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The domestic and foreign strategies – including the challenge to the democratic process in the past to current incursions and statements – weaken not only national and global jurisprudence. The implications are broader.

They endanger the very concept of what we mean by.

A moral purpose of any advanced culture is to prevent the stronger from harming and taking advantage of the less powerful. Otherwise, we could find ourselves locked in a brutish war where survival of the strongest wins.

This ideal is central of America’s founding documents. It’s also the foundation of the postwar international order supported by the United States, which stresses international cooperation, popular sovereignty, human rights, and the legal authority.

Yet, it is a fragile principle, frequently ignored by those who seek to abuse their authority. Upholding it requires that the powerful have enough integrity to avoid seeking immediate gains, and that the rest of us ensure they answer for their actions should they falter.

Unfettered might does not equal right. It makes for instability, upheaval, and hostilities.

Each instance people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful attack and exploit those that are less so, the structure of civilization weakens. If such aggression are left unchecked, the structure collapses. Allowing it to persist, the world can descend into instability and violence. We have seen this pattern previously.

We now inhabit a international landscape with deepening divides. Authority and resources are increasingly centralized than in modern history. This creates conditions for the powerful to exploit the less fortunate because they perceive themselves as above the law.

The resources of certain billionaires is almost beyond comprehension. The power of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors extends over numerous countries. Artificial intelligence is could consolidate wealth and power to a greater degree. The offensive capability of the major powers is without parallel in human history.

Supported by complicit legislators and a pliant supreme court, the presidency has been turned into the most dominant and unchecked entity of government in the modern era.

Consider this confluence and you see the danger.

A direct line links previous transgressions to current menaces. These were based on the overconfidence of invincibility.

You see a similar pattern in other global contexts: in military conflicts, in expansive ambitions, and in the global depredation by industrial titans.

Yet, strength without restraint does not create right. It produces uncertainty, revolution, and war.

Historical evidence demonstrates that frameworks designed to check the influential also safeguard them. If these guardrails are removed, their insatiable demands for greater influence and riches in time cause their collapse – taking down their corporations, nations, or empires. And threaten world war.

This kind of contempt for legal order will plague America and the global community – and indeed a rules-based order – for years to come.