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His internal and external initiatives – including the challenge to the democratic process previously to recent moves and statements – weaken both domestic and international legal frameworks. However, the issue goes deeper.

They threaten the core idea of civilization itself.

A ethical foundation of a functioning society is to stop the more powerful from preying upon and using the less powerful. Otherwise, we could find ourselves locked in a brutish war where might makes right could survive.

This principle is embedded of the nation's founding texts. It is equally the core of the postwar international order supported by the America, which stresses multilateralism, democratic governance, individual liberties, and the supremacy of law.

However, it is a vulnerable principle, often broken by those who would exploit their power. Maintaining it demands that the influential have a sense of duty to abstain from seeking immediate gains, and that society hold them accountable if they don't.

Absolute power is not right. It makes for uncertainty, upheaval, and conflict.

Every time individuals, companies, or nations that are richer and more powerful attack and exploit those that are not, the structure of civilization frays. Should such behavior are left unchecked, the system fails. Without intervention, the world can plunge into chaos and war. We have seen this pattern previously.

We now inhabit a global community with deepening divides. Political and economic power are increasingly centralized than ever before. This creates conditions for the elite to take advantage of the disadvantaged because they act with a sense of above the law.

The wealth of a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals is difficult to fathom. The power of global industrial giants covers much of the globe. AI is could centralize wealth and power further. The offensive capability of the major powers is unmatched in human history.

Enabled by a compliant faction and a pliant high court, the presidency has been made into the supreme and answerable-to-none entity of government in history.

Put it all together and you grasp the looming crisis.

A clear connection connects earlier breaches of norms to current provocations. Each were founded upon the hubris of invincibility.

You see much the same in other global contexts: in wars of aggression, in expansive ambitions, and in the worldwide exploitation by massive conglomerates.

Yet, raw power does not make right. It produces uncertainty, upheaval, and war.

The lessons of the past reveal that frameworks designed to check the powerful also safeguard them. If these guardrails are removed, their insatiable demands for increased control and resources eventually bring them down – taking down their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk world war.

This blatant contempt for legal order will haunt America and the global community – and indeed civilization – for a long time.