Empire abroad, subjects at home: The domestic cost of raw power

By James J. Devine

In the gilded corridors of a White House now unshackled from precedent, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has distilled a radical new American doctrine into a chillingly plain phrase.

Miller, the architect of the administration’s most severe domestic policies, has declared that the “iron laws of the world” are not written in treaties or charters, but etched by strength alone.

He posits a world where power confers the right to take, and where the powerful nation, like a lion on the plain, needs only consider its appetite. This principle is an expression of injustice directly linked to behavior that inspires violence and resistance against those in power.

Miller has replaced Lincoln’s vision of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” with his own creed: a world “governed by strength… by force… by power.” This is the inversion of the American ideal, articulated by a man who has been denounced as a “Jewish Nazi.”

This philosophy, laid bare in a televised interview, is no abstract academic exercise. It is the operating manual for a second term unrestrained, applied with swift brutality to Venezuela and announced as the rightful claim to the lands of allies.

The United States, Miller asserted, is “running Venezuela” following a military raid that extracted its president as if plucking a fugitive from his own capital.

He then turned his gaze north, to the ice and rock of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, and stated that the U.S. could seize it if it wished.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he said, dismissing the sovereignty of a NATO ally as a mere inconvenience.

The words carry the cold, metallic ring of a different century, echoing the blunt conquests of empires past. They reject the foundational compact of the modern world, painstakingly built from the ashes of catastrophic wars, which held that even the strong should be bound by agreed-upon rules.

This statement by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Adolf Hitler in 1939 is a foundational rejection of the very doctrine Miller espoused: “Nothing can persuade the peoples of the earth that any governing power has any right or need to inflict the consequences of war on its own or any other people save in the cause of self-evident home defense.”

Roosevelt asserts that power does not confer a right to take—that the only justifiable use of force is self-defense, not conquest.

In Miller’s world, there are only “international niceties” and the “real world” of force.

This is a vision where the Atlantic Charter, with its renunciation of territorial aggrandizement, is a forgotten scroll, where the U.N. Charter is a palimpsest over which new laws of conquest are being written, and where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a discarded leaflet on the floor of a forgotten chamber.

The Atlantic Charter, signed in 1941 by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, established the bedrock principles for a post-war world: self-determination, free trade, and global cooperation. Its commitment to sovereignty, disarmament, and the rejection of territorial conquest laid the direct foundation for the United Nations.

The United Nations Charter, signed in 1945, is the world’s foundational treaty. It established the global blueprint for peace, security, and human rights, binding all member states to its principles of sovereignty, peaceful dispute resolution, and the prohibition of force.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a product of tireless global debate, established the 30 essential rights that form the foundation of modern international law. It was forged in 1948 by a diverse UN commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, uniting figures like P.C. Chang of China, Lebanon’s Charles Malik, and France’s René Cassin to create a moral compass for the world.

If these foundational pillars of the international order—the Atlantic Charter, the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—are dismissed as mere parchment in Stephen Miller’s worldview, what sanctity then remains for the Constitution of the United States but to be seen as another “goddamn piece of paper“?

What makes this pronouncement so profoundly unsettling is not merely its brazenness, but the pedigree of the person delivering it.

Miller, whose own Jewish ancestors fled persecution, now champions a might-makes-right ethos that historically ends in the oppression of the vulnerable.

He has been denounced by his own uncle as an “immigration hypocrite” and by his childhood rabbi for betraying the Jewish message of compassion.

His policy blueprints, influenced by the darkest corners of nativist literature, have manifested in the separation of families and the slamming of doors on refugees.

Now, that same ideological impulse is projected onto the global map.

The administration’s actions have raced ahead of even its rhetoric.

The operation in Venezuela, described as a “law enforcement mission,” was in fact a military incursion into a sovereign nation, an act of war by any other name, executed without congressional authorization.

It has left a power vacuum filled not by democratic opposition leaders but by the hardened loyalists of the old regime, suggesting control, not liberation, is the true objective.

The president speaks openly of harvesting Venezuela’s oil, a candid admission of resource extraction that would make the old Rockefeller trusts blush, but it ignores the reality of chaos in an occupied nation, lessons we should have learned in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

And so the pattern clarifies: a relentless focus on the mechanics of power, divorced from the purpose of principle.

It is a domestic policy of division and fear, scaled to a foreign policy of domination and seizure. The social contract at home is frayed by design, pitting citizen against citizen, while abroad, the contractual bonds between nations are dismissed as fairy tales.

Following the tragic murder of filmmaker Rob Reiner, a man who brought laughter and insight to millions, Trump callously branded the late director “deranged” and “very bad for our country,” baselessly implying his death was linked to his political views.

This moment crystallizes the perversion of civic life that Miller’s ideology enables: where disagreement is recast as disloyalty, and the memory of a fellow citizen can be desecrated for political point-scoring. It is the domestic echo of the “iron law” he champions abroad—where raw power, not shared humanity or basic decency, dictates the terms of engagement.

The great and haunting question for Americans now is what becomes of a republic that adopts the habits of an evil empire.

History offers no comforting examples. The pursuit of dominion abroad has a corrosive habit of poisoning the well of liberty at home.

Ancient Greek and Roman writers, such as Polybius and Livy, analyzed the cyclical nature of governments and the dangers of imperial expansion leading to corruption and eventual collapse.

This idea has resonated through the ages, influencing the Founding Fathers of the United States, who intentionally designed a republic with checks and balances to avoid the pitfalls of empire.

The nation’s founders placed public virtue at the heart of the republic, warning against corruption and the concentration of power. George Washington warned that morality was its essential bulwark, while Benjamin Franklin asserted, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

When the state’s highest ambition becomes the flexing of muscle, its gaze inevitably turns inward, seeing its own people not as citizens to be served, but as subjects to be managed.

The infrastructure of control built for the outsider finds easy application to the dissenter.

Senator Bernie Sanders called Miller’s logic “a very good definition of imperialism.”

He is correct. But it is an imperialism of a particularly hollow sort—not for the spread of an ideal, but for the gratification of power itself. It seeks to raise the flag over Greenland not to extend democracy, but because it is there, and we are strong.

The American experiment was founded in rebellion against distant, unaccountable power that acted on its own whims.

The danger today is not a power distant, but one that is near, and has come to believe its own whims are law.

The “iron laws” Stephen Miller espouses are not the laws of nature, but a choice.

They are the choice to abandon the difficult, imperfect work of building a just and lawful world for the brutal simplicity of the club.

President Donald Trump’s shift towards imperial ambitions will undermine the principles of civic virtue, public service, and the rule of law.

A nation that makes that choice may find it has gained a hemisphere, but lost its soul.