The Mercenary’s Handshake: How a Trillion Dollars Bought the Silence of the West

They tell us the F-35 deal is about security. They tell us it’s about jobs. But when a government explicitly erases the memory of a murdered journalist to close a sale, we aren’t witnessing diplomacy. We are witnessing the sale of our collective soul.

The Seductive Logic of Necessity

I want you to try and agree with them. Seriously. Put yourself in the shoes of the strategist who looks at the map of the Middle East and sees only vectors of force. From their perspective, the moral outcry over the Saudi F-35 deal is childish. They would tell you that while we wring our hands over the death of one man—Jamal Khashoggi—adversaries are plotting the death of nations. They would point to the $1 trillion investment and ask: ‘Are you really willing to throw away the economic future of your country for the sake of a high horse?’ It is a compelling argument. It appeals to our desire for safety, for order, for the reassurance that someone, somewhere, is making the hard choices so we can sleep at night. It whispers that morality is a luxury for the weak, and that true power requires the stomach to shake hands with the devil.

The Cost of Calculated Blindness

But here is where the trap snaps shut. The moment we accept that truth is tradable, we lose the ground we stand on. When I watched the dismissal of the intelligence report on Khashoggi—labeled ‘unfounded’ despite the evidence—it felt like a ritual sacrifice. We weren’t just selling jets; we were sacrificing the very concept of objective reality on the altar of convenience. As Simone Weil so sharply observed:

To borrow the arms of the enemy is to become the enemy. To believe that one can use the methods of a totalitarian state to defeat a totalitarian state is a delusion.

– Simone Weil

We are telling ourselves that these F-35s are tools of deterrence, but in reality, they are hush money. We are paying for the privilege of pretending the world is simpler than it is. We are choosing the comfort of a lie over the jagged edge of the truth.

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The Transactional Trap

The tragedy is that this doesn’t even buy us the safety we crave. A friendship bought with arms sales is not a friendship; it is a hostage situation. By signaling that our values have a price tag, we have emboldened every autocrat who watches. They now know that the West’s ‘red lines’ are painted in water, easily washed away by the flow of capital. We are left in a world where alliances are hollow shells, void of trust, held together only by the fear of what happens when the money stops flowing. We have forgotten the warning of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We have chosen the lie. The question is, how long before the violence follows?