Power has always struggled to disguise itself as principle. In every era, dominant states have preferred their conquests to be understood as necessity, civilisation, law or security—rarely as the plain exercise of superior force against a weaker party.
Yet, stripped of the language of legitimacy, a blunter logic often persists beneath the architecture of the international system: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. This logic has appeared repeatedly throughout modern political history.
This does not mean that sovereignty and self-determination are meaningless. Rather, it suggests that these principles often survive as constraints only when powerful states choose to observe them, rather than as rights weaker states can reliably enforce.
A “might makes right” policy implies that a powerful state can govern, dictate to or intervene in another country because it possesses greater military, economic or diplomatic power. It undermines international law and the principle of independence by treating sheer capability as a source of legitimacy.
In such a system, power becomes the basis for creating political earthquakes in other countries. International law risks becoming optional for powerful states because no authority exists above them with the consistent ability to enforce compliance.
Sovereignty and self-determination then become privileges extended by stronger states to weaker ones, rather than inherent rights. Legitimacy collapses into capability. A state dictates outcomes in another country not because it is right, but because it can.
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must” remains an uncomfortable reality in world politics. Many people condemn it, but condemnation alone does not always produce change. International law—including the UN Charter, sovereignty norms and customary international law—exists precisely to restrain this dynamic. Yet its effects remain imperfect because enforcement itself ultimately depends on power.
This is not merely a theoretical tension between norms and enforcement. It has a long and documented history. Doctrines built on this premise—colonial empires and spheres-of-influence politics, for example—generated prolonged resistance, instability and, eventually, the delegitimisation of the powers that relied on them.
The Second World War was not initiated simply because aggression was universally considered morally wrong. Ethiopia’s experience illustrates this clearly. When Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations, warning: “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.” His appeal was not met with decisive collective action.
Ethiopia’s 1935–36 appeal failed not because the League had no rules, but because major powers lacked the political will to enforce them until their own interests were directly threatened. Ethiopia remained under Italian occupation until 1941, when Commonwealth-backed forces and Ethiopian resistance fighters helped liberate the country as part of the broader war against the Axis powers.
This was not proof that the League of Nations system had worked. Rather, it showed that Ethiopia’s moral and legal appeal was abandoned in practice because no powerful state considered enforcement sufficiently important until the conflict became linked to wider strategic interests.
There is also substantial evidence that colonialism did not end simply because colonial powers suddenly recognised it as wrong. The European governments and publics that had maintained colonial empires for generations did not undergo an immediate moral conversion after 1945. Decolonisation was driven significantly by colonised peoples themselves through nationalist movements, armed resistance, political organisation and sustained demands for independence.
France and the Netherlands, for example, fought hard to retain Algeria and Indonesia after 1945. In part, this was because colonial possessions were seen as important to national prestige, economic recovery and post-war reconstruction.
The Second World War was not a moral or civilisational mission for the Allied powers. It was fundamentally a struggle over power, territory and geopolitical balance. Even the Atlantic Charter’s language on self-determination did not prevent Britain from maintaining its empire or the United States from building and defending its own spheres of influence after the war.
At the same time, history does not simply confirm that might makes right. Vietnam, for example, demonstrates that overwhelming military power does not necessarily produce political success or legitimacy. Stronger powers can be resisted, defeated or forced to retreat when political will, popular mobilisation and strategic conditions turn against them.
There have also been moments when major powers sought international legitimacy rather than acting unilaterally. In 1991, the United States built a UN-authorised coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait during the Gulf War. That action, whatever one’s broader view of the conflict, differed sharply from unilateral intervention.
The 1989 United States invasion of Panama offers a contrasting example. U.S. forces entered Panama, captured Manuel Noriega on drug-trafficking charges and installed a new government without UN Security Council authorisation. A Security Council resolution condemning the intervention was vetoed by the United States, while the UN General Assembly subsequently adopted a resolution describing the invasion as a “flagrant violation of international law.” The vote was 75 in favour, 20 against and 40 abstentions.
Recent events in Venezuela raise similarly serious questions. In January 2026, U.S. forces conducted military operations in and around Caracas and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The UN Secretary-General said he was deeply alarmed and warned that the action could set a dangerous precedent.
Unlike the 1991 Gulf War, this intervention did not have a UN Security Council mandate or a broad international coalition. It illustrates the danger of a stronger state reshaping a weaker state’s internal governance and political economy through unilateral force.
The gap between the normative ideal of sovereign equality and the empirical reality that power often determines outcomes has repeatedly shaped history, but it has never gone unchallenged. Powerful states may treat international law as optional when it conflicts with their interests, but this does not make international law irrelevant.
International law’s weakness is real. There is no global sovereign capable of consistently enforcing rules against great powers. Nevertheless, law persists because it performs important functions: it establishes standards, creates legitimacy or illegitimacy, mobilises diplomatic pressure, shapes public opinion and provides weaker states with language and institutions through which to resist.
Military invasions of sovereign states often produce instability, insecurity and deepening crises. The persistence of the gap between sovereign equality as an ideal and sovereign equality in practice is not evidence that the ideal is worthless. It is evidence that the ideal remains unfinished.
Today, the same dynamic appears in new forms. Nuclear protection, drug trafficking, terrorism, economic coercion and NATO-related security concerns can all become pretexts for intervention. In such an environment, military, economic and diplomatic power becomes the principal currency of influence.
Sovereignty is not an empty phrase on international platforms. The law is clear. But when enforcement is selective, its protections are weakened. Sovereignty becomes exposed, and weaker states may be pressured into compliance while stronger states calculate that they can absorb the cost of ignoring legal norms.
Under such conditions, appeals to the United Nations can appear futile or merely symbolic. This is largely because the powers capable of acting do not always have an interest in applying the law consistently and equally.
States with superior capabilities can shape agendas, dictate terms and use veto power when they choose to override the norms of sovereignty and self-determination. This is the selective morality of world politics: international law carries unequal weight depending on the power of the state involved.
That is the central danger of the “might makes right” policy. It turns law into an instrument applied unevenly, sovereignty into a conditional privilege and justice into a calculation of power.