To many non-Americans, the United States looks over-legalized and under-regulated at the same time. It has a written Constitution older than most modern states, yet it often lacks explicit laws where Europeans expect them. Whole domains of political and legal life appear to rest on assumptions rather than rules. This is not an accident. For much of its history, the United States functioned through what can best be described as an honor system: an expectation that individuals and institutions would restrain themselves even when they had the power not to.
This honor system was never naïve idealism. It was a pragmatic form of governance. It reduced enforcement costs, stabilized expectations, and allowed a sprawling, diverse republic to function without omnipresent coercion. But honor systems are fragile. They depend on reciprocity. Once key actors demonstrate that restraint is optional, and profitable, the system does not gently bend. It snaps into something colder and more punitive.
Understanding this system, and its collapse, is essential for interpreting American politics today and for grasping why its internal crisis has global security consequences.
Honor at the Individual Level: Trust as a Social Technology
At the ground floor, the American honor system is easy to recognize. Unproctored exams. Self-reported income taxes. Jury duty enforced more by civic expectation than fear. Farm stands with a handwritten sign and a cash box. These arrangements assume that most people will comply most of the time, and that violators will be disciplined informally through shame, exclusion, or loss of reputation.
From a game-theory perspective, this works because social life is a repeated game. Cheating once may bring short-term gain, but it carries long-term costs. Trust, once lost, is expensive to rebuild. Honor becomes a coordination mechanism: I behave honestly because I expect you to do the same, and because I expect future interactions to matter.
This logic scales upward.
Political Norms: When Power Is Self-Restrained
At the political level, many of the most important American practices were never fully written into law. Candidates released tax returns. Presidents avoided overt conflicts of interest. Election losers conceded. The Department of Justice maintained distance from partisan direction. Congress followed procedural norms even when obstruction or abuse was technically possible.
These were not legal inevitabilities. They were norms, sustained by an elite consensus that certain actions, though permissible, would damage the system itself. Political power was real, but its exercise was bounded by shared expectations of honor.
This arrangement resembles a repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Cooperation—restraint—was rational because defection carried reputational costs and threatened future legitimacy. The system assumed that today’s winners would be tomorrow’s losers, and that everyone had an interest in preserving the rules of the game.
Precedent as Honor: Why Courts “Make Law” in the United States
Nowhere does this logic confuse non-Americans more than in constitutional law.
In most European systems, law is codified. Rights exist because legislatures enact statutes. Courts apply those statutes. Stability comes from text. In the United States, stability historically came from precedent. When the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, that interpretation becomes binding law across the country.
A landmark case like Roe v. Wade did not simply resolve a dispute. It established a constitutional understanding that shaped legislation, medical practice, and personal lives for decades. This durability rested on the doctrine of stare decisis: the idea that courts should stand by what has been decided.
But stare decisis is not enforced by any higher authority. No one can punish the Supreme Court for reversing itself. Its power lies entirely in self-restraint. Precedent endures because judges historically believed that overturning settled law carried institutional and moral costs that outweighed ideological satisfaction.
This, too, was an honor system.
When Roe was overturned in 2022 by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the shock in abroad was not just about abortion. It was about legal stability. From a civil-law perspective, the idea that a foundational right could evaporate without legislative repeal looks like chaos.
From within the American system, the deeper rupture was the loss of confidence that precedent itself constrains power. Once a court signals that long-standing interpretations can be discarded simply because personnel changed, precedent ceases to function as law and becomes conditional on ideology. The honor norm—we do not do this lightly—collapsed.
Trump and the Demonstration Effect
A similar collapse occurred in politics with the rise of Donald Trump.
Trump violated norms and rejected the idea that unwritten rules mattered at all. He treated politics as a one-shot game rather than a repeated one. Concessions were unnecessary. Conflicts of interest were irrelevant. Shame had no bite. What mattered was winning now.
The critical point lies in the demonstration effect rather than in moral outrage. Once a high-status actor shows that defection carries no decisive penalty, others update their strategies. Restraint starts to look like weakness. Norm compliance becomes irrational if it is not reciprocated.
Game theory predicts what followed: escalation, preemption, and institutional hardening. When trust disappears, actors stop relying on norms and start relying on enforcement. Courts are asked to do what shame once did. Laws multiply because self-restraint evaporates. Politics becomes procedural warfare.
The honor system does not vanish. It is replaced.
From Honor to Hard-Coding, and Evasion
When an honor-based system breaks down, societies often attempt to compensate by formalizing behavior through rules, procedures, and legal constraints. What was once informal becomes litigated. What was once assumed becomes contested. To outside observers, this can make the United States appear both normless and hyper-legalistic at the same time.
But under Trump, this shift does not produce order. Rules are invoked selectively and ignored when inconvenient. Law becomes a weapon rather than a restraint. As trust collapses, transaction costs rise, decision-making slows, and adversarial behavior becomes rational. Cooperation stops being rewarded because restraint is no longer reciprocal. The system does not move cleanly from honor to regulation; it stalls in a volatile space where neither norms nor rules reliably bind power.
What remains uncertain is what follows. Once Trump is gone, will Americans attempt to rebuild an honor-based equilibrium, restoring norms through renewed self-restraint? Or will the lesson drawn be that trust itself is too risky, leading to an impulse to formalize everything in an effort to prevent another shock? Once bitten, twice shy. Whether the United States relearns restraint or locks itself into brittle rule-making may shape its democratic future and its credibility in an international system that still depends, uneasily, on trust.
Why This Is a Global Security Problem
This is not a purely domestic story.
International order itself relies on a fragile honor system. Treaties are not self-enforcing. Deterrence stability depends on both capability and restraint. Arms control regimes assume that states will not exploit every loophole simply because they can. Diplomatic credibility rests on consistency over time.
When the United States demonstrates that its own institutions no longer bind themselves to precedent or norms, the signal travels. Allies recalibrate trust. Adversaries probe boundaries. If constitutional commitments are contingent, why assume treaty commitments are sacred? If restraint collapses at home, why expect it abroad?
This is especially dangerous in domains like nuclear deterrence, cyber operations, and emerging technologies, where escalation risks are high and rules are thin. In these contexts, honor functions as a stabilizing force that prevents catastrophe rather than as mere sentimentality.
Conclusion: The Cost of Discovering That Trust Was Doing the Work
The American honor system was never perfect. It excluded many. It relied on unequal access to reputation and power. But it performed real labor. It allowed a powerful state to restrain itself, and a complex society to function without constant coercion.
What we are witnessing now reflects the aftershock of discovering how deeply the system depended on voluntary restraint, and how little redundancy remained once that restraint failed.
For non-Americans, the lesson is not that the U.S. system is irrational. It is that honor systems scale only as long as participants believe they are mutual. Once defection proves profitable, the system adapts in ways that are harsher, more rigid, and more dangerous.
Honor, once revealed as optional, stops coordinating behavior. And rebuilding it, unlike rewriting a law, is the hardest task of all.