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His domestic and foreign strategies – including the effort to overturn the election in the past to recent incursions and statements – erode not only national and global legal frameworks. However, the issue goes deeper.

These actions threaten the core idea of a civilized world.

The ethical foundation of a functioning society is to stop the dominant from attacking and exploiting the less powerful. Failing that, we risk being permanently immersed in a conflict of all against all where survival of the strongest wins.

This ideal lies at the center of the nation's founding texts. This is also the foundation of the modern framework of international relations supported by the US, emphasizing international cooperation, democratic governance, human rights, and the rule of law.

Yet, it is a delicate ideal, often broken by those who seek to abuse their power. Maintaining it requires that the influential have enough integrity to abstain from seeking immediate gains, and that the public hold them accountable if they don't.

Unchecked strength does not equal right. It leads to instability, disruption, and hostilities.

Whenever entities that are wealthier and stronger prey upon those that are not, the framework of society unravels. If these actions are not contained, the system fails. Allowing it to persist, the world can descend into disorder and conflict. It has happened before.

We now inhabit a international landscape with deepening divides. Authority and resources are more concentrated than ever before. This encourages the elite to take advantage of the less fortunate because they perceive themselves as omnipotent.

The wealth of a small group of billionaires is difficult to fathom. The power of global industrial giants extends over much of the globe. Artificial intelligence is likely to further concentrate wealth and power further. The military might of the major powers is unprecedented in human history.

Supported by political allies and a sympathetic judicial body, the presidency has been transformed into the most powerful and unaccountable instrument of the state in the modern era.

Consider this confluence and you perceive the threat.

A clear connection connects earlier transgressions to present-day provocations. These were based on the overconfidence of absolute power.

You see a similar pattern in other global contexts: in wars of aggression, in expansive ambitions, and in the global depredation by industrial titans.

Yet, raw power does not make right. It produces instability, upended order, and armed conflict.

Historical evidence demonstrates that laws and norms to check the powerful also protect them. Absent these limits, their endless appetite for increased control and resources in time bring them down – along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk world war.

This blatant contempt for legal order will cast a long shadow over the nation and the world – and the very idea of a rules-based order – for the foreseeable future.