Not ‘Might Makes Right’ but ‘Might Should Serve Freedom’

Recently White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller suggested that real adults know that might in foreign affairs makes right. The matter, though, is far from settled. Moreover, America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions reject that cynical assessment in favor of the notion that might should serve freedom.

Does might make right throughout history?

As long as people have discussed power and justice, some have doubtless opined as, according to Thucydides, envoys of great-power Athens told representatives of the tiny island of Melos, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The harsh judgment gains credibility from conduct readily visible to casual observers of human affairs: In a pinch, fine words and lofty sentiments frequently give way to pulling rank, subterfuge and brute force, and power’s cold logic. However, the well-known capacity of violence, or its credible threat, to decide conflicts does not settle the larger question. Power may yield victory without determining the outcome’s justice. Great thinkers ancient and modern have extensively examined the issue without having resolved it.

Contemporary advocates – deliberate and unwitting – for the proposition that might makes right are not lacking. Pretentious professors dress up the idea in highfalutin language, stating that justice is socially constructed, or that morality is the expression in disguise of desire, or that right and wrong are tools by which oppressors keep the oppressed in thrall. Sometimes it seems cutting-edge scholars will say anything other than that justice, morality, and right and wrong can be ascertained by reason and should guide a well-lived life. Meanwhile, crude realists, who pride themselves on proclaiming aloud what the weak fear to acknowledge – while overlooking their cynical view’s convergence with progressive clichés – assert that nation-states must be judged only by how effectively they exercise power to advance their interests.

The Founders rejected the idea that might makes right

Wherever one comes down on the enduring philosophical debate over whether power is the ultimate arbiter of morality and politics, America’s founders rejected the equation of right with might. The U.S. Declaration of Independence affirms that government’s primary purpose is to secure for the nation’s citizens the rights shared equally by all human beings and that governments acquire

their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The various mechanisms incorporated into the United States Constitution for limiting government power serve justice by thwarting state encroachment on individual liberty. And President George Washington underscored in his 1796 Farewell Address that in the United States power is exercised for the sake of liberty and not the other way around. According to the nation’s first president, “the love of liberty” is woven into American hearts; the protection of liberty requires a government endowed with “vigor” while restrained by “powers properly distributed and adjusted”; and to safeguard liberty at home – at a time in which the United States was young and its interests were not inextricably intertwined with nation-states in every region of the world – America must “steer clear of permanent alliances.”

Because it conflicts with essential elements of the American spirit, embracing the idea that might makes right will not make America great again. Rather, it threatens to fundamentally transform American principles.

The context of Chief Miller’s remarks

Yet in an early January interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper about America’s capture of Venezuela dictator Nicolás Maduro, Miller truculently affirmed the might-makes-right thesis as a universal truth. “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,” he stated. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller implied not merely that strength, force, and power are essential to American foreign policy, but that they are its exclusive components.

In response to Tapper’s follow-up question – about why President Trump thought that Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado lacked support in Venezuela to lead the country – Miller delivered a “foundational” statement. He reiterated the importance of power and interest:

The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

He indignantly emphasized a sensible tactical consideration underlying Operation Absolute Resolve:

It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us, to hoard weapons from our adversaries to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States rather than on behalf of the United States.

And he insisted that the decision to seize Maduro stemmed from a combination of venerable and new foreign policy thinking: “The Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Doctrine” deal with “securing the national interests of America.”

The two doctrines, however, advance different approaches to securing America’s national interest in the Western Hemisphere.

The Monroe Doctrine

Set forth in President Monroe’s annual message to Congress, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine starts from the proposition that the United States must “make preparations for our defense” when “our rights are invaded or seriously menaced.” Monroe identified a serious menace to American freedom in European monarchies’ “future colonization” of “the American continents.” Consequently, he wrote, “we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

While prepared to use the American military to block further incursions by European nations in the Western Hemisphere, Monroe rejected American resort to force to overturn the status quo: “With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere.” This restraint resembled America’s stance toward Europe “which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none.”

The Trump Corollary

In contrast, the “Trump Corollary” – as introduced in the president’s November 2025 National Security Strategy – is emphatically interventionist. It asserts that the United States “will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” It also promises “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.” Whereas the Monroe Doctrine aimed at containing European colonization, the “Trump Corollary” commits the United States to rolling back competitors’ positions in the Western Hemisphere and enhancing America’s own capabilities and positions in the region.

Having emphasized America’s readiness to use military force to advance its interests in exercising hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, Miller moderated his harsh position without moderating his belligerent tone. He invoked a crucial consideration that is not reducible to mere interest: “The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology.” This suggests, consistent with much of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy, that a commitment to freedom should guide America’s use of power. Inconsistent with that commitment, Miller postured as if the free world’s future does not also depend on America’s cooperating with friends and partners.

Does Miller plump for America as the world’s policeman?

Immediately after connecting American self-assertion to the free world’s defense, Miller deplored “this whole period that happened after World War II, where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging and engaging in vast reparations schemes.” This absurd and degrading caricature of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy distracts from Miller’s larger agreement with post-World War II U.S. foreign policy: To condemn, as does Miller, a servile and self-flagellating America for weakening the free world over the last 80 years is to implicitly endorse the goal – defending the free world – that animated much of U.S. foreign policy during those decades.

Miller concluded with hopes for Venezuela that omitted freedom and democracy, but which converged with the Bush administration nation-building that much of Trump World has always mocked and reviled. “The objective, Jake, is security and stability for the people of Venezuela,” Miller said. “With our help and leadership that country will become more prosperous than it has ever been in its whole history. Venezuelans will be richer and safer and more secure and better off.” The thrust of Miller’s remarks indicated that a more prosperous and secure Venezuela enhances America freedom.

Might should serve the cause of American freedom

Posing as a tough guy who has risen above conventional pieties, Stephen Miller couldn’t avoid invoking freedom as the principle that limits and directs U.S. foreign policy even as he declined to consider freedom’s accompanying necessities.

The Trump administration should keep American freedom – very much including accompanying necessities such as the friends and partners vital to defending it in a dangerous and exceedingly interconnected world – central to national-security and foreign-policy deliberations. That goes not only for deliberations about Venezuela but also for those concerning Greenland, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza, the Chinese Communist Party, and wherever American interests are at stake.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.