If you listen closely to the wind howling through the hollowed-out skull of modern geopolitics, you can hear the distinct sound of Keir Starmer sighing in relief. The British Prime Minister, a man whose personality has all the flavor of boiled cardboard, has stepped up to the microphone to announce a great victory for “British pragmatism.” And what, pray tell, is this triumph? What monumental feat of statecraft has the United Kingdom achieved under his technocratic stewardship? They have successfully convinced Donald Trump not to destroy their economy just because he couldn’t buy Greenland.

Let that sink into your gray matter until it burns. The leader of a nuclear-armed nation, a supposed pillar of the post-war order, is taking a victory lap because the United States President decided—for now—not to levy crushing tariffs on his allies as punishment for their refusal to sell him a sovereign territory like it was a distressed property on a Monopoly board. Starmer calls this “pragmatism.” I call it the desperate whimpering of a nation that knows it has become a geopolitical rounding error, surviving only by the grace of a chaotic hegemon’s short attention span.

The entire spectacle is a masterclass in the degradation of human governance. On one side, we have the American Right, incarnate in Trump, treating the globe not as a complex web of nations and cultures, but as a real estate catalog. The desire to buy Greenland is not strategy; it is the id of late-stage capitalism unbuttoning its trousers in public. It is the greedy, moronic impulse to possess things simply because they exist on a map. And when told “no,” the response was not diplomatic engagement, but a threat to economically strangle the dissenters. This is not foreign policy; this is a mob shakedown conducted by men who think “diplomacy” is the name of a horse they bet on in the eighties.

On the other side, we have Starmer and the performative centrists of the UK. Listen to the language he uses. He speaks of “finding a way forward on security in the Arctic” and the “hard yards” ahead. It is the banal, emptyspeak of a middle manager trying to explain why the office is burning down during a quarterly review. “British pragmatism” in this context is nothing more than the art of keeping your head down while the giant toddler in the room throws his toys at the wall. Starmer isn’t navigating a crisis; he is merely enduring one, hoping that if he uses enough rugby metaphors about “hard yards,” the public won’t notice that the UK’s foreign policy is now entirely dependent on the mood swings of a man launching a “board of peace” at Davos.

And let us discuss that little nugget of absurdity, shall we? While Starmer is busy congratulating himself for not being tariffed into the Stone Age, Trump is at Davos—the annual gathering where the world’s arsonists meet to discuss fire safety—launching a “board of peace.” The irony is thick enough to choke a horse. The very man who threatened to upend the economic stability of the North Atlantic Alliance over a failed real estate deal is now positioning himself as the arbiter of global tranquility. It is grotesque. It is a farce so broad that even the most hackneyed satirist would hesitate to write it, yet here we are, living in it, forced to nod along as if this is serious business.

Starmer claims that the focus must now shift to the Arctic, a region that “may seem a long way away, pretty remote, but actually it does matter.” He speaks to the British public like they are children who haven't yet grasped object permanence. Of course the Arctic matters. It is melting, it is militarizing, and it is the stage for the next great resource war. But Starmer’s sudden pivot to “security” is a transparent attempt to dignify a humiliating week. He wants you to believe that this was a strategic realignment, a meeting of minds on the icy frontiers of defense. It wasn’t. It was a hostage negotiation where the hostage was the British economy and the ransom was the Prime Minister's dignity.

The tragedy is not just that our leaders are incompetent—that would be bearable. The tragedy is that they are incompetent in such boring, predictable ways. The Right is manic and acquisitive, driven by a brain-rot that equates landmass with leverage. The Left—or whatever diluted shade of beige Starmer represents—is reactive and timid, redefining surrender as “pragmatism” and relief as “victory.” They are both useless. They are both toxic. And they are both conspiring, inadvertently or not, to turn the serious business of survival into a reality TV subplot.

So, raise a glass of lukewarm water to Keir Starmer. He survived. The tariffs are lifted. The "crisis" of not selling Greenland is resolved. We can all go back to the “hard yards” of pretending that any of these people know what they are doing, while the ice caps melt and the empires crumble. British pragmatism, indeed. It’s just a polite way of saying we’re all doomed, but at least we’re being sensible about it.