Trump rejects international law, says US authority is limited only by his own judgement

I t was, perhaps, the inevitable terminus of ‘America First’. Sitting in the Oval Office on Wednesday with New York Times (NYT) journalists, President Trump stripped away the remaining veneers of diplomatic protocol to reveal the raw, unadulterated machinery of his second term.

His authority, he told the NYT, knows no external tether — neither treaty, nor tribunal, nor the cumulative weight of post-war convention. The only constraint on the world’s most potent military arsenal?

“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

It is a chilling, if clarifying, admission. Whilst previous administrations have occasionally skirted international law in the shadows, Donald Trump has dragged this unilateralism into the light, framing it not as a violation, but as a prerogative of American hegemony.

The Death of Obligation

The President’s discourse was a masterclass in the rejection of the rules-based order. When pressed on the limits of his global reach, he was unequivocal: “I don’t need international law.”

This is not merely a rhetorical flourish; it is operational doctrine. The President effectively positioned himself as the sole arbiter of when legal frameworks apply to the United States. In this Hobbesian worldview, laws are for the weak; morality — specifically, the mercurial morality of Donald J. Trump — is the luxury of the strong.

The implications are immediate and kinetic. Having already extracted the US from a raft of international bodies, and with Secretary of State Marco Rubio enforcing a scorched-earth policy on multilateralism, the administration is pivoting to a strategy of raw coercion.

Real Estate Geopolitics

Nowhere is the conflation of statecraft and property development more acute than in the President’s renewed, and increasingly manic, fixation on Greenland. Dismissing the utility of the NATO alliance, which currently secures the territory through Denmark, Trump insists on “ownership”.

To the President, sovereignty is transactional. A lease, or the strategic access granted by the 1951 treaty, is insufficient for the ‘psychological’ satisfaction of empire.

“Ownership is very important,” Trump told the NYT. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

It is a view that reduces the North Atlantic to a distressed asset awaiting a cash buyer, ignoring the nuanced reality of Danish sovereignty and the strategic anxieties of the Arctic Council (which brings together the eight states with territory above the Arctic Circle: Russia, United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark – Greenland and the Faroe Islands – and Iceland). Trump views the landmass — three times the size of Texas — through the lens of a developer, not a statesman; possession is the only metric of success.

Coercive Diplomacy in Action

The practical application of this “morality” doctrine was visible in real-time. During the interview, Trump fielded a call from Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The context was stark: the US had just decapitated the Venezuelan government in a lightning strike, and Petro, fearing a similar fate, was purportedly seeking assurances.

This is the new diplomatic dialect: fear.

Donald Trump’s engagement with Latin America has shed any pretence of partnership. By leveraging the unpredictability of his military decisions — symbolised by the B-2 bombers on his desk — he has instituted a system in which silence and compliance are the only currencies accepted in Washington.

The Atlantic Rift

Across the pond, the President’s view of NATO remains deeply cynical. Though he claims credit for European nations purportedly hitting a 5% GDP defence target — a figure bolstered by creative accounting regarding domestic infrastructure — his disdain for the alliance is palpable.

He views the transatlantic pact not as a mutual defence treaty, but as a protection racket where the client states must “shape up”. The grim irony, however, is his dismissal of the Russian threat to Europe. In Trump’s calculus, Moscow fears only Washington; the rest of the continent is merely scenery.

“I’m the one that got them to spend more on the, you know, more G.D.P. on NATO. But if you look at NATO, Russia I can tell you is not at all concerned with any other country but us.” Trump added: “I’ve been very loyal to Europe. I’ve done a good job. If it weren’t for me, Russia would have all of Ukraine right now.”

A Singular Exception

Perhaps most alarming is the cognitive dissonance regarding interventionism. With the New START treaty weeks from expiration — leaving the US and Russian nuclear arsenals unconstrained for the first time in half a century — Trump remains blasé.

“If it expires, it expires,” Trump said. “We’ll just do a better agreement” and “you probably want to get a couple of other players involved also.”

Simultaneously, he rejects the notion that his forceful removal of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela sets a precedent for China to move on Taiwan or for Russia to dismember Ukraine further.

His logic is circular and rooted in American exceptionalism: US power is righteous because it is American; rival power is illegitimate because it is not American. He argues that Venezuela was a “real threat” due to migration and narcotics — a justification he denies to Xi Jinping regarding Taiwan. It is a dangerous gamble. By dismantling the legal arguments against annexation and regime change, he may well be handing Beijing and Moscow the very playbook they require to redraw the maps of Asia and Europe.

Will Xi’s China move on Taiwan soon? “That’s up to him, what he’s going to be doing. I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t.” And if he does, Trump believes it could only be under another president, not under his mighty presidency... obviously. “He may do it after we have a different president, but I don’t think he’s going to do it with me as president.”

The Domestic Reflection

This unbridled ethos turns inward, too. Trump hinted at using the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically and repackaging struck-down tariffs as “licensing fees” to bypass the Supreme Court.

The message is consistent: checks and balances, whether international or domestic, are obstacles to be circumvented. We are witnessing the consolidation of a presidency that views the law not as a foundation, but as friction.

GOING FURTHER

• Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’ | THE NEW YORK TIMES

• Thomas Hobbes | BRITANNICA

• Buy Greenland? Take It? Why? An Old Pact Already Gives Trump a Free Hand | THE NEW YORK TIMES

• Agreement of 27 April 1951 between the USA and Denmark [PDF] | UNITED NATIONS

• How Trump’s NATO comments escalate his disdain for America’s allies | AXIOS

• If the only thing stopping him is his own mind, just how far will Donald Trump go? | THE INDEPENDENT

• Trump Confirms He Threatened to Withdraw from NATO | ATLANTIC COUNCIL

• The last Russia-US nuclear treaty is about to expire. What happens next? | REUTERS

• The Insurrection Act, Explained | BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE AT NYU LAW

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Europeans TODAY on 9 January 2026.

▪ Cover: Flickr/The White House. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)