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Notes -
Natural law.
Your country is not founded on the sole primacy of might. You'd have to be fine with slavery if it was.
But you can't fight for self determination only when convenient. Lest you tarnish the political formula into mere power.
And at that point, yeah anyone's entirely justified in opposing you to the death so long as they win. Not a position anyone reasonable wants to be in.
Natural law only applies to men of honour who will kill for that honour and glory.
Hobbes, locke, and the founding fathers assumed they lived in a world where men would look a man in the eye and murder him rituallistically as his friends watched, because the man had insulted him, and that that man would sooner stare down a pistol and "Recieve fire" than reveal himself a coward.
Unless you're willing to die and kill for your personal pride and pride alone you are not a free man with natural rights but a slave.
We are doomed to be slowly conquered by the cartels, they will slowly take over and slaughter all who oppose them and we'll deserve it and the gods will howl in rage that they show us any mercy.
Much as this could be brought up and debated in other contexts, is there any other American foe that is more worthy of being called men of honor in this sense than the Confederacy? But let's not take easy asides, your real objection to what I'm saying is that you think power is the thing-in-itself and the fictions I'm talking about have no reality except as to describe the relationships between the weak and the strong.
I disagree because I think there is such a thing as magic. The sentimentality that binds people into being a nation and not just a warband is a spell that has to be taken into account. Mere brutes are not lasting rulers. Women lord it over men that could easily overpower them. The story people tell about what they're doing, though it cannot replace the reality of the deed, is still very important.
And though as you justly point out, the higher levels of civilization Hobbes calls out for are only possible if we retain the ability to do violence. These higher levels are still real, desirable, meaningful and -- insofar as the Enlightenment is wrong about there ever being a state of nature -- natural.
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The founding of the country was a long time ago, and the current powers on the Left consider the founders to be irredeemably evil racists, whose legacy should be wiped out. So I don't see how you can expect them to operate within the same ethical framework as the Founders did. In fact, we know they aren't - a lot of heinous crimes are easily justified by the Left as part of "decolonization" and "resistance"- why you expect they would make any exceptions for their ideological enemies? You can consult your modern history textbooks to see what the Left does to their ideological enemies when they get to power. None of the dead old white patriarchal male chauvinist pigs and none of the old parchments would stop them from doing the same. They openly and explicitly rejected this framework already.
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