MELBOURNE – Two days after the United States launched military strikes on Venezuela, which killed 100 people and led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was asked whether the US was running Venezuela. Miller’s reply captured Trump’s governing philosophy perfectly.
“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he told Jake Tapper of CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time… By definition, we are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country.”
Three days later, Trump gave an interview to a group of New York Times journalists, during which he was asked: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” Trump: “Yeah, there’s one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
“Not international law?” another journalist followed up. Trump replied: “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When asked directly whether he feels that his administration needs to abide by international law on the global stage, Trump said that he does, but added: “It depends what your definition of international law is.” The journalists did not ask Trump for his own definition of international law.
Trump’s assertion that his own administration needs to abide by international law is difficult to reconcile with any plausible definition of international law, which is the system of rules and principles that govern relations between sovereign states. The use of force involved in capturing Maduro was a clear violation of the fundamental principle of international law embodied in the UN charter.
More revealing is Trump’s earlier statement that the only thing that will stop him from doing as he pleases on the world stage is his own morality. But what is that morality?
In his first inaugural address, Trump shared with the world his understanding that “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” That was no surprise: his campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again,” and his “drill, baby, drill” attitude toward fossil fuels very obviously puts America’s interest in cheap energy ahead of the well-being of people who will be endangered by climate change. Trump’s morality, then, appears to be the pursuit of his country’s self-interest.
That morality, however, is vulnerable to the objection that if everyone did the same, acting in their own self-interest, we would all be worse off. Remember the tragedy of the commons? Climate change is such a tragedy, on a global scale. Yet Trump has now withdrawn the U.S. from the key treaty, signed by President H.W. Bush in 1992, that is the basis of international cooperation to reduce emissions of the gases that are warming our planet.
But we should question whether what guides Trump is really any form of morality at all. Miller’s worldview is not new. In his CNN interview, Miller was echoing the words attributed by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to the Athenians when their overwhelming military force arrived on the small island of Melos:
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must… of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us.”
Though this view is often described as “might makes right,” the Athenians were not seeking to justify their conquest of Melos, but to persuade the Melians to recognize what Miller calls “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” and surrender. There are good reasons for challenging the accuracy of the Athenians’ bleak account of human nature, but even if it were true, it would not follow that it is right for the strong to make the weak suffer.
What is so shocking about Miller’s appeal to what he assumes is an iron law of history is that it rules out all hope of moral progress. Yet the evidence of moral progress is all around us. Unlike the Athenians, who may have seen slavery as another example of the strong doing what they can, we do not have slaves, and we grant equal legal status to men and women. We prohibit torture and have laws against cruelty to animals.
Granted, this progress is often far from complete. But would Miller and Trump deny that it really is progress? If not, the possibility of further progress is a reason for trying to achieve it, not for scrapping the gains we have made.
The same holds for international relations. It was one of Trump’s predecessors, Woodrow Wilson, who, toward the end of World War I, called for a League of Nations to prevent such catastrophes in the future. Although the League failed to prevent World War II, its successor, the United Nations, may have contributed – along with nuclear deterrence – to preventing a hot war between the major powers during the past 80 years.
That is not an achievement to discard lightly. The course of international relations for decades to come will be determined by whether the rest of the world accepts Trump’s reversion to the unbridled dominance of great powers, or holds even the most powerful states to account.
Peter Singer is Professor in Medical Ethics at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore, and Emeritus Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. His books include The Life You Can Save, and he is the founder of the nonprofit organization of the same name.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
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