The spectacle of Keir Starmer attempting to navigate the jagged, orange-tinted coastline of American ego is a masterclass in the futility of modern statecraft. On Tuesday, Donald Trump, a man who treats the global order like a personal buffet he hasn’t paid for, decided to weigh in on the British return of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. He called it an act of “great stupidity.” It is a phrase that carries the intellectual weight of a toddler complaining about a sibling sharing a toy, yet for the European diplomatic establishment, it functioned as a cold bucket of reality dumped over their collective, delusional heads. The message is clear: the strategy of ‘appeasement’—that desperate, sweaty hope that if Europe is just polite enough, the storm will pass—has failed before the hurricane even made landfall.

Let’s deconstruct the absurdity. The United Kingdom, a nation currently masquerading as a global power while its infrastructure crumbles like a wet biscuit, thought it could tidy up its colonial laundry by handing back the Chagos Islands while retaining a ninety-nine-year lease on the military base at Diego Garcia. It was a classic Starmer move: a technocratic, legalistic compromise designed to please international law enthusiasts without actually changing anything of substance. It was meant to be a quiet, dignified exit from a messy historical footnote. Instead, it became a target for Trump’s uniquely transactional brand of vitriol. To Trump, there is no such thing as international law or historical justice; there is only 'winning' and 'losing.' If you give an island back, you are a loser. If you don't extract every last cent and drop of blood from a deal, you are stupid. The nuances of the base’s security or the rights of the displaced Chagossians are irrelevant to a man whose geopolitical vision is limited to what he can see from a golf cart.

The broader tragedy here is Europe’s unwavering commitment to its own helplessness. For years, the Brussels-London-Paris axis has operated under the hallucination that Trump was a fluke, a glitch in the simulation that could be patched with a few flattering dinners and a commitment to buy more F-35s. They called it 'Trump-proofing,' a term so offensively naive it borders on the clinical. You cannot 'proof' a continent against a wrecking ball that doesn't believe the wall exists in the first place. Starmer, the human embodiment of a beige filing cabinet, believed that by being the 'adult in the room,' he could secure a place at the table. He forgot that when the host wants to flip the table, being the adult just means you’re the first one to get hit by the silverware.

This incident isn't just about a few specks of land in the Indian Ocean. It is a preview of the coming decade of diplomatic incoherence. The European strategy—if one can call a series of panicked reactions a strategy—has been to play both sides. They want the security of the American umbrella without the indignity of the American umbrella-holder shouting insults at them. They want to maintain the facade of a 'Special Relationship' that has, in reality, been a one-sided hostage situation for decades. Trump’s outburst proves that no amount of kowtowing, no amount of 'strategic autonomy' talk, and no amount of legalistic cleverness will protect them from the whims of a leader who views allies as parasites.

We are witnessing the final, pathetic gasps of the post-war consensus. On one side, we have the Right: a collection of moronic nationalists who think 'strength' is shouting at clouds and breaking treaties for the sake of a headline. On the other, the Left: a performative gaggle of bureaucrats who think that if they just follow the rules of a game the other side has stopped playing, they will somehow be declared the winners by a disinterested universe. Both are equally useless. The UK thinks it is being moral; Trump thinks it is being weak. In reality, both are simply irrelevant. The Chagos Islands are a prop in a play written by idiots, for an audience of the bored.

As Europe stares into the abyss of another Trump era, the 'what comes next' isn't a new strategy or a renewed sense of purpose. It is more of the same: more frantic meetings, more useless communiques, and more 'great stupidity' from every direction. We are strapped into a plane where the pilot is screaming at the passengers and the co-pilot is busy checking the manual for a polite way to crash. There is no appeasement for a man who considers peace a sign of exhaustion. The only thing left to do is watch the spectacle and marvel at the fact that we expected anything else.