🔗 Share this article

His domestic and foreign strategies – including the challenge to the democratic process in the past to recent actions and threats – undermine not only domestic and international jurisprudence. However, the issue goes deeper.

They threaten the core idea of civilization itself.

A guiding principle of any advanced culture is to forestall the stronger from harming and taking advantage of the vulnerable. Without this, we would be trapped in a conflict of all against all where might makes right could survive.

This principle lies at the center of America’s founding documents. This is also the core of the modern framework of international relations supported by the United States, emphasizing multilateralism, popular sovereignty, fundamental freedoms, and the supremacy of law.

However, it is a delicate construct, frequently ignored by those who would exploit their power. Preserving it demands that the those in charge have a sense of duty to avoid seeking temporary advantages, and that the rest of us demand responsibility when they fail.

Absolute power does not equal right. It results in uncertainty, chaos, and conflict.

Each instance people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful attack and exploit those that are less so, the framework of our shared norms weakens. If such aggression are left unchecked, the structure collapses. Allowing it to persist, the world can descend into disorder and conflict. It has happened before.

We now inhabit a global community with deepening divides. Influence and wealth are held by fewer hands than ever before. This invites the powerful to leverage their position against the less fortunate because they feel above the law.

The fortunes of a handful of tycoons is staggering. The power of global industrial giants spans numerous countries. AI is could centralize economic and political clout even more. The offensive capability of the leading countries is unmatched in the annals of time.

Supported by a compliant faction and a pliant high court, the executive office has been turned into the supreme and answerable-to-none entity of state power in the modern era.

Put it all together and you see the looming crisis.

A clear connection ties earlier breaches of norms to current menaces. Each were based on the hubris of invincibility.

You see a similar pattern in international affairs: in military conflicts, in coercive diplomacy, and in the worldwide exploitation by powerful corporate entities.

But, strength without restraint does not make right. It produces instability, upheaval, and armed conflict.

The lessons of the past reveal that rules and conventions to check the influential also safeguard them. Absent these limits, their insatiable demands for greater influence and riches eventually lead to their downfall – along with their enterprises, countries, or domains. And risk world war.

Such contempt for legal order will cast a long shadow over the nation and the world – and indeed civilized conduct – for years to come.