🔗 Share this article

The internal and external strategies – including the effort to overturn the election five years ago to recent incursions and threats – erode not only national and global legal frameworks. However, the issue goes deeper.

They jeopardize the core idea of what we mean by.

A ethical foundation of any advanced culture is to prevent the dominant from attacking and exploiting the less powerful. Without this, we would be permanently immersed in a conflict of all against all where survival of the strongest wins.

This ideal is embedded of the nation's founding texts. It is equally the foundation of the postwar international order supported by the United States, which stresses collective action, democracy, individual liberties, and the legal authority.

Yet, it is a vulnerable principle, frequently ignored by those who would exploit their power. Preserving it necessitates that the influential have a sense of duty to avoid seeking short-term wins, and that the public ensure they answer for their actions if they don't.

Unfettered might does not equal right. It leads to uncertainty, upheaval, and war.

Each instance people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful target and use those that are weaker, the framework of our shared norms unravels. If such aggression are not contained, the system fails. Without intervention, the world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.

Today, we live in a global community grown vastly more unequal. Influence and wealth are increasingly centralized than in modern history. This encourages the privileged to exploit the less fortunate because they feel omnipotent.

The wealth of certain billionaires is almost beyond comprehension. The power of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors extends over numerous countries. AI is likely to centralize resources and influence further. The offensive capability of the major powers is unmatched in the annals of time.

Empowered by complicit legislators and a pliant supreme court, the highest office has been made into the most dominant and unchecked entity of the state in history.

Put it all together and you perceive the threat.

A clear connection ties past lawless actions to ongoing menaces. These were founded upon the hubris of omnipotence.

One observes parallel dynamics in international affairs: in territorial invasions, in expansive ambitions, and in the rampant monopolization by massive conglomerates.

However, strength without restraint does not establish right. It produces fragility, upended order, and bloodshed.

History shows that laws and norms to constrain the powerful also shield them. Absent these limits, their insatiable demands for greater influence and riches in time bring them down – and with them their enterprises, countries, or domains. And threaten world war.

Such contempt for legal order will cast a long shadow over America and the global community – and indeed civilization – for a long time.