In his famous text, Leviathan,
Thomas Hobbes describes the state of nature as one of might, or raw force,
being the decider of what is rightly and determinatively so. If one person physically
harms another person such that the latter’s food may be taken by the former,
then that food belongs to the victor even without any overarching normative, or
moral, constraint that says that the food still belongs to the vanquished. If
Russia has successfully conquered a few regions of Ukraine by military means,
then those occupied lands have become part of Russia. If Israel has physically
decimated Gaza and placed its indigenous residents in concentration camps
without enough food or access to medical care, then Israel and the United States
can engage private investors on large-scale, upscale real-estate development
projects as attacks against the remaining residents in Gaza continue unabated. In
short, possession is really all that is needed to establish ownership. Might
makes right. In this system, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, simply
does not exist or is a target. Evolution has not changed human nature from the
hunter-gatherer “stage.” To be sure, not all of humanity is on board with this
sort of global order, even if guns have a way of pushing down or even silencing
the more progressive elements of the species. The Trump administration’s
attacks on the ICC represent a case in point.
The absolutist interpretation
of national sovereignty feeds into the functioning of a might-makes-right
world. “Global standards for how civilians must be treated and how to wage war
are often, in the eyes of the Trump administration, a hindrance and a violation
of national sovereignty.”[1]
The implication is that unimpeded national sovereignty not only comes without
danger, but is also the best system for international relations and thus the prosperity
and happiness of the species. Rather than merely criticizing Trump’s “unprecedented
campaign against a core institution of international law, the International Criminal
Court,” the assumptions underlying a global system of unfettered national
sovereignty merit critique, given the unnecessarily unheeded power-aggrandizing
actions of Stalin and Hitler in the twentieth century. The military exploits of
the Empire of Japan can be added to the list as well. In the next century, the unprovoked
invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the mass-killing and starvation of Gaza’s indigenous
residents by Israeli Zionists demonstrate the fallacy of a stable world to be
brought about by unrestrained national sovereignty, given the underlying human
nature that manifests too easily as the instinct of power-aggrandizement. In short,
the Israeli genocide in Gaza demonstrates that the Nazi holocaust was not a “one
off” deviation from human nature, but rather is closer to mainstream human
nature than was realized during the last half of the twentieth century. Indeed,
the genocide in Gaza may be reckoned by history as yet another holocaust writ
large.
Nevertheless, and as evidence
that might-makes-right can continue even amid such atrocities in progress, the
Trump administration “used America’s disproportionate global financial
power and threats of further repercussions to hinder the [ICC’s] work and
create a chilling effect—even as Palestinians [continued] to face U.S.-backed
Israeli policies that ICC judges said could constitute grave crimes, and that
could undermine Trump’s own stated vision of peace for Gaza.”[2]
Rather than focus on the role of private investor-capital in planned development
projects being planned for Gaza absent its indigenous population, I want to
highlight the disproportionateness of a might-makes-right superpower as itself
being a problem unless might-make-right is deemed salvific for humanity. For
the ICC, the raw power in the disproportionate military and financial power of
the Trump administration over other countries presented “an existential
paradox: The ICC’s pursuit of accountability over Gaza is both the reason it
has a target on its back, and proof that it [i.e., the ICC] is necessary.”[3]
But to be necessary and largely impotent against the power of the disproportionate
enabler of Israel (and perhaps even Russia) is to be in the worst of two
worlds, as it were.
Put another way, the very existence of a partisan “world police force” presents the ICC with its greatest threat as well as its highest raison d’etre. With such a police force operating on the basis of might-makes-right internationally, that same rationale can be seized upon by other partisans internationally to engage in power-aggrandizement activities of their own, even against the global police-force itself. Such a system is inherently self-contradictory, in other words, and thus weak as a system in which the world order can be in order rather than chaos and upheaval. That the dogma of absolutist national sovereignty sanctions and protects parchment-constraints at the national level (and below) saves such a system from being chaotic from top to bottom, but as Trump’s second presidency demonstrated, a might-make-right foreign-oriented attitude can easily be translated into efforts to walk through constraints at the national level, such as legislatures and courts.
Arresting and deporting a person deemed to be an illegal immigrant before one has the chance to challenge the actions judicially enjoys the default of a fait accompli. Quelle domage. The Trump administration could simply inform a judge that the suspect is no longer under U.S. jurisdiction so there is nothing that can be done. Such a tactic is well-known to the might-makes-right mentality. This point should not be taken to excuse or accept illegal immigration as if it were not a crime and one worthy of punishment and expulsion by the rule and thus due process of law.
Might-makes-right hates to be subject to, or constrained by the rule of law as the mentality sees itself as the law. It is easy for this mentality oriented to foreign affairs to be turned inward while using absolutist national sovereignty as a shield both domestically and internationally. Trump, "himself convicted of felonies, has promoted impunity for various violations of domestic and international law; in addition to opposing the ICC warrant for Netanyahu, Trump is supporting the Israeli leader's bid for a pardon over his corruption charges from Israeli prosecutors."[4]
I contend that such a world of both domestic and international impunity from the constraint of an externally imposed law represents a step backward for the species. Given the foregone benefits that political development could otherwise deliver, the phenomenon worthy to be examined goes
beyond the legitimacy and functioning of the ICC and the American foreign policy on
Israel and even Russia. The post-World War II international efforts to subject
might-makes-right to constraints internationally were being cast off and even
attacked a few decades into the next century with the implication being that nothing
but might-makes-right might be left standing.
1. Akbar S. Ahmed, “Trump’s
Pressure Campaign on the ICC Is Falling Apart,” The Huffington Post,
December 3, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., italics added.
