🔗 Share this article

The internal and external strategies – from the effort to overturn the election in the past to latest actions and warnings – undermine not only national and global law. However, the issue goes deeper.

These actions jeopardize the very concept of a civilized world.

A ethical foundation of any advanced culture is to stop the stronger from preying upon and using the less powerful. Without this, we would be permanently immersed in a brutish war where might makes right could survive.

This concept is embedded of the nation's founding texts. This is also the heart of the modern framework of international relations advocated by the United States, emphasizing multilateralism, democratic governance, fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law.

But, it is a fragile construct, often broken by those who seek to abuse their power. Preserving it demands that the those in charge have the moral fortitude to abstain from seeking temporary advantages, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don't.

Unfettered might does not equal right. It leads to uncertainty, disruption, and conflict.

Every time entities that are richer and more powerful prey upon those that are less so, the framework of society unravels. If these actions are not contained, the system fails. If not stopped, the world can fall into chaos and war. It has happened before.

Our current reality is a international landscape grown vastly more unequal. Authority and resources are increasingly centralized than ever before. This encourages the powerful to take advantage of the disadvantaged because they feel omnipotent.

The resources of certain billionaires is staggering. The influence of global industrial giants covers numerous countries. AI is likely to consolidate wealth and power to a greater degree. The destructive power of the major powers is unmatched in the annals of time.

Enabled by a compliant faction and a sympathetic judicial body, the executive office has been made into the most dominant and unchecked entity of state power in history.

Consider this confluence and you grasp the threat.

A direct line connects past transgressions to current provocations. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.

One observes parallel dynamics in the actions of other powers: in wars of aggression, in coercive diplomacy, and in the global depredation by massive conglomerates.

Yet, raw power does not establish right. It fosters uncertainty, upheaval, and armed conflict.

The lessons of the past reveal that frameworks designed to constrain the powerful also shield them. If these guardrails are removed, their endless appetite for increased control and resources ultimately bring them down – along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk world war.

Such contempt for legal order will cast a long shadow over America and the global community – and the very idea of civilized conduct – for the foreseeable future.