The law of the stronger: God first!
By Roberto de Mattei | 5 March 2025
While the 266th successor of Peter is fighting against death in a room of the Gemelli Hospital, two of the powerful of the earth, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, are negotiating the future of Ukraine and Europe. The apparent dialogue between the president of the United States and the head of the Russian Federation is in reality a showdown. The American president’s goal is to establish a preferential axis with Russia, in order to separate it from China, which is the main adversary of the United States on the global scale. Putin’s strategic goal is, conversely, to undermine the transatlantic alliance, in order to separate Europe from the United States and weaken the West. Both leaders are convinced of the imperial mission of their nations. In his inaugural address at the White House on 20 January 2025, Trump expressed the idea of the “manifest destiny” of the United States in the world in the formula “America First”.
Putin, for his part, has always manifested the will to bring Russia back to the borders and spheres of influence of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of which he has always considered “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.
The difference between the two visions does not lie only in the fact that Trump’s strategy on Ukraine was developed by his advisers in recent weeks, while Putin’s expresses the coherence of one who has led the Russian Federation for twenty-five years. The main asymmetry is that Trump’s plan, marked by a crude realism, interprets politics as a power game, variable according to positioning on the chessboard of world domination. Ukraine, in this perspective, can become a bargaining chip, subjected to the interests of the great powers.
Putin instead has a certain philosophy of history, outlined in his speech of 12 July 2021 at the Valdai Club and in numerous other documents. Ukraine, in his geo-philosophical vision, is destined to be absorbed in territory, language, culture and religious faith by a Russia resurgent not only in its ancient borders but above all in its new imperial mission against a West that is in its death throes.
Putin reasons in terms of a universal clash of civilisations, Trump in terms of contingent political and economic interests. But both base themselves on a lie. Putin bases his narrative on a falsification that denies the true origins of Kyiv, which, throughout history, belonged to the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages and not to the Muscovite East. Trump wants to justify his political pivot by denying the truth of Russian aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.
European leaders are dismayed: the hypocrisy of the democracies on human rights and the self-determination of peoples is once again falling to pieces. Today, from Putin to Trump, but also from Xi Jinping to Erdogan, there is only that “law of the stronger” which was formulated by the Athenian historian Thucydides. In the fifth book of his History of the Peloponnesian War, dedicated to the events of the long conflict that pitted Sparta against Athens at the end of the fifth century, Thucydides recounts the dialogue between the Athenian ambassadors and those of the small island of Melos, hemmed in by the siege of the imposing Athenian fleet. The inhabitants of Melos refused Athens’s dominion and were ruthlessly wiped out. So after having affirmed that the law applies only between those who are in a condition of equal strength, Thucydides affirms the existence of a law of nature, also adopted by the gods, according to which the stronger rightfully subdues the weaker.
There is a truth in Thucydides’s statement. The spectacle of nature always displays for us the prevalence of force. But assuming that the law of the stronger prevails in nature, some questions arise: What does force consist of? And is force truly always inseparable from justice? The only true answer to these questions comes from the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophia perennis and above all from the teaching of the Catholic Church, which explains how the primacy that rational man attributes to truth and justice is not an illusory abstraction. Man in fact has a supernatural life, which has its beginning in grace, a reality that transcends and surpasses all of nature and ushers us into the sphere of the divine and the uncreated. This is why St Thomas was able to write that the smallest degree of participation in sanctifying grace, considered in just one individual, is superior to the natural good of the whole universe (Summa Theologiae, I-II, 113, 9 ad 2).
One who reads human events in the light of material force alone reasons like Stalin, who at Yalta, when someone pointed out to him the demands of Pius XII on the configuration of Europe, asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?”. But in 1953, at the announcement of the Soviet leader’s death, Pius XII is said to have remarked to a confidant, “Now Stalin will see how many divisions we have up there!”
The last word always belongs to God, at whose tribunal every man, even a pope, presents himself. This is the reason why Pope Francis, the Vicar of Christ, is today the object of prayers on the part of Catholics all over the world. What matters more is not the health of his body, but that of his soul, which is facing the threshold of eternity. The prayers of Catholics at this time also concern the future of the Church, on which the future of world society depends, precisely because of the preeminence of the spiritual order over the natural.
The primacy of spirit over matter tells us that there is no peace possible without respect for the principles of natural and divine law, which cannot be violated with impunity. “We know in fact,” Pius XII warned, “that what is done without divine propitiation is lacking and sterile, according to the decree of the psalmist: ‘Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it’” (Optatissima pax, 18 December 1947).
According to Scripture, he who listens to the voice of Wisdom “shall judge nations” (Sir 4:16). And the voice of Wisdom tells us that the true and only force that moves the universe is not that of economies, militaries or energy industries, but the spiritual. He who draws this force from God, creator and lord of Heaven and earth, is afraid of nothing. For this reason, a true Catholic today does not allow himself to be seduced by any political leader or ideology, but seeks, in his words and deeds, fidelity to the Gospel and its law. His watchword is God first! God alone!