Trump's 'lunacy' and ownership lessons

On Sunday, real estate businessman-turned-president Donald Trump went beyond laying his claim on terrestrial assets like the Strait of Hormuz, Canada, Lake Ontario and Greenland, to declare on the delightfully named Truth Social that 'The Moon is ours', the US flag next to the message with the lunar landscape as background explaining what 'ours' meant. Tantrum dressed up as geopolitics is always a perfect mix of comic and irksome. Yet, beneath the theatrics lies a deeper fallacy: the belief that places, celestial or terrestrial, can be 'owned'.

Legally, the post is meaningless. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which the US is (still) a signatory, forbids national appropriation of celestial bodies. Trump's claim is, therefore, as enforceable as scribbling 'mine' across the night sky. But the conceit mirrors a broader delusion: that countries, territories or extraterrestrial bodies can be possessed like suburban plots. Native Americans understood this ('Everything is everybody's to be shared'); communists did not ('Everything is the state's to be doled out'). Ownership implies exclusion - mine, not yours, a prime requisite for privacy that was broadly extended to Westphalian notions of sovereignty. Belonging implies responsibility: 'ours', if we care for it. Moon, like Earth, cannot be owned but only inhabited, explored and tended to. The same applies to nations. A country 'belongs' to its people, not because they hold title deeds but because they invest in it - economically, environmentally, culturally.

So, Trump's 'lunacy' exposes the hollowness of territorial imagination at large. To claim Ganga as Bhagirathi is Indian and when it suddenly becomes Padma it's Bangladeshi is not so dissimilar from the Moon being 'American'.