🔗 Share this article

The domestic and foreign initiatives – ranging from the effort to overturn the election in the past to recent moves and threats – undermine both domestic and international legal frameworks. The implications are broader.

These actions jeopardize the very concept of civilization itself.

The guiding principle of any advanced culture is to prevent the stronger from harming and taking advantage of the vulnerable. Otherwise, we risk being trapped in a state of nature where might makes right could survive.

This concept is central of the Declaration and Constitution. It is equally the foundation of the postwar international order championed by the United States, which stresses collective action, popular sovereignty, individual liberties, and the legal authority.

Yet, it is a vulnerable construct, often broken by those who choose to misuse their influence. Preserving it requires that the powerful have a sense of duty to abstain from seeking immediate gains, and that society ensure they answer for their actions should they falter.

Unfettered might does not make right. It leads to instability, disruption, and hostilities.

Each instance people or corporations or countries that are wealthier and stronger target and use those that are weaker, the fabric of civilization unravels. If these actions are left unchecked, the structure collapses. If not stopped, the world can fall into chaos and war. We have seen this pattern previously.

We now inhabit a society and world with deepening divides. Authority and resources are more concentrated than in modern history. This invites the powerful to leverage their position against the less fortunate because they perceive themselves as above the law.

The wealth of a small group of tycoons is staggering. The power of global industrial giants covers a vast portion of the world. AI is could centralize wealth and power even more. The offensive capability of the leading countries is without parallel in the annals of time.

Empowered by a compliant faction and a sympathetic high court, the highest office has been turned into the most powerful and unaccountable instrument of the state in the modern era.

Put it all together and you grasp the danger.

An unbroken thread ties past lawless actions to ongoing menaces. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.

There is parallel dynamics in international affairs: in military conflicts, in coercive diplomacy, and in the worldwide exploitation by massive conglomerates.

Yet, unfettered might does not create right. It produces fragility, upended order, and bloodshed.

Historical evidence demonstrates that rules and conventions to check the influential also protect them. If these guardrails are removed, their insatiable demands for greater influence and riches in time bring them down – taking down their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk world war.

Such lawlessness will haunt the nation and the world – and the very idea of a rules-based order – for years to come.