We are becoming spectators in our own decline, applauding the dismantling of our own security because it looks polite.
Nothing is more dangerous than a virtuous man with a limited understanding.
– Camus (paraphrased from his notebooks)
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What Happens When the Rent Comes Due?
The tragedy is that we think we can negotiate with gravity. We think we can lease back our safety after we’ve sold the title. This is the great illusion of our time: that we can have the benefits of empire—security, trade routes, influence—without the moral and physical costs of holding it. The true danger is not losing an island, but losing the will to define why we held it in the first place. We are drifting into a world where everything is for sale, including our resolve. My advice to you is to watch these moments not as distant diplomatic events, but as barometers of our collective soul. When we stop holding the line, the line moves to us.