🔗 Share this article

His domestic and foreign policies – including the challenge to the democratic process previously to latest moves and statements – erode not only national and global jurisprudence. However, the issue goes deeper.

They jeopardize the very concept of a civilized world.

A moral purpose of a functioning society is to forestall the stronger from harming and taking advantage of the weaker. Otherwise, we would be permanently immersed in a brutish war where survival of the strongest wins.

This principle is central of the nation's founding texts. This is also the heart of the modern framework of international relations championed by the United States, emphasizing multilateralism, democratic governance, fundamental freedoms, and the legal authority.

Yet, it is a delicate principle, frequently ignored by those who would exploit their authority. Maintaining it demands that the powerful have the moral fortitude to abstain from seeking short-term wins, and that society hold them accountable if they don't.

Unchecked strength does not equal right. It leads to turmoil, upheaval, and war.

Every time individuals, companies, or nations that are wealthier and stronger target and use those that are not, the structure of civilization weakens. If such aggression are left unchecked, the system fails. If not stopped, the world can plunge into chaos and war. It has happened before.

Today, we live in a society and world marked by extreme inequality. Influence and wealth are increasingly centralized than ever before. This creates conditions for the powerful to leverage their position against the disadvantaged because they feel untouchable.

The fortunes of a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals is almost beyond comprehension. The power of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors extends over numerous countries. Artificial intelligence is poised to centralize economic and political clout to a greater degree. The military might of the world's largest nations is unmatched in the annals of time.

Empowered by political allies and an accommodating high court, the executive office has been made into the supreme and answerable-to-none entity of the state in recent memory.

Combine these factors and you grasp the looming crisis.

A direct line connects past lawless actions to ongoing provocations. Both were premised on the arrogance of invincibility.

There is a similar pattern in international affairs: in wars of aggression, in coercive diplomacy, and in the worldwide exploitation by powerful corporate entities.

But, raw power does not create right. It fosters uncertainty, upended order, and armed conflict.

The lessons of the past reveal that laws and norms to check the influential also protect them. Absent these limits, their relentless pursuit for more power and wealth eventually cause their collapse – taking down their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk world war.

This blatant contempt for legal order will plague international stability – and the very idea of a rules-based order – for the foreseeable future.