From the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump has threatened to destabilize the international legal order. Early in his second term, he claimed he would “take back” the Panama Canal, make Canada the 51st U.S. state, acquire Greenland, and “own” Gaza. Foreign policy experts shook their heads, reluctant to take Trump seriously. After all, his declarations seemed erratic and poorly thought out. Yet even speaking the words did damage. As we argued in Foreign Affairs last summer, Trump’s threats reflected a troubling lack of commitment to the legal structure the United States and its allies created 80 years ago. The norm against the use of force, embodied in the UN Charter, was already under strain. But Trump’s open disregard of this prohibition threatened to trigger its collapse.

That was before the United States invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, on January 3. The military operation, undertaken without UN Security Council authorization, without congressional authorization, without a claim of self-defense, and without even a plausible legal rationale, represents the most harmful attack yet on the rules-based order. It is not just the existing international legal system that is in jeopardy now. At risk is the survival of any rules at all—and with them any constraints on the exercise of state power.

THE RISE AND FALL OF WORLD ORDER

Before countries renounced the right to war, first in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and then again in the UN Charter in 1945, waging war was perfectly legal and legitimate. It was the main way in which countries resolved their disputes with one another. But even during this time, war was constrained by law. War, in its lawful conception, was understood as a last resort undertaken to enforce or defend a state’s rights. Killing, seizure of property, and destruction were permitted only if the entire endeavor was justified by law.

At the beginning of the twentieth century and for centuries before that, a country could not simply say it wanted another’s land. According to customary international law, as interpreted and popularized by the so-called father of international law, Hugo Grotius, in the early seventeenth century, a state had to offer a legal justification before it could go to war. Violence was acceptable, but only if it was necessary to vindicate a legal right. Sovereigns had to argue that another country had failed to pay a debt, unacceptably interfered with trade relations, violated a treaty obligation, or committed some other wrong that was considered an acceptable cause for war. This practice received formal legal sanction by the states that signed the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when they recognized that those who would go to war must make “a lawful Cognizance of the Cause.” Sovereigns took this obligation seriously, always issuing war manifestos to explain their reasons for entering a conflict as fighting began. They did this with the understanding that without such a claim, violence is not war. It is crime: murder, assault, kidnapping, and theft.

For the past eight decades, legitimate grounds for war have been much more narrowly defined. The current international system rests on the premise that the use of force by one state against another is prohibited, even criminal, unless undertaken in self-defense or with collective authorization by the UN Security Council. War is not considered a discretionary policy instrument, and the unlawful use of force does not give the perpetrator legal rights. Whereas conquering territory used to be enough to gain title to it, if a state today acquires another’s territory through an illegal use of force, the rest of the world is under a duty not to recognize its claims of sovereignty over the territory. Countries have violated these rules, sometimes gravely. But even rule-breaking states have offered legal rationales, recognizing that other states—and their own citizens—believe that killing people and taking their land and property requires justification, not merely power.

The Trump administration is no longer trying to work within this system. For the past year, it has been attacking and dismantling the legal infrastructure of the existing order. It is sanctioning judges and lawyers who work at the International Criminal Court so that crimes cannot be prosecuted. It is throwing up trade barriers, breaching World Trade Organization agreements and retreating from the norm of free trade that once underwrote global stability. It is failing to pay its dues to the United Nations and withdrawing from or violating countless treaties. And it is openly threatening sovereign states and territories—Venezuela today, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and Mexico tomorrow—not with lawful UN Security Council–authorized measures but with unlawful unilateral force and coercion. Because so many countries depend on the United States for their defense, their economic stability, or both, all but a few have been mere bystanders to the destruction.

NO MORE RULES

It would be bad enough to return to the prewar international system, in which states engaged in looting and conquest openly and unapologetically. It was a time when leaders launched wars based on the violation of a vast array of legal rights—and the people suffered the consequences of the widespread violence that followed.

But what may be in store could be even worse. In the short term, the world faces deep instability; leaders may sometimes invoke the postwar rules but may also increasingly ignore them, depending on what is convenient. This is a recipe for unrelenting conflict, as states would be in doubt about what the rules are and therefore unsure of how to avoid provoking violence. Until a clear set of rules takes hold, the world will be a profoundly dangerous place.

A longer-term possibility is a world in which states are no longer prohibited from resorting to force and at least one superpower acts as if there are no rules at all. In this world, not only would the rules be unpredictable, they would depend entirely on the impulses of whoever happens to command the most coercive power at a given moment.

U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether.

What is worrying is that the Trump administration seems to be ushering in such a world. The day after the United States kidnapped Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller explained the administration’s thinking in an interview with the CNN host Jake Tapper. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Neither Miller nor anyone else in the administration offered any real legal justification for launching a military assault on Venezuela—an operation that killed at least 75 people. There has been no legal justification, either, for the plan Trump announced on social media to seize “between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels” of Venezuelan oil. Instead, the State Department shared an image of the U.S. president emblazoned with the words “This is OUR Hemisphere,” and Trump styled himself in a Truth Social post as the “Acting President of Venezuela.” Now, the administration has begun to turn its sights on Greenland. A White House statement issued days after the capture of Maduro claims that the United States “needs” Greenland and that acquiring the territory is a “national security priority.”

What is so troubling about the Trump administration’s words and actions is not just that the administration is breaking the law. And it is: the intervention in Venezuela clearly violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. But more than that, U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether. The only constraint, Trump said in an interview with The New York Times last week, is his “own morality.” There is no real argument to defend the government’s behavior. No pretense. No attempt to persuade. When a policy is announced in an online post, without explanation or justification, one has the unsettling sense that its makers see no need to bother cloaking it with a lie. A system of rules can survive some hypocrisy, but nihilism will bring it down.

At the same time, the Trump administration is acting as though the threat or use of force alone can grant it legal entitlements. Gunboat diplomacy, roundly renounced when war was outlawed, has returned. The United States is using oil blockades, coercive seizures, and military threats to extract political and economic concessions from other countries. This is an attempt to assert that power alone creates rights, regardless of reason.

A world in which the powerful no longer feel the need to justify themselves is not merely unjust. It is barbaric: operations to kill, steal, and destroy are severed from any claim of right. That world does not have a legal order at all. It has only force, guided by one man’s whims.

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