🔗 Share this article

The internal and external strategies – including the effort to overturn the election five years ago to recent incursions and statements – erode both domestic and international legal frameworks. However, the issue goes deeper.

These actions jeopardize the very concept of what we mean by.

A ethical foundation of any advanced culture is to prevent the more powerful from harming and taking advantage of the weaker. Without this, we could find ourselves permanently immersed in a conflict of all against all where only the fittest could survive.

This ideal is embedded of the Declaration and Constitution. This is also the foundation of the modern framework of international relations supported by the US, emphasizing multilateralism, democratic governance, individual liberties, and the rule of law.

However, it is a vulnerable principle, easily violated by those who would exploit their authority. Upholding it demands that the powerful have the moral fortitude to refrain from seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable should they falter.

Absolute power does not equal right. It results in instability, upheaval, and war.

Whenever individuals, companies, or nations that are advantaged target and use those that are less so, the fabric of our shared norms unravels. If such aggression are allowed to continue, the structure collapses. If not stopped, the world can plunge into instability and violence. We have seen this pattern previously.

We now inhabit a society and world marked by extreme inequality. Authority and resources are held by fewer hands than in modern history. This invites the powerful to leverage their position against the weaker because they act with a sense of omnipotent.

The fortunes of a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals is staggering. The reach of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors extends over much of the globe. Artificial intelligence is could consolidate wealth and power even more. The offensive capability of the major powers is unprecedented in the annals of time.

Empowered by political allies and a sympathetic supreme court, the executive office has been made into the supreme and answerable-to-none instrument of the state in history.

Consider this confluence and you grasp the danger.

An unbroken thread ties past transgressions to ongoing menaces. Each were premised on the arrogance of absolute power.

There is much the same in the actions of other powers: in military conflicts, in expansive ambitions, and in the rampant monopolization by powerful corporate entities.

However, strength without restraint does not make right. It produces instability, upended order, and bloodshed.

The lessons of the past reveal that rules and conventions to constrain the influential also safeguard them. Absent these limits, their endless appetite for greater influence and riches in time lead to their downfall – along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And threaten international catastrophe.

Such disregard for rules will plague the nation and the world – and indeed a rules-based order – for the foreseeable future.