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I'm not defending it; I'm observing that invoking and rejecting it simultaneously doesn't work. If the Trump admin. wants to say "we can do what we want because we are powerful", they can't also appeal to international principles like freedom of navigation to demand other help them out.
Or rather, they can do that in the sense that you can say whatever you want, but it's not going to go anywhere (as we can see).
No. The critique is that they believe 'strength' obliges others to defer to them. This belief, in turn, is undergirded by a kind of brutish naivete about the nature of power. This leads them to make stupid decisions.
Any how do you gather the force to uphold the higher principles? Even the cruelest totalitarian relies upon their subjects accepting their rule. This is why I said that 'might makes right' (or however you care to formulate the idea that brute force trumps all) is a fatuous truism that obscures the substantive truth of the matter, which is that exercising power requires you to at the very least convince the people who do the actual exercising of your authority.
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