“The past explains how we arrived here. It does not decide what comes next.”
I have come to believe that travel is not only about seeing places, but about seeing systems—how they rise, how they fracture, and how fragile they truly are. That belief frames how I see the world today, a world that is not merely changing, but rupturing.
The language of continuity—of transition, reform, or rebalancing—no longer describes our moment. What is breaking is not only the geopolitical order, but the moral scaffolding that once made that order appear coherent. Questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and power—once politely deferred—are now being asked openly, and once asked, they refuse easy answers.
It is in this context that claims about territory and historical entitlement take on renewed urgency. Recent assertions that Denmark has no legitimate claim to Greenland because Europeans arrived there “only” five centuries ago expose a deeper contradiction. By that logic, the same question rebounds onto the United States and other settler societies. How long ago did Europeans arrive in North America to make it their own? Four hundred years? Five hundred? And what of the Indigenous peoples who lived on, governed, and cultivated the land for thousands of years before colonization began?
If temporal priority alone determines legitimacy, then much of the modern world collapses under its own weight.
Modern states were not born of moral clarity. They emerged through conquest, coercion, and unequal power, later stabilized by laws and institutions that transformed force into permanence. International norms did not erase these origins; they normalized them. Over time, repetition became legitimacy, and legitimacy became assumed. This is why appeals to history, when used selectively, are so dangerous. They are rarely about justice. More often, they are about leverage.
This tension—between how nations came into being and how they justify themselves today—is not abstract for me. It is one of the reasons I travel. To move through the world is to see, firsthand, how fragile governance really is, how contingent borders are, and how deeply history lives in the present. In ancient cities, colonial capitals, and post-conflict societies, the past is not a chapter—it is architecture, memory, grievance, and silence.
Travel strips away the illusion that governance is permanent or inevitable. It reveals how quickly order can fracture, how easily institutions fail, and how much of what we call stability rests on collective belief rather than unshakable truth. Standing in places shaped by empire, revolution, or collapse, one learns that sovereignty is less a fixed fact than a negotiated condition—renewed or eroded with every generation.
This understanding reframes the question of legitimacy. Modern states cannot justify themselves solely by how they came into being, because few would survive that reckoning. Legitimacy today must flow forward, not backward. It must rest on present consent, self-determination, and the agency of the people who live within those borders now. The past explains how we arrived here; it does not, by itself, determine who decides what comes next.
Greenland illustrates this distinction clearly. The question is not whether Denmark once claimed or administered the territory, but whether the people who live there now possess genuine agency over their future. Modern legitimacy depends not on the age of a claim, but on the reality of self-determination.
Applied honestly, this same standard exposes America’s unresolved contradiction. The United States exists as a sovereign state, yet its foundations rest on the dispossession of Indigenous nations who never truly consented to that loss. Tribal sovereignty persists, but uneasily. Land acknowledgments multiply, but restitution remains limited. Reconciliation is spoken of more often than it is achieved. America’s legitimacy today rests not on its origins, but on whether it continues to confront its history and expand justice in the present. That work remains incomplete.
These are not lessons learned from textbooks alone. They are learned by walking through cities where borders have shifted, by listening to people whose lives have been shaped by decisions made far away, long ago, and by witnessing how fragile peace and governance can be when trust erodes. Travel becomes, in this sense, a moral education. It reveals the cost of pretending that power is neutral, that history is settled, or that injustice fades on its own.
In a rupturing world, history is being reopened not to heal old wounds, but to justify new ones. Ancient grievances are revived selectively, pressed into service of modern domination. Moral language is stripped of consistency and used as strategy. That path leads not to justice, but to fragmentation and fear.
The only defensible response is an honest one: to acknowledge past injustice without allowing it to become a tool of opportunism; to reject nostalgia for an order that never fully lived up to its ideals; and to ground sovereignty not in conquest or myth, but in present agency and shared responsibility.
Travel has taught me that the world is held together not by inevitability, but by choice. The past explains how we arrived here. What matters now is whether we have the courage to see the world as it is—and to decide, together, what comes next. And whether this fracture becomes a collapse, or an opportunity to build something more honest, depends on whether we are willing to apply the principles we already accept, consistently and without exception.
Simply O
Simply O 