On Moral Law, the Golden Rule, and a World Crossing a Threshold

The immediate trigger for this reflection is the rapidly unfolding news of U.S. military action in Venezuela, accompanied by extraordinary claims regarding the removal or capture of that country’s leadership. As of this writing, facts remain incomplete and contested, and prudence demands restraint. Yet even allowing for later clarification, legal reframing, or partial walk-backs, something significant has already occurred at the level of signal.

In international politics, signals often matter as much as facts.

For those who read world affairs through the lens of Sun Tzu, this episode provokes a deeper unease than any single crisis headline. Not because it heralds an imminent world war — it does not — but because it suggests that a moral threshold has been crossed.

Sun Tzu begins The Art of War not with weapons or tactics, but with what he calls the Moral Law: the principle that binds ruler and people, allies and partners, through shared restraint. It is not moralism. It is cohesion.

Across cultures and centuries, this intuition has been captured by what later traditions called the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not wish done to yourself.

Applied to individuals, it governs ethical behavior.
Applied to groups, it underpins trust.
Applied to nations, it becomes the foundation of sovereignty and international law: Do not do to other countries what you would not accept being done to your own.

Since 1945, the international system has lived — imperfectly, inconsistently, often hypocritically — under a version of this principle. Sovereignty was never absolute; international law was never fully enforceable. But there was a broadly shared understanding that force required justification, and that exceptions should not be normalized.

UN mandates, alliance consultations, coalition-building, legal argumentation — these were not guarantees of justice, but rituals of self-binding. Even when violated, they signaled an intent not to universalize the violation. The message was: this is an exception, not a model.

That understanding underpinned what might be called the Long Cold Peace: a period without direct great-power war, sustained less by goodwill than by restraint, legal framing, and moral asymmetry. The strongest actors claimed — and were often granted — a special responsibility to uphold the rules they themselves had helped shape.

What feels different now is not simply the use of force, but the open abandonment of self-binding restraint. When a major power acts unilaterally, publicly, and without multilateral authorization against another sovereign state, it does more than resolve a tactical problem. It sends a systemic signal: We reserve the right to do this — and we accept the logic if others do the same.

This is where the Golden Rule fractures. Because when a system’s primary enforcer no longer acts as if it would object to others doing the same to it, the Golden Rule is replaced by its inverse. Not another moral law, but what might be called a Dark Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you.

This rule does not appeal to reciprocity, but to pre-emption.
Not to restraint, but to demonstration.
Not to law, but to capability.

That is not a moral judgment. It is a strategic diagnosis.

Once this inversion takes hold, moral asymmetry collapses. Arguments that once distinguished enforcement from aggression, or order from destabilization, lose their force. What remains is equivalence. And in international politics, equivalence is corrosive.

From that point onward, it becomes easier — not morally right, but rhetorically easier — for others to justify their own unilateral actions. Russia’s claims to spheres of influence, China’s extraterritorial assertions, Iran’s proxy logic: all gain oxygen once the leading power demonstrates that power itself defines legitimacy.

The question shifts from Is this lawful? to Can this be done?

This does not mean the world is on the brink of World War III. History is rarely that punctual. But it does suggest the end of a phase: the slow erosion of a post-1945 order in which even the powerful felt compelled to narrate their actions in the language of law, reciprocity, and collective authority.

When Moral Law collapses, it does not disappear.
It inverts.

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Annex: Three Phases of the Post-1945 Order

Seen through a diplomatic lens, the post-1945 period can probably be read in three overlapping phases — with different dates depending on whether one looks at power, law, or legitimacy.

1. The Cold War Balance (1945–1989)
A bipolar world: dangerous, but paradoxically stable. Moral Law operated through deterrence, alliance discipline, and fear of escalation. Sovereignty was violated, but usually indirectly, through proxies and narrative restraint. The rules mattered because breaking them openly risked systemic collapse.

2. The Unipolar Illusion and the Missed “Warm Peace” (1989–2003)
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the true turning point. The Cold War was won — but no genuine Warm Peace followed. Instead of embedding victory in a strengthened, universally respected legal order, power increasingly substituted itself for consent.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003, without a clear UN mandate, was the moment many diplomats experienced as a moral rupture: the Golden Rule bent sharply, even if the language of law was still invoked.

3. The Age of Open Instrumentalism (2003/2014– )
From Iraq onward, restraint thinned. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 made explicit what had been implicit: law had become a tool, not a boundary. Extraterritoriality — legal, economic, and strategic — normalized. Moral asymmetry faded. Power no longer consistently bound itself.

If we are now fully in this third phase, then the Long Cold Peace is not ending in catastrophe, but in something more subtle and more dangerous: the abandonment of the Golden Rule at the level of states.

Sun Tzu would have understood this moment. Moral Law, once lost, is not easily restored. And when it fades, wars do not begin immediately — but they become easier to justify.

That is the danger of thresholds.
You only realize you crossed one when the ground behind you no longer holds.

Post Scriptum: A Preliminary Note on the European Union’s Reaction

As events continue to unfold, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the European Union’s official position regarding recent U.S. actions in Venezuela. Formal statements from the Council, consolidated EU positions, or explicit UN-related démarches may yet emerge. Prudence requires waiting for those.

Still, even at this early stage, the initial signals coming from Brussels — including reported comments attributed to the EU’s High Representative (reported by Reuters and picked up by sites such as Modern Diplomacy) — already raise a number of structural questions worth noting.

First, there is the striking impression that the European Union was caught unprepared. If U.S. military action of this magnitude took place without prior political coordination with European partners, this suggests that the transatlantic relationship functions less as a partnership in strategic decision-making than as a system of post hoc notification. That asymmetry is not new, but moments like this make it visible — and uncomfortable.

Second, the EU’s early language appears to reflect a familiar difficulty: commenting on rapidly evolving ground reality. European diplomacy excels at carefully calibrated, legally precise statements, but it is institutionally ill-suited to situations where faits accomplis unfold faster than consensus can be built. The result is often a default to general principles — restraint, international law, the UN Charter — without clear positioning on the action that triggered the crisis itself.

Third, and more fundamentally, these early reactions expose the EU’s lack of an autonomous ideological or strategic stance when judging U.S. military action. The Union defines itself as a normative power, committed to international law and multilateralism. Yet when its principal security partner acts unilaterally, Europe seems torn between upholding those norms and preserving political alignment. The outcome is language that is normatively correct, but strategically weightless.

This tension is not unprecedented. The 2003 invasion of Iraq already revealed a similar fracture: moral concern without collective leverage, legal unease without institutional resolve. Two decades later, the underlying dilemma appears unresolved.

None of this implies that the EU should reflexively oppose U.S. action, nor that it should ignore internal legitimacy issues within Venezuela itself. Rather, the question is whether Europe is prepared to do more than react normatively to precedents that shape the international order — especially when those precedents touch the very principles the EU claims to defend.

This annex does not offer conclusions. It merely notes a pattern that may become clearer with time: a widening gap between fact-setting power and norm-commenting authority. Whether the European Union is content to inhabit the latter role — or intends to close that gap — remains an open question.

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Note: This annex was written in the awareness that early impressions can be corrected by later facts. But precedents are often set before interpretations catch up — which is precisely why they merit attention, even in provisional form.