BEIRUT—The modern international system is built—at least in principle—on a foundational norm: the sovereignty of states. 

Regardless of size or power, no country is legally entitled to abduct foreign leaders, engineer regime change, or impose its will through force beyond the constraints of international law. 

This principle was meant to shield the world from chaos. Yet today, it is increasingly treated not as a rule, but as an inconvenience—honored selectively and discarded when power can act with impunity.

Recent American conduct and rhetoric reflect a dangerous normalization of this erosion. 

When a superpower asserts the right to “swoop in” and seize a foreign head of state under the banners of security, justice, or moral necessity, the global order is no longer governed by law but by hierarchy. 

The issue is no longer whether international law exists, but whom it binds. The answer has become painfully clear: it restrains the weak and exempts the strong.

This is not an isolated deviation; it is a pattern!

Washington has repeatedly positioned itself as judge, jury, and executioner in global affairs—launching unauthorized wars, conducting covert operations, orchestrating coups, and enforcing collective punishment through sanctions that devastate civilian populations.

These actions, which meet widely accepted definitions of state terrorism, are routinely justified through abstract rhetoric about democracy and human rights, even as their human cost mounts across the Global South.

The hypocrisy is especially stark when contrasted with the culture of impunity enjoyed by Western political and economic elites. 

While foreign leaders are sanctioned, prosecuted, or abducted in the name of “values,” grave crimes committed or enabled within Washington frequently go unpunished.

The Epstein scandal—extensively documented yet still unresolved—exposed how wealth, power, and political protection can insulate perpetrators from accountability, while public outrage is carefully managed into silence. 

Justice, it seems, is reserved for those without influence. This same double standard defines U.S. global conduct.

Allegations of intelligence involvement in drug trafficking, regime destabilization, and economic coercion are not speculative conspiracies; they have been investigated by journalists, courts, and even U.S. congressional bodies over decades.

Yet responsibility is perpetually deferred behind the shield of “national security,” transforming law into a tool of control rather than accountability.

Meanwhile, multinational corporations thrive amid war, sanctions, and engineered instability. Entire economies are dismantled, resources extracted, and societies fractured, all while profits flow upward. 

The opioid crisis within the United States itself illustrates this systemic corruption: millions of lives destroyed by regulatory capture and corporate greed, while executives paid fines and communities buried their dead. This was not a failure of the system—it was its logical outcome.

Perhaps most alarming is the normalization of this reality. Large segments of the American public suffer from the same structures of exploitation, surveillance, and economic precarity imposed abroad, yet sustained resistance remains fragmented. As long as violations occur beyond U.S. borders, they are tolerated.

As long as elites remain immune, injustice becomes routine. A world where power replaces law is not safer; it is more unstable and more violent. 

When sovereignty can be violated without consequence, no nation is secure. When crimes by the powerful go unpunished, justice becomes performance. And when populations are conditioned to accept this imbalance, the cycle of domination deepens.

History offers a consistent lesson: empires rarely fall from external assault alone. They collapse when legitimacy erodes, when hypocrisy becomes intolerable, and when rhetoric can no longer conceal reality. 

The question is not whether such a reckoning will come—but how much devastation will be inflicted before it does.