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IN MY VIEW - President Trump responded to a question about whether his administration is bound by international law by stating the only limit on his power is his personal sense of conscience. Senior advisor Stephen Miller amplified this message by indicating that might makes right and that the actions of the US are constrained only by the limits of our power. This pronouncement eviscerates the post-World War II American policy of the rule of law. Such a policy legitimizes Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Holocaust, Pol Pot killings and Netanyahu’s genocide, unless such actions are constrained by an even greater power. Under this view, law is not principle, but merely the language of the strong.
The “might makes right” doctrine has often been defended as a legitimate instrument of statecraft—a regrettable but necessary means of shaping policy when diplomacy fails. I reject that framing. War is not properly understood as a tool of politics. War represents an abdication of the political process which exists precisely to reconcile competing interests in order to avoid violence. War is a confession that politics has failed. When war occurs, it signals the collapse of the political process—the failure to reconcile competing interests through reason, compromise, and institutional restraint.
The primary responsibility of any politician is not conquest nor ideological triumph. The political process must prevent organized violence. Politics exists because human societies are pluralistic: interests diverge, values conflict, and power is unevenly distributed. The task of political leadership is to manage these tensions without resort to force. When leaders choose war, they are acknowledging that they could not—or would not—do that job.
This claim is not a modern invention, nor a naïve pacifist aspiration. It is rooted in the foundational tradition of political thought. Aristotle defined politics as the opposition to violence. Aristotle understood politics (politikē) as the art of deliberation among citizens aimed at achieving a shared life under law. For Aristotle, force belonged to tyranny and barbarism; politics began where persuasion replaced coercion. The polis existed precisely to transform conflict into argument and rivalry into compromise.
This distinction remains essential. Politics does not eliminate disagreement—it institutionalizes its resolution. Legislatures, courts, treaties, and diplomatic norms are mechanisms designed to keep conflict within bounds that do not require bloodshed. Compromise is not weakness; it is the defining achievement of political order. A stable society is not one without conflict, but one that has learned to manage conflict without violence.
A politician’s resort to force must be viewed as a confession of that politician’s incompetence. When disputes are settled by killing rather than deliberation, politics has ceased to function. Even when war produces a clear victor, it does so by replacing legitimacy with domination—an inherently unstable foundation for peace.
Modern political theory reinforces this classical insight. Hannah Arendt drew a sharp distinction between power and violence. Power, she argued, arises from collective agreement and legitimacy; violence appears when that agreement has broken down. Violence can destroy power, but it cannot create it.
Seen through this lens, war does not evidence political strength. Violence signals political decay. Leaders resort to force when persuasion fails, when institutions lose credibility, and when consensus can no longer be sustained. Violence may compel obedience, but it cannot generate durable authority. Every regime maintained primarily by force must continually apply more force, as its legitimacy erodes.
This insight undermines the common claim that war “works.” Even when it succeeds tactically, it often deepens the very conditions—fear, resentment, and mistrust—that make future conflict more likely. War may suppress opposition temporarily, but it rarely resolves the underlying political disputes that gave rise to it.
The most systematic philosophical rejection of war as policy comes from Immanuel Kant. In Perpetual Peace, Kant argued that war is not a natural feature of human politics, but a symptom of defective political arrangements. States go to war, he believed, because they are organized in ways that externalize the costs of violence and insulate leaders from accountability. Kant never denied that wars occur. Rather, he insisted instead that their occurrence indicts the political systems that allow them. This aligns precisely with the claim that war represents failure: failure to build institutions capable of resolving disputes peacefully, and failure to restrain leaders tempted by violence.
If Aristotle provides the political foundation and Kant the institutional framework, Mahatma Gandhi supplies the ethical core. Gandhi rejected violence not because conflict could be wished away, but because violence signaled moral failure—the failure to persuade, to empathize, and to recognize the humanity of opponents.
Gandhi did not claim that nonviolence was easy or guaranteed success. He claimed that violence guaranteed moral loss. This distinction matters. To say that war is failure is not to say that compromise always succeeds, but that violence always represents something profoundly broken in the political relationship between adversaries.
The strongest challenge to this position comes from the realist tradition, most famously articulated by Carl von Clausewitz, who described war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” This formulation is frequently cited to justify war as a rational policy choice when diplomacy stalls.
Yet even Clausewitz understood war as dangerous, unpredictable, and tragic. His statement was descriptive, not celebratory. Modern invocations of his phrase often strip it of context, transforming a warning into an endorsement.
Moreover, the realist argument concedes more than it admits. If war is the continuation of politics, then politics has already failed to achieve its aims peacefully. War becomes an admission that persuasion, compromise, and institutional restraint were insufficient. It may alter bargaining positions, but it does not eliminate the need for bargaining. Almost every war ends not with annihilation, but with negotiation—often after catastrophic human cost.
Political leaders are entrusted with extraordinary power precisely because the consequences of their decisions are so grave. To authorize war is to authorize mass death—of soldiers and civilians alike. That decision demands the highest standard of justification.
Too often, however, war is framed as inevitability rather than choice. Leaders speak of being “forced” into conflict, as though history itself pulled the trigger. This rhetoric obscures agency. Wars do not happen; they are made. They result from decisions—to escalate rather than pause, to abandon talks rather than persist, to value domestic political advantage over long-term stability.
To regard war as failure is not to assign simplistic blame. It is to insist that leaders be judged by the standard appropriate to their office: whether they exhausted nonviolent alternatives, whether they understood the fears and interests of adversaries, and whether they resisted the incentives that reward belligerence over restraint.
There are moments—genocide, invasion, mass atrocity—where violence may appear necessary to stop greater violence. Acknowledging this does not refute the thesis; it sharpens it. Even in these cases, war is not vindicated as political success. It is undertaken as damage control after political systems failed catastrophically. The lesson is not that war works, but that the cost of political failure can be unbearable.
Recognizing war as failure does not paralyze action; it disciplines it. It shifts attention upstream, toward prevention, institution-building, and diplomacy, where lives can be saved before violence becomes unavoidable.
In the first year of this Trump administration, the United States made possible the Israeli genocide in Gaza and openly attacked Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela. No modern President has had this number of military actions during their administration’s first year. By doing so, Mr. Trump builds a legacy of abysmal failure in political strategy that can only be gauged in human suffering and death.
(J. George Mansour was born and raised in Missouri and has long been a student of political science and international relations. Mr. Mansour is now based in Austin Texas, where he remains an active investor in a variety of businesses.)
