The Trump administration is ever more candid about its view of power in the international arena.
Bombing alleged drug smugglers on boats in the Caribbean “is the highest and best use of our military,” Vice President JD Vance argued in September, adding when challenged on the legality of the strikes that he doesn’t “give a s— what you call [them].”
“I do believe in the niceties. I get along with a lot of people,” President Trump told The New York Times earlier this month, acknowledging the value of international law “depend[ing on] what your definition of international law is.” But ultimately, he said, there is but “one thing” that can check his actions abroad: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
And speaking on CNN the same week, US homeland security adviser Stephen Miller went further, dismissing the international engagement Trump half-embraced. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Miller said to CNN host Jake Tapper, “but we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
There’s an important sense in which Miller is right: At a descriptive level, when you get down to it, the international order is fundamentally anarchic. But at prescriptive levels—the level of what the United States should do and be, plus the level of how people who profess to follow the God of the Bible should think—he’s telling a dangerous half-truth.
That the world does run on raw power tells us nothing about how it should run. This harsh reality doesn’t render ethics irrelevant, only difficult and often costly. And Miller’s “iron laws of the world” do not date to the beginning of time but to the Fall, to human rebellion against our own maker. They are devilish.
Christians, Let’s Stop Abusing Romans 13
Now, anarchy in international relations isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. It’s just a recognition that there’s no single organization or person in charge of and meditating between every country on earth. The world is “devoid of any central authority with the wherewithal to protect states from aggression,” MIT political scientist Barry Posen explained in a brief for the think tank Defense Priorities (where I am a fellow). “Without a world government, each nation must look to its own resources to ensure its security.”
So yes, what’s commonly called the “liberal international order” or “rules-based international order” exists, and that’s generally a good thing. It’s a product (however insufficient) of centuries of Christians theorizing about war and justice. But it doesn’t operate with anything like the same force as domestic laws. You can’t opt out of your state’s criminal code or the federal tax code. But countries can and do opt out of—or let lapse or formally exit or simply violate—international treaties and laws.
For example, having seen how Nazi Germany treated prisoners of war, especially Soviet soldiers, I’m glad the Geneva Conventions have set international rules for handling of POWs. But Germany had previously signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on humane treatment of POWs, so how real were those rules?
Now, as then, some of us may aspire to something better. But what the Greek historian Thucydides wrote of international relations 400 years before Christ remains true in practice: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The United States is undoubtedly “the strong” in this line. We can invade and occupy other nations. Regime change is a live option for us (though 50 years of failure suggest nation building is not). Our wealth and military might are unmatched; even near-peer nations have substantially lower military spending (such as European allies), smaller nuclear arsenals (China), or more outdated and depleted conventional forces and arms (Russia).
But let’s move past description to prescription: past what is to what should be. Often the US can do what it wants on the world stage. But what should it want?
Most succinctly: the rule of law and peace, so far as it depends on us. War and conquest are failures of foreign policy, not triumphs, and though it’s true that relationships between countries are anarchic, the United States is not. We have laws about matters of war and peace, laws that are binding on the president and vice president and certainly our homeland security adviser.
The framers of our Constitution approached these matters with utmost seriousness. They assigned the power to declare war to Congress rather than the president because of their well-considered and oft-vindicated conviction that no one person is “safely to be trusted” with that authority. Notes on the Constitutional Convention say that George Mason, known as the father of the Bill of Rights, was particularly interested in “clogging rather than facilitating war [and instead] facilitating peace,” and allowing presidents to act solo only “to repel sudden attacks.”
The War Powers Act of 1973 set even more granular law about presidential warmaking, and unlike international rules, that act and our Constitution are not opt-in arrangements for this or any administration. That the world is governed by strength, force, and power does not mean the United States should be.
The rule of law is a fragile and valuable inheritance; amid chaos, we need more of it, not less. This isn’t idealism but prudence, for the reality Miller describes is escalatory and precarious. It is not to be encouraged or accepted but rather fought.
Strong as we may be, the United States will find many imitators if we lead the world toward greater anarchy and violence, and those imitators are unlikely to be our friends. This posture toward power will have unintended and unwanted consequences. We would be fools to jettison the world Mason helped build to revert to the one Thucydides endured.
And that “iron law” of which Miller spoke is not as iron as he claims: God did not create a world governed by force. It is only in Genesis 3, after humanity has betrayed its creator to side with the Enemy, that God speaks of a world characterized by domination, scarcity, pain, hardship, and risk. Time did not begin like this, nor, in Christian conviction, will it end this way (Rev. 21).
Miller is Jewish, so citing Revelation here isn’t quite fair play. But the creation story is shared by our faiths, and so are the Old Testament wisdom books. Proverbs 16 is especially apt.
Even after the Fall, it says, “Better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice” (v. 8). Even in a reality governed by power, a good king will love truth (v. 13), “detest wrongdoing” (v. 12), and refuse to “betray justice” (v. 10). Even amid global anarchy, God requires honesty and order (v. 11). He makes peace (v. 7); punishes wickedness (v. 4); and condemns violence, plots, and instigation of conflict (vv. 27–30). He knows when we deceive ourselves about the motives of our hearts (v. 2).
Christians and Jews have long debated, both with each other and among ourselves, what it looks like to “give a s—t” in a fallen world: to seek something more solid than niceties, more trustworthy than our own morality, more righteous than bare power. How do you know and fear the Lord when you no longer walk with him in the Garden? What does it look like to seek justice when it’s in such short supply? How do you choose shrewdness alongside honesty, realism alongside mercy? Can we avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good, or even the good enough?
These are old questions, big questions, questions faithful and good-faith people have answered very differently over the years, questions I cannot settle here. Nor do I envy anyone trying to answer them from a seat of power. But whatever the answer may be, it cannot amount to embracing the way of the world that sin has wrought.
“There is a way that appears to be right,” Proverbs 16:25 warns—a way that, in this fallen world, seems sensible, savvy, and secure. “But in the end it leads to death.”
Bonnie Kristian is the deputy editor at Christianity Today.
