"If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful. You are harmless"

Unless you can stand on equal field - either by alliance, or by your own power - you aren't a negotiating partner, and i say that as European.

this is exactly the value that caused so much war and death all over the world, for decades and thousands of years. still, even in 2025, it's being followed. are we doomed, chat?

Eg. birds abandoning rather than defending a perch when another approaches.

We're typically not happy to do that, though you can see it happening in some parts of the world right now.

Some kind of enlightened state where violent competition for resources (incl. status & power) no longer makes sense is imaginable, but seems a long way off.

The idea though is that if everyone suddenly disarmed overnight it would be so highly advantageous to a deviant aggressor that one would assuredly emerge.

yes.

i would also recommend The Prince as light reading to better understand how the world works.

Those with the biggest economies and/or most guns has changed a few times but the behaviours haven't and probably never will.

And the extent of which you can do global enforcement (which is often biased and selective) is limited by the reach of your economic and military power.

Which is why the US outspends the rest of the world military powers combined and how the US and their troops have waged ilegal wars and committed numerous crimes abroad and gotten away with it despite pieces of papers saying what they're doing is bad, but their reaction was always "what are you gonna do about it?".

See how many atrocities have happened under the watch of the UN. Laws aren't real, it's the enforcement that is real. Which is why the bullies get to define the laws that everyone else has to follow because they have the monopoly on enforcement.

Well, yes. This is why people have been paying a lot of attention to what exactly "rule of law" means in the US, and what was just norms that can be discarded.

Where it was used in a rhetorical tantrum throwing response to their power refuse to do the impossible like make an encryption backdoor 'only for good guys' and have the sheer temerity to stand against arbitrary exercises of authority by using the courts to check them only to their actual power.

If actual 'more powerful than the states' occurs they have nobody to blame but themselves for crying wolf.