Sovereignty Is Not a Religion

The principle that states should not attack one another to seize land or assets is one of the great moral achievements of modern history. After centuries of conquest, plunder, and empire, the idea that borders should not be changed by force represents real progress. It protects small countries from predation, limits imperial ambition, and affirms the right of peoples to govern themselves.

But principles are means, not ends. When they are treated as sacred commandments rather than practical tools, they can become obstacles to survival rather than safeguards of justice.

Only physics has absolutes. Most of life is engineering—and engineering requires cost, quality, and schedule to be taken into account. What does it cost to maintain the fiction of sovereignty when a state has failed? What is the quality of life for those trapped inside, and for the neighbors absorbing the consequences? How long must the schedule run before we admit the approach isn’t working?

A Note on Timing

Let me be direct: yes, I’m writing this while an American president openly threatens to take Greenland by force. Yesterday, Trump declared that “anything less” than US control is “unacceptable.” European NATO allies are deploying troops to Greenland in response—Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland—a show of solidarity against a fellow NATO member. The Danish foreign minister emerged from White House talks saying the president has “this wish of conquering over Greenland.”

This is not an argument for that. Unilateral annexation by a great power is precisely the kind of sovereignty violation the postwar order was designed to prevent, and rightly so. But the fact that Trump’s approach is wrong doesn’t mean the underlying questions are illegitimate. The liberal reflex to treat any questioning of sovereignty as Trumpian imperialism-in-disguise is itself a failure of serious thought.

The world that gave rise to absolute sovereignty no longer exists.

Greenland

Roughly 56,000 people exercise effective control—via self-rule within the Kingdom of Denmark—over one of the largest landmasses on Earth, including ice sheets whose stability directly affects global sea levels, Arctic climate systems, shipping routes, and access to critical minerals. That arrangement exists not because it is morally optimal, but because borders and authority were frozen by historical accident.

Population size does not determine moral worth, and self-determination matters. But it is not obvious why historical continuity alone should confer unilateral authority over assets and systems that affect billions of people who have no voice in their governance. Sovereignty distributes responsibility according to history, not according to impact, capability, or justice.

Venezuela

Venezuela illustrates a different failure mode: sovereignty without competence. For over a quarter century—across multiple US administrations, through sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and endless multilateral hand-wringing—the world watched a country collapse. A state that cannot feed its people, cannot maintain basic infrastructure, cannot prevent the collapse of its oil industry despite the largest proven reserves on Earth—and has generated nearly eight million refugees who have destabilized the entire region. The Maduro regime invoked sovereignty as a shield against accountability, and the international community treated intervention as unthinkable regardless of consequences.

On January 3, the United States resolved that question unilaterally, launching airstrikes on Caracas and capturing Maduro from his compound. The operation was widely condemned as illegal under international law. But the condemnations ring hollow from an international community that spent decades watching Venezuela collapse while insisting that sovereignty made it someone else’s problem.

The principle designed to protect peoples from external domination had become a tool for protecting a regime from the consequences of its own catastrophic misrule. When the rules-based order refuses to act, eventually someone acts outside the rules.

Iran

Iran has exported instability across the region for forty-five years while demanding non-interference in its “internal affairs.” It funds Hamas, Hezbollah, and militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It pursues nuclear capabilities that threaten Europe and the Middle East. Its government brutalizes its own population.

This week, that population is rising. Protests have erupted across all thirty-one provinces, with millions in the streets. The regime’s response has been massacre—estimates range from 2,000 to 20,000 killed in less than two weeks, an internet blackout to hide the slaughter, live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators. If confirmed, these would be among the largest massacres in modern Iranian history.

And yet sovereignty discourse treats the regime’s survival as someone else’s problem. When a state’s actions routinely cross borders—through proxy wars, weapons proliferation, refugee flows, and regional destabilization—and when that same state massacres its own citizens by the thousands, the claim that outsiders have no standing to respond is not principled. It is incoherent.

Brazil and the Amazon

Consider Brazil and the Amazon. In legal terms, Brazil exercises sovereign authority over its territory. In physical terms, the Amazon is a planetary system that regulates rainfall, stores vast amounts of carbon, and sustains biodiversity critical to global ecological stability. If it is irreversibly degraded, the costs will be borne not only by Brazilians, but by billions of people worldwide—many of whom are poorer, more vulnerable, and entirely excluded from the decisions that shape their fate.

Sovereignty grants authority over territory, but it does not logically imply ownership of planetary life-support systems. No serious moral framework would assign exclusive, unlimited discretion over a shared ecological system simply because of historical borders.

Other examples of problem countries apply. Everyone knows the list.

When Patience Runs Out

The rules-based order prefers patience. Reform from within, diplomatic pressure, sanctions, multilateral consensus—these take time. But how much time? Several factors determine when patience becomes complicity:

Duration. Has this been going on for decades? Venezuela has been in collapse for over a quarter century, across five US presidents, none of whom found an answer. Iran has been exporting revolution for forty-five years. At what point does the international community admit that waiting for internal change is a fifty-year treadmill going nowhere?

Disruption. How much harm spills across borders? Refugees by the millions. Proxy wars in four countries. Regional economies destabilized. When “internal affairs” become everyone’s problem, the framing has already failed.

Disproportion. Does the situation defy common sense? Fifty-six thousand people exercising control over a landmass that affects global sea levels and Arctic shipping routes is not self-determination in any meaningful sense. It is historical accident frozen into permanent entitlement.

Environmental stakes. Some decisions are irreversible. A rainforest burned cannot be unburned. Ice sheets melted cannot be refrozen. When sovereignty protects the right to destroy shared planetary systems, the timeline for patience shrinks to zero.

Capacity for change. Can the country fix itself? Some failures stem from bad leaders who might be replaced. Others stem from structural conditions—borders that make no sense, institutions too hollowed to function, resource curses that corrupt everything they touch. When a state cannot fix itself, insisting on sovereignty is not respect. It is abandonment.

None of these factors alone justifies intervention. But when several align—decades of failure, massive cross-border harm, environmental irreversibility, and no plausible path to internal reform—the burden of proof shifts. The question becomes: what justifies continued inaction?

The Danger of Abuse—And the Greater Danger of Paralysis

The danger of abuse is real. History is full of examples where claims of moral necessity were used to justify domination, empire, and violence. Any move to constrain sovereignty must be multilateral, rule-based, and explicitly designed to limit the power of the strong as much as the weak.

But the danger of pretending that absolute sovereignty is benign is greater still. Treating sovereignty as inviolable, while treating the consequences as someone else’s problem, is a recipe for moral paralysis. The rules-based order gives people the excuse not to act and not to deal with the imperfection of the situation. That is just complicity dressed up as righteousness.

What This Requires

There is no perfect answer. But bad things have learned to adapt and flourish using the rules-based order as cover and justification. Serious dialog is needed here.