U.S. President Donald Trump has, for the instant, indicated a willingness to desert his danger to take over Greenland via army power – announcing that he prefers negotiation to invasion. He’s, alternatively, proceeding to say that the USA ought to obtain possession of the self-governing territory.
Trump has again and again raised the opportunity of the usage of army motion, in opposition to each Greenland and Canada.
Those threats had been continuously taken as fanciful. The truth that he has, effectively, used army power to take away Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from energy has lent some plausibility to those threats.
Crucially, those army probabilities were justified virtually completely as regards to what Trump’s management sees as The us’s nationwide pursuits. The rest wanting possession in terms of Greenland, the president has emphasised, would fail to adequately give protection to American pursuits.
As a political thinker interested by the ethical research of global family members, I’m deeply bothered by way of this imaginative and prescient of conflict – and by way of the ethical justifications used to legitimize the making of struggle.
This view of conflict is radically other from the only championed by way of the U.S. for a lot of the twentieth century. Maximum significantly, it repudiates the criminal idea that knowledgeable the Nuremberg trials: that army power can’t be justified at the foundation of nationwide self-interest on my own.
The ones trials, arrange after Global Battle II to prosecute the leaders of the Nazi regime, had been foundational for contemporary global legislation; Trump, alternatively, turns out to put out of your mind or reject the criminal concepts the Nuremberg tribunal sought to determine.
Competitive struggle as global crime
The usage of conflict as a method during which states may search political and financial benefit was once declared unlawful by way of 1928’s Kellogg-Briand Pact – a world device during which many countries, together with each Germany and the U.S., agreed to desert conflict as a device for nationwide self-interests.
After 1928, invading every other nation within the identify of advancing nationwide pursuits was once officially outlined as against the law, fairly than a valid coverage possibility.
The lifestyles of this pact didn’t save you the German army movements that ended in Global Battle II. The prosecution for the Global Army Tribunal at Nuremberg, accordingly, took two objectives as central: reaffirming that competitive conflict was once unlawful, and enforcing punishment on those that had selected to make use of army power in opposition to neighboring states.
The primary fee laid in opposition to the Nazi management at Nuremberg was once due to this fact the initiation of a “war of aggression” – a struggle selected by way of a state for its personal nationwide pursuits.
The executive prosecutor in Nuremberg was once Robert H. Jackson, who on the time additionally served as a justice at the U.S. Very best Court docket. Jackson started his description of the crime by way of announcing that Germany, in live performance with different international locations, had sure itself in 1928 to “seek the settlement of disputes only by pacific means.”
Extra specifically, Jackson famous, Germany had justified its invasion of neighboring international locations as regards to “Lebensraum” – lounge, or, extra in most cases, area for German voters – which marked the ones invasions out as unlawful.
Nuremberg trial, Dec. 4, 1945.
Sepia Occasions/ Common Photographs Team by way of Getty Photographs
Germany used its personal nationwide pursuits as enough reason why to start up fatal power in opposition to different international locations. In so doing, mentioned Jackson, it engaged in against the law for which particular person prison punishment was once an acceptable reaction.
All through this crime, Jackson famous, Germany had proven a willingness to forget about each global legislation and its personal earlier commitments – and had given itself “a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years.”
Jackson asserted, additional, that the abnormal violence of the twentieth century required the construction of a few criminal gear, during which the plague of conflict and violence may well be constrained.
If such rules weren’t codified in legislation, and revered by way of international locations, then the sector may neatly see, in Jackson’s word, the “doom of civilization.” Nuremberg’s job, for Jackson, was once not anything not up to making sure that competitive struggle was once endlessly to be understood as a prison act – a proposition sponsored, crucially, by way of the U.S. as birthday party to the Nuremberg trials.
The morality of conflict
It’s honest to mention that the U.S, like different international locations, has had a blended report of dwelling as much as the criminal rules articulated at Nuremberg, given its report of army intervention in puts like Vietnam and Iraq.
President Donald Trump on the Global Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2026.
AP Photograph/Evan Vucci
Trump’s prior statements about Greenland, alternatively, trace at one thing extra excessive: They constitute an abandonment of the main that competitive struggle is a prison act, in desire of the concept that the U.S. can use its army because it needs, to advance its personal nationwide pursuits.
Earlier presidents have in all probability been accountable of paying too little consideration to the ethical significance of such global rules. Trump, against this, has introduced that such rules don’t bind him in the slightest degree.
In a contemporary interview with The New York Occasions, Trump asserted that he didn’t “need international law” to grasp what to do. He would, as an alternative, be restricted handiest by way of “his own morality” and “his own mind.”
Ecu leaders, for his or her section, have increasingly more decried Trump’s willingness to return on his phrase, or abandon up to now insisted-upon rules, if such revisions appear to supply him with some specific benefit.
Trump’s statements, alternatively, suggest that his management has followed a place strikingly very similar to that decried by way of Justice Jackson: The U.S., in this imaginative and prescient, can merely come to a decision that its personal ethical pursuits are extra vital than the ones of alternative international locations, and will start up violence in opposition to the ones international locations by itself discretion. It may well do that, additionally, irrespective of both the content material of global legislation or of up to now undertaken political commitments.
This imaginative and prescient, in spite of everything, is being undertaken in an international by which the to be had gear of destruction are much more complicated – and extra fatal – than the ones to be had all through the 2d Global Battle.
It’s, certainly, a historical irony that the U.S. of these days has so roundly repudiated the ethical values it each helped advanced and championed globally all through the twentieth century.
