The Morality of a Mafia Boss
Trump wants the freedom to act how he pleases. We’re already seeing the results.
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Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.
—Donald Trump, in answer to a question about whether there were any limits to his ability to use military force around the world.
Although Donald Trump is a habitual liar about issues big and small, he is occasionally capable of surprising honesty. His statement to a group of New York Times reporters, quoted above, is one example. It contains two largely frank and correct assertions: first, that American international behavior is constrained by norms (i.e. “morality”) rather than law; and second, that the applicable norms are his personal ones, and not necessarily those shared by other nations.
We should acknowledge the truth of the first, and be very frightened of the implications of the second.
Trump’s action in snatching Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and putting him on trial in New York has been widely criticized for violating international law. In my view, law is not the central issue here. International law simply does not exist in the same sense as domestic law. There is no global sovereign that can either make or enforce international law. States may enter into treaties, compacts, alliances, and international agreements with one another, but those are entirely voluntary acts. States remain sovereign and can withdraw from prior commitments whenever they want, unlike citizens who cannot refuse to live under the laws of their country. The dominant international agreement which the United States is party to is the UN Charter, which forbids the use of force except as authorized by the UN Security Council. Over the years, the United States has repeatedly violated this rule, as when it intervened in Kosovo under President Clinton, or in Iraq under George W. Bush.
International law is not so much law as a series of normative commitments that states will observe certain rules and constraints in the future. It is those normative constraints and not legality per se that are critical to international order, and it is those norms that we should focus on.
For example, there has been a powerful norm since 1945 against territorial conquest: powerful states should not march armies across international borders and grab territory and resources from their neighbors. The “no conquest” norm was violated by Iraq in its 1990 takeover of Kuwait, and again by Russia in its seizure of Ukrainian territory in 2014 and 2022. The reason that the United States and other countries responded so forcefully in both cases was not due to the illegality of these invasions, but due to the way they openly trashed a critical international norm. By contrast, when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it observed the “no conquest” norm by limiting its objectives to neutralizing Iraqi WMDs and removing Saddam Hussein’s abusive regime. The United States made clear it had no intention of claiming Iraqi territory or oil resources for itself. So while it had not received “permission” from the UN Security Council, it was still acting within a familiar normative universe.
So Trump is right that it is norms and not international law that will govern American behavior. The problem lies in his statement about “my morality”: Trump has the morality of a Mafia boss. He wants to use American power to acquire territory, resources, and prestige. His snatching of Maduro should be less shocking than his justification for the action: he wants to make “billions and billions” of dollars extracting oil from the ground and selling it for American benefit. In the past, he has claimed that this oil actually belongs to the United States, given that Venezuela had earlier nationalized the assets of American oil companies. Before that, he argued that the United States, having gone to the trouble of invading Iraq, should have stayed and claimed Iraq’s oil reserves for itself.
Trump, in other words, is following in the footsteps of Russia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in rejecting the “no conquest” norm. So it should surprise no one that Trump went on from targeting Venezuela’s oil to making claims on Greenland as well. It is not enough for Denmark to give the United States access to Greenland’s strategic facilities and mineral resources. The president stated, “Ownership is very important.” When asked why, he said, “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.” Trashing the “no conquest norm” is doubly upsetting to the international normative order in this case because the territory in question belongs to a longtime NATO ally.
While international law may not be a strong constraint on the powerful, domestic law has been. The American constitutional system was deliberately designed to constrain the power of the executive by putting in place a rule of law, as well as constitutional checks and balances to prevent presidents from doing whatever they wanted. Americans have come to think of these constitutional checks as almost physical barriers like the Jersey walls on the side of highways that keep cars from veering off the road. Hence the metaphor of legal “guardrails” that protect society from an overweening executive.
Our experience with the Trump administration, especially in its second term, should make it clear to everyone that formal laws are ultimately no stronger than the informal norms underlying them in their ability to constrain power. Laws are effective only if people believe in them, are willing to abide by them, and ultimately want the state to use its power to enforce them. But whether people take the law seriously is not a legal but a normative matter. If the executive ignores the law, denies its power, and indeed uses the power of the state in ways never intended by the law, then the rule of law collapses. The law becomes nothing more than the will of the executive, one more tool in the arsenal of a modern state. The distinction between law and norms disappears; everything becomes normative.
It is clear that Trump has been chafing under the constraints of American law and would like to have the same freedom of action domestically that he has internationally. He has displayed a normative disregard for law from day one of his administration. He has issued a blizzard of executive orders that have skirted and in many cases clearly violated the law. For example, the law states conditions under which federal officials can be removed from their offices, and under which federal agencies can be dismantled. These laws were rapidly broken. The executive branch began to exercise budgetary authority, when the Constitution clearly locates that within the legislative branch. The administration took office declaring that birthright citizenship, something clearly asserted in the Fourteenth Amendment, was invalid.
Powers have traditionally been separated not just between the branches of government, but within the executive branch itself. By law or custom, certain functions like control over the money supply or prosecutorial authority have been walled off from elected politicians, because we do not trust politicians to act in the broad national interest. Those powers, once politicized, could become very dangerous to society as a whole. The current crisis over the administration’s attempt to indict Fed chair Jerome Powell implicates both of these separations: not only is Donald Trump seeking to take away the Fed’s autonomy to set monetary policy; he is also misusing the Justice Department by criminalizing disagreements over policy.
Erosion of the normative order and its descent into Mafia-like behavior was on display last week in Minnesota. Police forces in democratic countries are trained to show restraint in their use of deadly force against citizens. Yet when an ICE agent shot Renee Good to death, he was immediately exonerated by both the president and by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. When videos revealed that the agent’s life was not in danger as Trump initially claimed, the president asserted that the agent was entitled to use force because he was being “disrespected.” Shooting someone for disrespect is a perfect encapsulation of Mafia morality, where “men of honor” are ready to kill over the smallest of slights.
So Trump is right that we are only constrained by our own morality, and that his morality allows him to do anything he pleases.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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It's interesting how all the liberal critics of Trump are so very very certain that he is somehow uniquely immoral and so very morally inferior to any democrat politician past or present. I certainly don't like the war mongering that Trump is doing- which is the opposite of the America first foreign policy he campaigned on.
Yanis Varoufakis makes the case, along with John Meirsheimer and others, that imperialism, regime change and foreign meddling is what the US has always done. ( Ukraine being another example). Trump is just more honest about it than his predecessors. Funny that the author mentions Saddam Hussein as an example of a bad guy. The US didn't exactly cover itself in moral glory with the Iraq War. Read the book "Legacy of Ashes" by NY Times reporter. The CIA has done over forty regime change operations around the world. Usually covertly.
Morality anyone?