Thesis

Morality is not a universal force that rewards good behavior. It is a framework for creating social harmony under shared culture and shared responsibility. When that shared culture and responsibility exist, moral obligations are real and binding. When they do not, morality becomes the wrong tool for the wrong job.

This is why immoral enterprises so often succeed. Not because evil is secretly good, but because states, empires and cultures are usually playing a Darwinian game of preservation and growth. The point is not to celebrate this. It is diagnostic. If our moral framework cannot predict how nations actually behave, then the framework is not describing the world. It is only describing our discomfort with it.

The Puzzle of the Mexican War

The Mexican-American War has been called “one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” In fact, it’s been called that by Ulysses Grant, a junior US Army officer at the time who fought in the Mexican-American War. And he wasn’t simply exaggerating. The entire operation was ruthlessly Machiavellian. The US president manufactured the pretext. He sent troops into disputed territory, got them attacked, then claimed Mexico had shed blood on American soil. He was called out at the time for manufacturing a war of conquest by a large power against a recently independent, unstable smaller nation.

And yet, the USA won. Mexico lost half of its territory. The US got California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and more. To add insult to injury, the Gold Rush came months after the treaty had been signed. The Pacific coast access transformed America into a two-ocean trading power with San Francisco as a major global port. This eventually led to the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Los Angeles we know today.

And so we are left with an uncomfortable question. Was US president James K. Polk really in the wrong for initiating the Mexican war? After all, the result was indisputably positive for the USA. If his actions were so unjust, why did they pay off?

We can ask the same question over many horrible acts of history. The Dutch VOC, the American Slave Trade and many other immoral enterprises were nonetheless successful. You could argue the specific economics, and many scholars do, but the trend remains. There is not a strong correlation between enterprises which are moral and enterprises which are successful.

Why is this? If morality truly is a universal virtue, then why doesn’t it pay off in practice?

What Morality Is For

To answer this, we must accept morality for what it truly is: a framework. And just like any framework, it serves a purpose under specific conditions. Namely, creating social harmony under a shared culture with shared responsibility. It is not a magic field that covers all human interaction equally. It is closer to a jurisdiction.

This is why morality often falls short on the nation level. The shared culture and responsibility don’t exist; it’s a category error. Trying to achieve morality here is not only impractical - it’s not desirable in the first place. It would be like judging a chess player for “killing” pieces.

Once morality is jurisdictional, the next question is what governs relationships outside that jurisdiction. The answer is not moral accounting. It is selection. Cultures that preserve themselves continue. Cultures that don’t are absorbed, conquered or replaced. This is where the Darwinian claim enters. Not because survival is morally beautiful, but because outside a shared moral community there is no common moral referee with the authority to make virtue pay.

That is the sense in which conquest can be a success even when it is immoral. If you enrich your economy at the expense of others, you have not become good. You have preserved and grown your own culture. You may not find that desirable, but you don’t need to. A culture which doesn’t value self-preservation will be replaced by one which does. You cannot end the game, you can only resign.

This is why the lion metaphor matters. If a lion wants to be vegetarian, it dies. A less reluctant lion would replace it. The lion should not feel bad for eating deer.

Where the Framework Holds

The framework holds in practice exactly where shared culture, dependency and responsibility are thick enough to create a real moral community. This is why the boundary cannot be reduced to a passport. “Nation-level” is a shorthand. It’s an approximation for any collective with shared culture and responsibility.

The clearest case is your own citizens. There, the moral framework holds because there is shared culture, shared responsibility, shared institutions and shared consequences. But the moment you leave that culture and responsibility, it starts to weaken. This is why it would probably be immoral for the USA to torture Canadians. Their culture is so similar and economy so intertwined that they effectively act as a “soft-nation”.

And it doesn’t have to be black-and-white. There’s a spectrum of nationhood which demands a spectrum of moral consideration. New Zealand is a shared member of the Anglosphere but less economically intertwined with the US when compared to Canada. Therefore New Zealanders can expect a lower level of moral protection. If the US decided New Zealand was no longer a strategic ally, morality alone will only do so much.

We can already see how this plays out between EU states, how it strains America’s relationship in NATO and how it has prevented China from occupying Taiwan for so long. Where that dependency exists, moral obligations are real and binding. Where it doesn’t, applying the framework is sentimental at best and self-deceiving at worst. The practical question is not whether a moral community exists in the abstract. The practical question is how thick the shared culture, dependency and responsibility actually are.

This is also why international law fails whenever stakes are high enough. I am not being radical when I say international law such as the Geneva Convention gets violated constantly, by everyone, whenever the game becomes serious. The rules hold only when they are convenient, or when the strategic cost of violating them is too high. They are philosophically bankrupt, using the wrong tool for the wrong job. It is a failure, has always been a failure and will always be a failure.

Objections and Counterpoints

Some critics would say that this understanding of morality structurally justifies virtually anything a state does to outsiders. They are correct. That is the point of the diagnosis. If a state is dealing with people outside its actual moral community, morality alone will not restrain it. Strategy might. Reputation might. Dependency might. Fear of retaliation might. But morality by itself will not.

This does not mean cruelty is noble, or that all cultures should behave as badly as possible. It means the word “should” only has force inside a framework that can actually bind behavior. Outside that framework, it becomes a sentimental wish dressed up as a law of nature.

Most people might accept this understanding but then ask “but surely not genocide?” The answer here is unforgiving. The restraint exists but it’s strategic, not moral. Rwanda happened. It will probably happen again.

Some might object here, saying that historically, “shared culture” has been weaponized to exclude. The Dutch in 1650 would say Indonesians simply lack the cultural sophistication to be in the moral community - which conveniently justifies anything.

The Dutch were correct that there was a boundary, with a couple important caveats. It’s not a matter of sophistication, but rather cultural context. One is not superior to the other. Likewise, the relationship is symmetrical. The Indonesians would have been equally justified, by this same logic, in doing terrible things to the Dutch.

Some might say there’s a difference of agency. That unlike lions, leaders do have a choice. But that is merely an illusion. There is a temptation, perhaps perpetuated by philosophies like Great Man Theory, to believe that it is individual leaders who are solely responsible. But that is not true. Leaders are products of their cultural systems. If a leader isn’t serving their culture, the system replaces them. If Hernán Cortés decided to be “moral”, the Spanish crown would have appointed someone else. They are not freer than the lion.

Moral Confusion in Foreign Policy

To be clear, I am not inventing anything new. The only thing I am attempting here is to clear up moral confusion. Leaders often think they’re “sacrificing morality”, and the guilt distorts decision-making. They overcorrect with performative moral gestures that serve neither their citizens nor anyone else. That or they develop cynicism. “I had to be evil for my country.” But that is also distorted. The honest framework is simply: am I serving my actual moral community effectively?

This also explains a lot of bad foreign policy. Humanitarian interventions that destabilize regions because leaders felt moral pressure, and aid that props up corrupt regimes because withdrawal “feels wrong”, can both be explained by this clouded judgment. The confusion between geopolitical strategy and interpersonal morality doesn’t make leaders more moral - it just makes them worse at both.

Polk Revisited

So was Polk really in the wrong? From Mexico’s perspective, obviously. From the perspective of Americans whose moral community extended to Mexico, also yes. But history did not punish him for that, because history is not a moral court. From the narrow standpoint of the American political community, Polk served his culture brutally and effectively.

That is the uncomfortable answer. Mexico did not deserve to lose half its territory. The deer does not deserve to be eaten. But the lion is not guilty for being a lion. It only looks guilty if we pretend the forest is a courtroom.