A swift strike. A toppled strongman. A decisive and visible victory. In Venezuela, the lesson seemed simple: power works when it is unmistakable — when it acts quickly and leaves no ambiguity about who has prevailed.
Recent American actions suggest a governing conviction that power must be displayed to be real. Strength is not something quietly possessed; it is something shown. Power held in reserve looks like hesitation. Power filtered through institutions looks weak. What counts is action — kinetic, immediate, undeniable.
In Donald Trump’s view, credibility is not built slowly through alliances or norms. It is demonstrated. Trump’s theory of power is built for the Twitter Age. A successful display establishes a reputation. When the world is talking about you, when it is wondering what you will do next, when it fears what you might do, it obsesses about you–incessantly. Trump is so powerful because he consolidates attention, and attention becomes leverage.
But there is danger in tying greatness to constant performance of power. A victory that is won in terms of attention becomes a victory that must be repeated. What worked once tempts reenactment. The world becomes a series of stages on which strength must again be proved. Trump’s power comes from his eternal movement, from never stopping, from his preternatural ability to draw all eyes and all tweets to himself.
But politics is not theater. What succeeds in one place does not necessarily travel. The unexpected proliferates. Action multiplies consequences. The very demonstration meant to secure power can expose its limits.
That dynamic is already playing out beyond Latin America’s borders. Having treated Venezuela as a proving ground, the temptation now reaches the Middle East. Operation Epic Fury — a major U.S.–Israel military campaign against Iran’s regime — was launched with explicit aims that go beyond deterrence and instead edge toward regime change. The stated goal is to dismantle Tehran’s nuclear and military infrastructure and, in the process, remove a government long accused of repression and regional destabilization.
Iran is not Venezuela. It is larger, more entrenched, better armed, more ideologically rigid, more regionally entangled, and far more capable of retaliation. A strike there is a gamble with cascading consequences. And yet the temptation is clear. If decisive force produced a visible victory once, why not again? If power must be shown to exist, then each new confrontation becomes an opportunity to display it.
None of this is to romanticize the regimes in Caracas or Tehran. The government of Nicolás Maduro hollowed out a country of immense wealth and drove millions into exile. It jailed opponents, corrupted institutions, and ruled through fear and patronage. Iran’s regime is harsher still: a theocratic state that crushes dissent, persecutes minorities, funds proxy militias across the region, and has long pursued nuclear capabilities that destabilize an already combustible Middle East. These are brutal governments. There are serious political and moral reasons to want them gone.
And that is precisely why the temptation is so powerful.
When a regime is manifestly repressive and dangerous, the argument for decisive action writes itself. Remove the tyrant. Break the apparatus. Demonstrate resolve. The moral clarity of the target makes the assertion of force feel not only strategic but righteous. To topple such a government can look like strength aligned with justice. It might even feed the fantasy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
But here the paradox begins. We can recognize the brutality of a regime without surrendering to the intoxication of force. Judgment demands that we hold two truths at once: that a government is evil, and that the use of violence against it may still corrode the political world we inhabit.
The more a single country — and a single man — takes upon itself the role of executioner, the more it centralizes power in its own hands. It shows the world what it can do. It proves its reach. Yet that very centralization can erode the broader foundations of its power. Allies become spectators rather than partners. Institutions become instruments rather than arenas of shared judgment. Citizens become subjects, and collective power narrows from active consent to unilateral capacity.
The more military power must perform itself, the more it depends on immediate confirmation. If the adversary collapses, the power is validated. If it absorbs the blow, adapts, or retaliates, the display reveals limits. Power that fails to compel does not remain neutral; it diminishes.
As I prepare to return this week to Hannah Arendt’s On Violence in the Hannah Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group, I am struck by how contemporary her distinction is between power and violence. She insists that power and violence are not the same thing. Violence can destroy power, but it cannot create it. Power arises when people act together in a shared political world. It depends on legitimacy, consent, and plurality. Violence is instrumental; it appears when power is in jeopardy. Violence can be useful; the danger is that using power leads not to more power but to more violence.
Arendt also warned that the centralization of power drains its sources. When everything flows from a single will, the system may look strong, but it becomes brittle. Remove the center, and nothing holds. A politics that equates greatness with decisive blows risks confusing the capacity to strike with the capacity to build a world others accept as legitimate.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that “the fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman’s prudence.” It is a line worth remembering in moments of decisive action. Every strike produces consequences beyond its design. Allies recalibrate. Adversaries adapt. Markets tremble. Regional actors test the edges. What appears as clarity at the moment of impact often dissolves into complexity the next morning.
President Trump’s temptation to dramatize his power doesn’t just play out on foreign soil; it has a constitutional dimension that should alarm anyone committed to the republic. The President has repeatedly shown contempt for the legal processes designed to check executive authority — whether that’s taxing without Congress, spending without appropriation, or wielding emergency powers without clear justification. Now that pattern has extended to war. In the latest strikes against Iran, the United States launched major military action without congressional authorization — a move lawmakers from both parties condemned as a violation of the Constitution’s allocation of war powers to Congress.
This is more than a legal quibble. The Framers gave the power to declare war to Congress precisely because horizontal diffusion of power slows the rush to violence. They did not want a King. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 69, a king can declare war and raise armies. The Constitution intentionally separates those powers. The President is commander-in-chief of forces that Congress creates and funds. Congress declares war. So operational command is executive; the decision to initiate war is legislative. The underlying theme in 69 is separation through limitation. Executive power exists, but it is fenced in. It is not sovereign power.
A republic, unlike a European nation-state or an empire, is designed to make war difficult. That friction is not incidental; it is constitutional ballast. When the executive repeatedly bypasses Congress — conducting strikes in Venezuela and now a major assault on Iran without the constitutional authority of a declaration of war — that diffusion erodes. It centralizes decision-making in the presidency, shrinking the space of public judgment and shrinking the role of the legislature. Over time, this pattern inexorably transforms the republic into something more like an imperial nation-state: swift to act unilaterally, slow or unwilling to justify itself collectively.
The danger in Trump’s need to demonstrate his power is not simply that brutal regimes are being confronted with a confidence that will inevitably confront the fecundity of the unexpected. The danger is that the republic forfeits its own defensive architecture against executive aggrandizement. What begins as a posture of strength abroad can become a structural weakness at home.
If we move from republic to imperial nation-state — if foreign interventions become demonstrations of executive capacity rather than acts of collective authorization — we may indeed show our strength. But we also risk draining the deeper reservoirs of collective power from which American power has long flowed.
Arendt understood this. Power, she argued, arises when people act together. It rests on shared judgment, on plurality, on institutions that channel consent. Violence can destroy enemies. It cannot generate the durable authority that sustains a political world.
An empire can command. A republic persuades. An empire centralizes. A republic distributes power with confidence. The more we lean into unilateral, executive demonstrations abroad, the more we subtly reshape ourselves at home. Republics can be powerful, but they must exercise dispersed power with judgment and confidence rather than bombast.
But something else must be said plainly. The liberal world order is over. Whatever one thought of it — admired it, criticized it, resented it — it has been shattered. Just as the Second World War and the Holocaust shattered Europe’s inherited traditions and forced a reckoning with the collapse of an entire political world, so too the rise of leaders who openly scorn liberal norms — Trump, Putin, Xi, Khamenei, Orbán, Erdoğan — has fractured the post-1945 order beyond repair.
Many feel nostalgia for that world. But nostalgia is not politics. The question is not how to restore what has broken. The question is how to build anew.
The task before us is both to “say what is” and to imagine what kind of future world we might want to share. The world is the space between us — the web of laws, institutions, and mutual recognition that makes politics possible. But rebuilding our world requires a revolutionary task, what Arendt calls the act of foundation.
Such a revolutionary task requires enlarged thinking, imaginative judgment, and great action. There is a chance that Trump’s gamble will lead to a revolutionary uprising in Iran, peace in the Middle East, and a Gazan renaissance. But there is a greater chance it will lead to years of chaos. Boldness has its place. But if we wish to maintain our freedoms and prevent the rise of tyrants and totalitarians, we must insist that power remain accountable to the people even in moments of emergency. A republic does not prove its greatness by how quickly it can strike. It proves it by whether it can preserve and renew the world in which freedom appears.
If the liberal order is broken, then the task before us is not to reenact old performances of strength. It is to think again — clearly, courageously — about what kind of political world we wish to inhabit and what forms of power can sustain it.
That work will not come out of theories but it will also not drop from bombs. It will emerge more slowly from people talking and acting together. A new world emerges from the bottom up, from experiences in which the people protest, organize, and insist on living in a world that respects them as empowered actors while also protecting their rights.
We must not be starry-eyed idealists. In this new world, we must admit that military power matters. Militaries will have to act decisively. In an age of total war and inhuman weapons, in which drones and artificial intelligence challenge human judgment and accountability, wars and governance will likely become less democratic and more automated.
But that does not mean we have to sacrifice the spirit of self-government and the spirit of democratic organization. We can develop new institutions of citizen engagement from citizens’ assemblies to enriched and empowered local governance. This is a time for experimentation. The world is changing. We need to welcome the change, as dangerous as that is, and have the courage to build new institutions and new centers of power on both local and national levels.
Arendt’s point is not simply that violence destroys power. It is that violence, when it substitutes for power, generates a cycle of its own. Force that does not rest on legitimacy must be repeated. Repetition demands escalation. Escalation compresses judgment and narrows consent. What begins as decisive action becomes dependency on further action. Violence fills the space where power has withered.
Power that grows out of the barrel of the gun, while tempting, is fleeting. Real power comes from the active and enthusiastic consent and participation of the people. That is the only kind of power that endures.
