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The national and international strategies – from the attempted coup five years ago to recent moves and warnings – undermine both domestic and international legal frameworks. But that’s not all.

They threaten the core idea of civilization itself.

A guiding principle of a functioning society is to prevent the stronger from harming and taking advantage of the less powerful. Otherwise, we risk being permanently immersed in a brutish war where only the fittest wins.

This ideal is embedded of the nation's founding texts. It’s also the core of the postwar international order advocated by the United States, which stresses multilateralism, popular sovereignty, fundamental freedoms, and the supremacy of law.

Yet, it is a delicate ideal, often broken by those who seek to abuse their authority. Preserving it requires that the those in charge have enough integrity to abstain from seeking temporary advantages, and that the rest of us demand responsibility when they fail.

Absolute power is not right. It results in turmoil, disruption, and conflict.

Whenever individuals, companies, or nations that are wealthier and stronger target and use those that are less so, the structure of society frays. Should such behavior are allowed to continue, the structure collapses. Without intervention, the world can fall into instability and violence. It has happened before.

Our current reality is a global community grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are increasingly centralized than in modern history. This encourages the powerful to take advantage of the less fortunate because they act with a sense of untouchable.

The fortunes of certain ultra-wealthy individuals is staggering. The power of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors spans a vast portion of the world. Advanced technology is poised to centralize wealth and power to a greater degree. The destructive power of the major powers is without parallel in the annals of time.

Empowered by a compliant faction and a pliant high court, the executive office has been made into the supreme and answerable-to-none entity of government in recent memory.

Consider this confluence and you grasp the looming crisis.

A clear connection connects previous transgressions to ongoing provocations. Each were founded upon the arrogance of absolute power.

There is a similar pattern in other global contexts: in wars of aggression, in coercive diplomacy, and in the global depredation by industrial titans.

Yet, unfettered might does not create right. It fosters uncertainty, revolution, and war.

History shows that laws and norms to constrain the influential also protect them. Absent these limits, their relentless pursuit for increased control and resources ultimately lead to their downfall – along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And pave the way for world war.

This kind of contempt for legal order will haunt the nation and the world – and indeed civilization – for years to come.