Everything we do, both personal and political, is based on our value system and understanding of how the world works. A headline example of values determining behaviour was given by Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, when explaining President Donald Trump’s abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro on CNN News. He said: “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Contrary to this view the evidence indicates that life in its myriad forms is based on cooperation rather than coercion. The important point is that how we see our place in the world determines how we act in it. If a view is erroneous then the consequences will, at the very least, be disruptive for those concerned.
The view of the world held by the leaders of the global political powers as in President Trump, President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin all subscribe to the nationalist belief of manifest destiny. The term was coined in the United States in 1845 by the prominent New York based newspaper editor John O’Sullivan who propagated the view that the westward expansion of the United States was divinely ordained. This in effect meant that those who endorsed the idea believed that the extermination of the Indigenous people and the theft of their land was endorsed by God.
The idea of Manifest Destiny combined with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which is a formal U.S. foreign policy declaration concerning spheres of political influence, governs the political sparring between the major powers today.
President Trump holds that the U.S. has a right to dominate the Western Hemisphere, thus his expressed intention to colonise Greenland. President Xi Jinping claims that China has a divine right, as ordained by history, to Taiwan and most of the South China Sea. For his part President Putin asserts that Russia has a right to Ukraine, vast areas of the Arctic seabed beyond its Exclusive Economic Zone in addition to other independent territories. Putin’s claim for having divine authority for his war on Ukraine is provided by the Russian Orthodox Church which describes it as a “holy war”.
The genocide in Palestine, another zone of terrible violence and suffering, also has its roots in the claim to divine authority as in the view of many in the Israeli government that Palestine was given to the Jewish people by God as stated in the Old Testament.
Reliance on the idea of Manifest Destiny, or claim to know the will of God, is not only used by political leaders and movements to acquire territory through violence, including intimidation and deception, but by corporations and ordinary people who have a strong acquisitive drive. The Christian source of divine authority in regards to treating the Earth as a collection of material resources available for the exclusive use of humankind rather than the community of life-forms we share the planet with is Genesis 1: 26. The text is sometimes called the Dominion Mandate and says:
“And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (King James Bible)
The Collins Etymological And Reference Dictionary (1953) states that dominion means supreme authority. To claim to have supreme authority over every species on Earth, many of which, as New Scientist, 17 January 2026, tells us have their own culture, values and emotions, is both hubris and self-aggrandisement. The Dominion Mandate, along with the belief that humans are created in the image of God, places us outside the natural order giving us licence to do with it as we wish without moral consequence.
The practical and moral consequences of this are evident in the steady rise in the average global temperature resulting in frequent extreme weather events that result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people every year and financial costs in hundreds of billions in hard currency. The Christian Aid report ‘Counting the cost 2025’ tells us that the estimated cost of climate breakdown in terms of physical damage between 1991 and 2020 is US$28 trillion.
Believing ourselves to be made in the image of God, superior to every species that has ever existed, has, in addition to climate breakdown, resulted in ecocide. Scientists estimate that between 20,000 and 2 million species went extinct during the 20th century due to human behaviour and according to the Royal Society a million species are currently threatened with extinction.
Given the extent of this annihilation of life one can only but conclude that to subscribe to the Dominion Mandate is to believe that God wants humans to eradicate all life on Earth and that we are His / Her/ Its executors somewhat akin to the Daleks in the 1960s BBC series Doctor Who whose mission was to exterminate all non-Dalek life.
The Daleks’ catchphrase. was “Exterminate” which they uttered as often in any given episode as our leading politicians utter the catchphrase ‘economic growth’ in any given speech or commentary with its rational to level mountains, build mega dams, change the course of rivers, mine the sea bed and eradicate all nonhuman life forms in order to realise economic goals. It would seem that we are so in love with ourselves we don’t want any other species to exist except those we have domesticated for our own use and gratification.
The healthy alternative to behaving like Daleks is to accept that we have no divine mandate and like every species are dependent upon the existence of a dynamic, evolving biosphere to survive and thrive. This means recognising the right of other species to exist through protecting their habitat from our avarice and sense of entitlement.