🔗 Share this article

His domestic and foreign strategies – ranging from the effort to overturn the election in the past to latest incursions and threats – weaken both national and global law. However, the issue goes deeper.

They endanger the fundamental meaning of a civilized world.

A moral purpose of any advanced culture is to prevent the stronger from preying upon and using the weaker. Without this, we would be permanently immersed in a brutish war where survival of the strongest wins.

This principle is central of the Declaration and Constitution. It’s also the core of the modern framework of international relations supported by the United States, which stresses international cooperation, democracy, fundamental freedoms, and the legal authority.

But, it is a fragile construct, often broken by those who seek to abuse their power. Upholding it requires that the those in charge have the moral fortitude to abstain from seeking immediate gains, and that society hold them accountable when they fail.

Unfettered might is not right. It leads to uncertainty, disruption, and war.

Each instance individuals, companies, or nations that are wealthier and stronger prey upon those that are not, the framework of society frays. If these actions are not contained, the structure collapses. If not stopped, the world can plunge into instability and violence. We have seen this pattern previously.

Our current reality is a society and world with deepening divides. Influence and wealth are more concentrated than in modern history. This encourages the elite to exploit the less fortunate because they perceive themselves as above the law.

The fortunes of a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals is almost beyond comprehension. The power of global industrial giants covers a vast portion of the world. AI is could consolidate wealth and power to a greater degree. The military might of the world's largest nations is without parallel in the annals of time.

Enabled by a compliant faction and an accommodating supreme court, the executive office has been turned into the most dominant and unchecked agent of government in recent memory.

Put it all together and you see the looming crisis.

An unbroken thread connects previous lawless actions to present-day threats. Both were based on the overconfidence of invincibility.

One observes a similar pattern in the actions of other powers: in wars of aggression, in coercive diplomacy, and in the global depredation by powerful corporate entities.

But, unfettered might does not establish right. It makes for instability, upended order, and armed conflict.

Historical evidence demonstrates that rules and conventions to check the influential also shield them. Absent these limits, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually cause their collapse – along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And pave the way for global conflict.

This kind of contempt for legal order will plague the nation and the world – and the very idea of a rules-based order – for years to come.