Violence as Policy
How the United States Is Drawing Blood and Raising the Stakes at Home and Abroad
We are one week into the new year, and it is already clear that things are not trending upward.
In just the short span of days, the United States has demonstrated a willingness to deploy force as a primary instrument of governance, abroad and at home. In Venezuela, U.S. operatives successfully extracted the sitting president from the heart of his own capital in a black-bag operation that would have once been considered unthinkable outside of open war. In Minneapolis, a woman named Renee Good was shot and killed during an ICE operation while attempting to disengage from a threatening federal encounter, becoming yet another civilian casualty in a growing pattern of domestic enforcement violence.
Violence Is a Choice, Not an Inevitability
These events will be debated on legal grounds, and rightly so. Others are better positioned to parse statutory authority, international law and procedural failures. What cannot be ignored, however, is the more fundamental truth beneath both incidents: violence is being used as policy. And policy, by definition, is a choice. Which means other choices could have been made and still can be.
Violence is not merely an outcome. It is a signal. It communicates priorities, values, and thresholds. When a government chooses force early, often, or visibly, it sends a message not just to its adversaries, but to its own people and to the world. That message is not strength. It is impatience. It is fragility masquerading as resolve.
Moral Injury – Courtesy of the State
The psychological consequences are immediate and corrosive. Every contested, ambiguous, or disproportionate act of state violence inflicts moral injury on the population. Citizens are forced to reconcile the ideals they are told to believe in with the reality unfolding before them. Trust erodes. Cynicism grows. People disengage or radicalize, convinced that the system no longer operates on shared rules or mutual restraint.
Domestically, this is how legitimacy dies. Not all at once, but through repetition. Each incident becomes another data point in a growing pattern. Enforcement without accountability, power without humility, authority without consent. Fear replaces confidence. Outrage replaces civic faith. Communities stop seeing the state as a protector and begin to experience it as an occupying force. Especially when violence is deployed against citizens under the banner of administrative necessity.
Internationally, the consequences are no less severe. The violation of another nation’s sovereignty, regardless of how objectionable its leadership may be, creates precedents that do not remain neatly contained. Norms exist for more than conformity. They exist because the cost of breaking them is understood to be destabilizing. When the most powerful nation on Earth demonstrates that borders, sovereignty, and restraint are optional, it invites others to follow suit.
A Punch-Drunk World
This is how global order frays. Allies grow uneasy. Rivals grow emboldened. Neutral nations hedge and arm themselves. The world becomes louder, more suspicious, and more brittle. Each unilateral act raises the baseline of acceptable aggression, edging everyone closer to miscalculation and escalation. Violence used casually today becomes catastrophe tomorrow.
Ther is also a strategic blindness at work. Force does not resolve underlying conditions. It suppresses them temporarily while making them more volatile. Heavy-handed domestic enforcement creates exactly the radicalization it proclaims to rail against in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Aggressive foreign interventions produce resentment, martyrdom narratives, and long-term instability that outlast any short-term victory. Violence is a multiplier of resistance more than control.
This is where Stewardship draws a hard line.
The Stewardship of Force
Stewardship does not deny the necessity of force. It rejects the casualization of it. Violence is inherently destructive, difficult to reverse, and morally costly. It must be treated with gravity, restraint, and humility, reserved for defense against clear harm and malice – Not as a shortcut for governance or a substitute for competence.
A stewarding state understands that authority is not enforced at gunpoint. It is cultivated through legitimacy. Long-term authority comes from predictability, fairness, and restraint. Short-term authoritarianism sacrifices that future for the illusion of control in the present.
The principle applies directly to immigration. If a nation does not want mass migration, the solution is not to terrorize migrants or brutalize citizens in the process. The solution is to make staying home more viable. To invest in international partnerships, economic development, and systems that people can work within for mutual benefit. Open borders carry real risks. But mass deportation campaigns and lethal enforcement are catastrophes, morally and strategically.
The Choice
Violence against one’s own citizens is not merely a policy failure. For a political philosophy that places the good of the people at the center of legitimacy, it approaches the deepest meaning of treason: the state turning its power inward against those it exists to serve.
The same is true abroad. Leadership is not demonstrated by domination, but by example. A nation confident in its values does not need to constantly prove its strength through coercion. It speaks softly and carries a big stick.
We are only entering the second year of this administration, and already the damage is undeniable. Socially, psychologically, and globally. There will be immense work required to walk back the erosion of trust, the normalization of violence, and the precedents being set.
The choice remains. Violence can continue to be policy, or it can return to what it should be: a last resort, wielded sparingly, in defense of the people.
Stewardship insists on the latter.