By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

I spent one college semester in Europe where I helped some prestigious Italian professor write an article for some prestigious journal. His graduate students had interviewed dozens of diplomats on the value of international law, he had stacks of transcripts to study, and they were all in English so I was useful. I summarized a sample for him and their import was clear. Diplomats from small and weak countries adored international law and held every nation to be bound by its dictates. Diplomats from large and powerful countries also liked international law, but mainly as an anodyne construct that came in handy to give their decision-making a veneer of respectability after the fact.

Cynical stuff, but unsurprising. It’s the daily experience of any practicing bureaucrat, defense lawyer, or cop: the higher you climb the chain of command, the more politics gets in the way. But the surprise came when I told my professor what his transcripts said. He told me that was not acceptable. He would not write his article on that basis. He made his living, after all, by teaching international law.

I don’t know what he did with those interviews. He probably buried them. I returned home before it got resolved. He gave me a lousy grade.

Nor did I ever understand his high dudgeon. To the extent international law exists as a system, it comes from the United Nations and its progeny. Yet the UN was crippled at birth when the Soviets and the Americans ceased being allies and the Security Council became a debating chamber; it was crippled again when the corrupt ex-colonies of the old Western powers all became members, making the General Assembly into a Punch and Judy show; now it is being crippled yet more by China’s rise and the success of capitalistic autocracy. There has never been a global standard for civil rights. There has never been a global belief in democracy. There has never been any global foundation at all for what we know and feel as law, which is the consent of the governed and agreement on values.

Our president, who has been shredding the world’s status quo lately, is therefore not completely blameworthy for snubbing international institutions in the process. Taking Venezuela for example, that country has spewed poison across South America for decades. Its refugees have flooded its neighbors. Its own citizens have suffered grinding poverty and the loss of their freedoms. It has been nothing less than a cancer at the heart of our western hemisphere. The global system has watched this happen. Why not do something; why not do anything. Ditto for Iran. Ditto for Hamas.

As always, Trump’s failure is not a failure of ambition but a failure of vision and leadership. His mistake lies not in choosing to act, but in neglecting to build a new and viable system to replace what we have. He could have lined up our allies and presented Venezuela with a united front; he could have used all America’s strength to do so. He could be doing the same with Colombia’s cartels; he could be doing the same with Mexico’s. He could be leading the world against selfish thugs. He might find a ready global audience for his goals. He might find allies in deed as well as word. He might find himself the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, if that empty honor matters so much to him.

Instead he finds himself a pariah. Our allies watch our actions with horror.

Here is another story to consider. A farmer’s family on the frontier is hewing out a tough living when a dusty cowboy appears and asks for work. They learn he used to be a gunman. He tells them he has left his past behind. This family and its whole community are soon menaced by cattlemen who want their land. Women, children, schools, churches; the law is too weak to protect them. The former gunman straps on his gun and kills his enemies one last time. Then, having both saved the society he hoped to make his own and having proven himself good for nothing but violence, he leaves for the wild again. Society advances on the backs of outlaws. That’s the tale of Shane, the purest western movie ever made. Every western is a variation on that theme.

Trump sees himself as that cowboy. Yet not only did that hero have a future in mind for those he loved. Every western is also a variation on an older theme still. By the rules of ancient tragedy, the scourge of the gods must himself be scourged.

I suppose we can talk about Greenland now.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.