Power Is, Was, And Will Always Be the Rule

Every time a major power acts decisively, someone warns that “a dangerous precedent has been set.” That assumes history was ever governed by precedent rather than permission. It wasn’t. States have always done what they could get away with. What changes is only who notices.
What feels destabilizing today is the recognition of a truth we have long ignored.
North Korea assassinates dissidents abroad. Russia has been accused of deploying nerve agents on foreign soil. Saudi Arabia murdered a journalist inside a consulate. Israel conducts extraterritorial strikes as a matter of survival. The United States has killed targets via drones in countries it was never formally at war with. None of these acts collapsed the international system because none were anomalous. If precedent governed behavior, these acts would have triggered isolation. Instead, they were absorbed, rationalized, and quietly normalized. Power decides outcomes, not principle.
The appeal to precedent assumes there was once a firewall between law and force. Law has always followed power. Norms are friction, not barriers—slowing escalation when interests are low and disappearing when they are high. Worrying about precedent now is to ignore that it has always existed in practice, if not in rhetoric.
The ICC: Law Without Teeth, Teeth Without Law
This tension becomes unavoidable when the conversation turns to the International Criminal Court. Many countries view figures like Netanyahu as war criminals. The United States rejects that designation—not because the accusations are inconceivable, but because enforcement would be unacceptable.
International law has always been selective. Enforcement has been asymmetrical. The Nuremberg trials are often cited as a moral benchmark—but they were selective too. The Nazis were tried because the Allies could impose the court. Meanwhile, the communists, whose campaigns killed far more, faced no trials, no tribunals, no reckoning. Power decided accountability, not principle. The ICC’s problem is not that norms were recently broken—it is that the system has never enforced them equally. Saying “this sets a dangerous precedent” is often a polite way of admitting the hypocrisy is now visible.
Critics warn that today’s actions could be turned against U.S. allies—or against U.S. leaders themselves. That concern is valid—but late. Vulnerability already exists. The difference now is that fewer people are pretending otherwise.
Argentina: Change From Within, But at a Cost
Argentina offers a contrast—but not a perfect one. Its political rupture did not come through sanctions, indictments, or foreign pressure. It came through internal exhaustion and electoral legitimacy. Whatever one thinks of Milei, his rise represents a pathway that coercive regime change systematically destroys: legitimacy from within.
That path is not painless. Rapid reforms, fiscal tightening, and economic shocks strain social programs and the most vulnerable. Argentina shows that internal change can preserve sovereignty and legitimacy—but at a cost.
Once a state is fully criminalized or locked under external pressure, the moderate path closes. Elites dig in. Politics gives way to survival economics and security rule. Venezuela illustrates the alternative: when every door except collapse is sealed, reform becomes impossible. Argentina demonstrates the difficult trade-offs of internal change; Venezuela illustrates the dangers of enforced external change. Both show that power—internal or external—always shapes the outcome.
The Least Bad Option in a Bad System
Seen in this light, capturing a leader alive and subjecting him to trial—even a compromised or politicized one—is not moral collapse. Compared to assassination, deniable poisonings, or drone strikes that erase targets without record, capture is the most restrained expression of coercive power. It preserves life, extracts information, and forces accountability into the open rather than burying it in secrecy.
The deeper fear is not about precedent. It is about recognition.
To admit that force remains the final arbiter is to abandon the comforting myth that we have graduated beyond power politics. The West, in particular, grew insulated—mistaking dominance for order, and order for permanence. We are not entering chaos. We are confronting how close to it we have always lived, and how much of what we called “rules” depended on no one powerful enough deciding to ignore them.
“Might has always made right. The only question is whether we are honest enough to admit it.”

Mic G