To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme reassuringly “conventional,” joking that Trump’s base might start to worry that he had been “kidnapped by the black-helicopter crowd.”
It was hard to miss Trump’s emphasis: He used the word “sovereignty” more than 20 times in the course of his speech. America’s international success, he argued, “depends on a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty, to promote security, prosperity, and peace for themselves and for the world.” It was the duty, he said, of states to “respect the rights of every other sovereign nation.”
Alas, such intro-to-international-relations “realism” is not a very useful guide to politics and power, especially to American politics and power, and particularly if the goal is to guarantee a global liberal order. Since the end of World War II, the United States has more or less demanded that its allies—beginning with the resurrected Germany and Japan—renounce the principal measure of sovereignty, that is, national self-defense. Moreover, Americans have long subordinated the claims of sovereignty to the higher principle of legitimacy. Indeed, for Americans, while sovereignty of course matters, legitimacy trumps sovereignty.
Consider the position of the American Founders. They did not deny that George III was their legal sovereign. Instead, in an echo of their predecessors who deposed the Stuart monarchs in the 17th century, the revolutionary generation declared that their sovereign had “unkinged” himself by his failure to secure their natural political rights. Faced with a despotic sovereign, it was “the Right of the People to alter or abolish” even a longstanding, habitual, and otherwise profitable order and to “institute new Government, laying its foundations” upon the principles of justice.
Indeed, from King George to Saddam Hussein, we have never been especially respectful of autocrats who stand on sovereignty. We have been cautious of their power but unwilling to grant them legitimacy on that basis alone. Conversely, as our own power has grown, we have based our assertions of power and interest first and foremost on their underlying justice.
This, in turn, has been a real source of American power, as any truly realistic appraisal of international politics should comprehend. On a fundamental level, countries like Japan and Germany can accept the loss of sovereignty—of being historically “abnormal” nations—not simply because they can be free riders on U.S. military might but because they believe their liberties will also be better protected. So a more principled strategy is also a more prudent and more effective strategy.
At best, an international system premised simply upon state sovereignty might look like post-Napoleonic Europe. Regional great powers—China, Russia, Iran in its dreams, the nations that today are most assertive of their sovereignty—might establish spheres of influence like the Holy Alliance of czars, kings, and emperors in the mid-19th century. For a time, they could coexist with a more liberal order elsewhere, occasionally partitioning Poland or meddling in the Middle East, but avoiding larger conflicts. Trade might well prosper, giving a gloss of international “interdependence” that would render war an irrational course.
But such a balance of liberal and illiberal powers would prove unstable. State sovereignty is both an expression of national honor and a sign of national fear and, absent a larger purpose to international life, a time-tested recipe for conflict, as historians since Thucydides have observed.
“Sovereignty” is also a term with an unhappy history here at home. Before Trump perhaps the most famous American politician to invoke “sovereignty” was Stephen A. Douglas, who preached “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the question of whether slavery should be permitted to spread westward into territories of the United States. The people of each territory should decide for themselves, argued Douglas, whether to adopt the “peculiar institution” of the South.
Standing in opposition was Abraham Lincoln, who held that an individual’s right to liberty preceded any collective right to sovereignty; this was at the heart of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. When Douglas accused Lincoln of saying that the people of Nebraska weren’t good enough to govern themselves, Lincoln replied, “What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”
Of course, there is a world of difference between matters foreign and domestic. But the limitations of “sovereignty” are evident in each sphere. There is not a different standard for what we deem legitimate government for ourselves and legitimate for others. And while politics demands practical statesmanship and compromise, a worthy definition of justice can’t mean one thing in one place and something quite separate in another.
The antidote to an overemphasis on sovereignty is not, of course, Obama-style “globalism.” International law without a means of enforcement is vanity. In this regard, Trump’s critique of the United Nations was correctly harsh.
A better alternative—and the venerable American alternative—is what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison came to call, in their correspondence, an “empire for liberty.” By that they meant a traditional and calculating pursuit of power, but employed in and legitimated by the pursuit of human liberty. They and the Founders more generally had to implement the principles of the Declaration through the compromised practicalities of the Constitution. Jefferson, Madison, and their contemporaries, though men of the Enlightenment, were in no way Kantian utopians. But facing a Hobbesian world of absolute rulers, the Founders understood the “force multiplier” effect of liberty in helping their republican empire to survive, to thrive—and to grow.
That Donald Trump and the Washington establishment unite in exalting state sovereignty suggests how far we have strayed from our natural and desirable national course. For the celebration of sovereignty will not make America great again; it will instead make America less exceptional, no greater than any other state.
