the empire speaks all the time about its 'principles' and its 'rules based order' in which the rules are made by the empire and subject to change at every moment, and they are, essentially saying: these are my principles and if you don't like them, we have others. the rules change depending on who and what is being presented to us. israel, syria, iraq, vietnam, afghanistan and so on. the empire has no introspection and it sometimes seems that most of its citizens don't either.