From Steve Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” The iron law of history is that might makes right has always failed, later or often sooner. The betting favorite is Trump will be in the sooner group. From Patrick Lawrence at thefloutist.com:
Post–Gaza, post–Venezuela, ours is a world ruled by power alone.
It all mattered, once. Montesquieu. (Wikimedia Commons.)
8 JANUARY—It is a long time now since the paying-attention among us began speaking of the fundamental lawlessness of our time. It was the Israelis who prompted this discourse, as readers will easily recall, by way of their daily barbarities against the Palestinians of Gaza after the events of 7 October 2023. The Western powers compounded the shock of all that real-time savagery as they supported the Zionist terror machine—militarily, materially, politically, legally, diplomatically. Alon Mizrahi, the Arab Jew who left Israel in protest three autumns ago, afterward made the point severally in The Mizrahi Perspective, his Substack newsletter: This is what comes when a people are told that however atrocious their conduct toward others, however great their crimes, there will never be any consequence. Totalized impunity: In two words, this was Mizrahi’s preoccupation.
As 2025 drew mercifully to a close, I sat to share some observations concerning law and its perversion or absence or opposite—American law, European law, international law—with the Zionist regime much in mind. The world’s most lawless state had just de-recognized the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which bears primary responsibility for the welfare of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan, so stripping UNRWA of diplomatic immunity while sequestering its finances, blocking its supplies of electricity and water, and seizing its offices in East Jerusalem.
The Israelis also barred 37 aid organizations from the Gaza Strip, including—some big names here—the French, Belgian, and Spanish affiliates of Médecins sans Frontières, Mercy Corps, the International Rescue Committee. As John Whitbeck, the tireless Parisian blogger, put it in response, “Israel’s finding a new way, virtually every day, to flaunt its contempt for the United Nations, international law, and human decency.” With the move against UNRWA, it is indeed clear the Israelis intend to destroy the U.N. and all it stands for as completely as the world lets it. And so to a second source of outrage: It looks so far as if the world is going to let it.
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Screw the law as the old Black Flag instrumental on the Process Of Weeding out.
All laws are simulacrums of reality.