When Law Becomes Optional

Let’s drop the pretence that this is merely the latest symptom of a long-running decline. Yes, the post-war legal order has been eroding for years. Yes, Russia and China have been probing its edges. But Donald Trump is not a passive beneficiary of that erosion. He is an accelerant.

International law operates by consent. Trump is not withdrawing consent quietly or reluctantly. He is revoking it theatrically, and inviting applause while he does so.

What previous presidents treated as constraint, Trump treats as inconvenience. What others bent, he snaps. He does not merely violate norms; he ridicules the idea that norms should bind him at all. Law, to Trump, is not a framework within which power operates. It is a tool to be picked up when useful and discarded when not.

Hypocrisy within a rules-based system is not the same thing as open contempt for the existence of rules at all.

This is not realism. It is vandalism. Realism recognises constraints. Vandalism denies they matter.

The United States once played the role of world policeman imperfectly, hypocritically and often brutally, but with at least a working belief that rules mattered, even when bent. Trump has taken that role and inverted it. The enforcer has become indistinguishable from the racketeer. Gamekeeper turned poacher. Selective enforcement, personal loyalty tests, punishment without jurisdiction, immunity for friends. That is not strength. It is organised opportunism.

And the damage is not abstract. By acting without consequence, Trump does not deter rivals. He licenses them. Every time he overrides sovereignty, ignores jurisdiction or shrugs at legality, he confirms the worldview of Moscow and Beijing. Not rhetorically. Practically. He shows that power answers only to itself and that the rules were always optional. This does not create aggression from nothing, but it lowers the marginal cost of acting on it. 

What China and Russia see is not a warning, but a precedent. They see confirmation that sovereignty is conditional, that law is instrumental, and that the strong may act without penalty. What they say in response should not be confused with what they think. Their public condemnations are automatic, performative and pre-programmed. Condemning the United States is diplomatic muscle memory, not strategic revelation. It is a reflex, not intent. The intent lies elsewhere. Applauding selective rule-breaking by the West does not make them cautious. It makes them confident. You cannot cheer that and then object when others follow the same script.

This is where Nigel Farage enters the picture, not as a serious strategist, but as a cautionary example. Farage has suggested that Trump’s actions might make China and Russia “think twice”. This is a category error so basic it barely deserves the name analysis.

Deterrence requires consequences. There are none.
Deterrence requires predictability. Trump offers impulse.
Deterrence requires doctrine. Trump offers spectacle.

What rivals see is not restraint but normalisation. They see confirmation that sovereignty is conditional, law is optional, and power carries no automatic penalty. Applauding this does not unsettle them. It reassures them.

Farage’s mistake is the same one he made with Brexit. He mistakes disruption for leverage, noise for strength, and rule-breaking for strategy. He cheers the act of demolition and then looks bewildered when the building collapses. The pattern is familiar. Only the scale has changed.

Once the most powerful state treats law as optional, law becomes advisory everywhere. This is not the end of law, but it is the end of universality. For lawyers, this is not extinction but triage. Law survives where consent still exists and enforcement is real. Elsewhere, it becomes rhetoric. Fine words, floating free of consequence.

And this is where the United Nations comes in. The UN was never a world government, but it briefly functioned as something stronger than a talking shop because major powers accepted restraint. Its weakness today is not institutional failure alone, but the withdrawal of great-power consent that once gave it force. That premise is gone. The UN cannot enforce rules against states that no longer consent to be bound by them. Pretending otherwise only drains what credibility remains.

Its future is not as referee, but as venue. The UN is becoming the place where spheres of influence talk past one another, occasionally negotiate, sometimes de-escalate, and often launder faits accomplis into diplomatic language. Smaller states will still attend, protest and vote. Real decisions will increasingly be made elsewhere, inside regional blocs, then formalised after the fact.

Think of it less as a court and more as a Congress of Vienna with microphones. Minutes are taken. Weather is recorded. The storm is not controlled. That is not nothing. It is just far less than what people were taught to expect.

Trump understands this world instinctively, even if he cannot articulate it. He does not care if international law survives. He does not care if the UN is hollowed out. He does not care if the system becomes more violent and less predictable, so long as he can move faster than the constraints that slow everyone else down. Speed without legitimacy is not decisiveness. It is volatility with a flag on it.

This is not history unfolding beyond anyone’s control. It is choice. A deliberate decision to trade restraint for speed, rules for leverage, and legitimacy for applause.

That is not strategic insight. It is the sort of thinking that cheers the demolition and then looks surprised when the roof collapses - a habit Britain knows rather well after Brexit.

This time, though, the rubble will not be confined to one country.