When a sitting President of the United States says he does not need international law and that only his personal sense of morality can restrain him, the world ought to listen carefully. Not because Donald Trump is unfamiliar with controversial rhetoric, but because such a declaration exposes a dangerous truth about the state of global power. The rules that are meant to govern nations are becoming as strong as the willingness of the powerful to respect them.
Trump’s remark, made in an interview with The New York Times, that “I don’t need international law” and that “my own morality, my own mind” is the only limit to his authority, may sound like bravado.
But history teaches that such statements are rarely harmless.
They are signals subtle or otherwise about; how power perceives itself and how it intends to act when restraint becomes inconvenient.
International law has always been imperfect. It has often failed to prevent wars, stop human rights abuses, or protect vulnerable populations. Yet it remains the thin line separating order from global anarchy. As the Finnish legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi once observed, international law does not eliminate power; it seeks to discipline it. When discipline is replaced with personal judgment, the world enters uncertain and dangerous territory.
Trump insists that his administration still follows international law, though he quickly qualifies that position by suggesting it depends on “what your definition of international law is.” That qualification is telling. It reflects a long-standing practice among powerful states: respecting international law when it aligns with national interest and redefining or ignoring it when it does not. What is new, however, is the bluntness with which this attitude is now expressed.
For countries outside the circle of global power, particularly those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this posture is deeply unsettling. International law, weak as it may be, has often served as the last line of defense for smaller states against overt coercion. It is the reason colonial conquest eventually became unacceptable, why apartheid was delegitimized, and why territorial aggression is at least publicly condemned, even when quietly tolerated.
Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland illustrates the danger notably. His insistence that ownership is psychologically necessary for success, and that treaties or leases are inadequate substitutes, revives a worldview many believed had been buried with the age of empire. It frames sovereignty not as a collective agreement rooted in law, but as a transaction to be completed by those with sufficient leverage.
Such thinking does not exist in a vacuum. It echoes loudly in a world strained by territorial disputes, wars of influence, and competing claims of historical entitlement. If ownership, rather than agreement, becomes the defining principle of international relations, then treaties lose their meaning and borders become provisional.
Based on the context of the well known Political analyst Anne-Marie Slaughter has warned that global leadership is sustained not merely by power, but by restraint. Without restraint, leadership dissolves into domination. Trump’s rhetoric suggests a troubling comfort with the latter.
By elevating personal morality above collective rules, he replaces transparency with subjectivity and accountability with self-assessment.
This is where the danger deepens. Morality, when detached from law, is neither measurable nor enforceable, all the way.
It varies from one individual to another and shifts with circumstance. Leaders throughout history have justified wars, repression, and conquest by appealing to personal conviction and moral certainty.
Trump’s assurance that he is “not looking to hurt people” offers little comfort in this dimension. Harm, after all, is often the unintended consequence of unchecked power rather than its explicit goal. As former United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk once noted, the gravest threat to international law is not its violation by the so-called rogue states, but its manipulation by powerful ones who believe themselves above it.
For Nigeria, these developments are not abstract, being a country that has relied heavily on diplomacy, multilateral cooperation, and international norms to navigate both internal security challenges and external relations, Nigeria has a vested interest in the survival of a rules-based international order.
A world governed solely by the instincts of powerful leaders is one where the voices of mid-level and smaller states fade quickly into irrelevance.
Meanwhile, there is also a broader hypocrisy at play, that the same global powers that invoke international law to condemn adversaries often discard it when it restrains their own ambitions. Trump’s remarks weaken the moral authority of the United States to challenge similar behavior by others.
One cannot credibly defend sovereignty in Ukraine, Taiwan, or the South China Sea while openly questioning the relevance of international law elsewhere.
China, Russia, and other strategic competitors are watching closely, hence, every dismissal of global norms by Washington provides justification for similar conduct elsewhere. When the architect of the so-called “rules-based order” signals that the rules are optional, the structure begins to collapse from within.
It is important to note that this is not a uniquely American problem, nor is Trump its sole architect. His comments merely reflect a broader global drift toward unilateralism, nationalism, and transactional diplomacy. What makes his case significant is the scale of American power and influence.
When a superpower speaks this way, its words reverberate far beyond its borders.
The danger, then, is not simply what Trump might do, but the precedent such thinking sets. If personal morality becomes the ultimate check on presidential power in one country, others will claim the same privilege. The result is a world where law becomes decorative and power decides truth.
Countries in the Global South, silence in the face of such rhetoric is not neutrality. It is quiet acceptance of a system that leaves them exposed. Nigeria, Africa, and other developing regions must continue to insist firmly but intelligently, based on the relevance of international norms, even when they are inconvenient to the powerful.
In the end, the question is not whether international law is perfect. It is whether the world is safer without it. History offers a clear answer.
