Uphold territorial integrity

An organizing principle for U.S. power in the 21st century.

“I am just a man/ Fighting other man/ For land, for land” — System of a Down

Venezuela just voted to claim two-thirds of the territory of neighboring Guyana. Guyana has vowed to defend itself. Brazil has moved troops to the border in case Venezuela tries to invade via Brazilian territory.

This is one more sign of the unraveling of Pax Americana; the U.S. is overburdened with numerous other conflicts, and doesn’t have much attention or power to spare. But it also demonstrates another crucial fact about geopolitics in the 21st century: The norm of territorial integrity is breaking down, and conquest is coming back into vogue.

The end of World War 2 was supposed to put a stop to the practice of seizing bits of territory from neighboring countries. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

This echoes the language in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in which he suggested that the League of Nations should provide “guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike.” And it hearkens back to the idea of Westphalian sovereignty, which was established gradually after Europe’s disastrous Thirty Years’ War.

Protecting the territorial integrity of smaller nations has been a major reason for U.S. wars since World War 2. A U.S.-led effort successfully defended South Korea from communist conquest in the 1950s, and a U.S.-led coalition repelled an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 90s. After World War 2, the USSR also largely adhered to the principle of territorial integrity; it invaded Afghanistan, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and interfered in many countries’ internal affairs, but rarely if ever tried to redraw borders.

Upholding nations’ “political independence” has proven to be a more ambiguous and difficult goal, and one that the U.S. and the USSR were far more willing to cast by the wayside. But U.S. support for territorial integrity has been pretty consistent — even when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 (completely unjustly, in my view), it left Iraq’s borders intact, and eventually withdrew its occupying force. The country’s territorial integrity was preserved.

Something changed in 2014. When Russia conquered Crimea by force, it violated the principle of territorial integrity that great powers had largely upheld since World War 2. Crimea was an internationally recognized part of the territory of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. Obviously Russia claimed that Crimea belonged to it by historical right — that Khruschev had made a mistake by giving Crimea to Ukraine — but when have conquerors ever failed to make such claims? Everyone who conquers their neighbors land says “This land rightfully belongs to us.” It’s conquest all the same.

Of course, that was just the beginning. Russia followed its conquest of Crimea with a full-blown invasion and attempted conquest of Ukraine. China, meanwhile, has made more incremental moves — slowly taking land in Bhutan, pressing India along their disputed border, seizing reefs from the Philippines, and claiming the South China Sea as its own. Smaller would-be conquerors are getting in on the game as well; Venezuela’s claim to Guyana is the most obvious example, but Azerbaijan also just claimed 8 Armenian villages. Meanwhile, a popular nationalist leader in Romania campaigns with maps of a “Greater Romania”.

Conquest has returned to our world.

As the U.S. finds itself dealing with a proliferating set of conflicts — Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, and potentially Taiwan — Americans are asking why. Although it’s clear that the two sides of Cold War 2 have very different values, the conflict itself is not really an ideological one; China doesn’t want to push its own system of government on the world, and the U.S. has become disillusioned with democracy promotion since Iraq. So what’s our goal? What are we using our power to accomplish?

I believe that territorial integrity should be the U.S.’ central guiding principle in Cold War 2. Avoiding a return to a jungle-like world of empires and conquerors is a top priority, both for human freedom and for the health of the global economy. Territorial integrity is sure to be a popular rallying cry as well, which will help the U.S. win the contest for allies. And since Russia and China have shown their willingness to grab land from smaller, weaker nations, upholding territorial integrity helps the U.S. draw a bright distinction between our values and theirs.

Of course, just saying “territorial integrity” doesn’t automatically tell us how to solve all international disputes. China believes Taiwan is a breakaway province, and that conquering it by force would be upholding territorial integrity rather than violating it. And in the Israel-Gaza conflict, the borders between Palestine and Israel are not well-defined. China’s disputed border with India is…well, disputed.

But the general idea of territorial integrity doesn’t depend on legalistic distinctions. The concept is very clear: Don’t invade and conquer places. Don’t send your troops into a region you don’t control, and say “We control this now.” Territorial integrity simply means a world where no one has to be afraid that an army is about to march into their home and subjugate them. In that framework, border disputes should be hashed out by negotiation and compromise, not by force of arms.

This would make for a much more peaceful, stable world than the one we had before the world wars — and the one that we now seem to be slipping back towards.

Alternatives to territorial integrity

There are two basic alternatives to the principle of territorial integrity: 1) liberal interventionism, and 2) indigenism. Both are deeply flawed concepts, but only the second one is going to present a real challenge to territorial integrity in the next decade or two.

Liberal interventionism basically says that if a sovereign state is doing something very bad within its own borders — a genocide or other mass atrocity — it’s acceptable for powerful countries to invade that state in order to put a stop to the atrocity. In principle this doesn’t have to violate territorial integrity — just because a country is invaded doesn’t mean it’s conquered. But if powerful countries can invade weaker countries to compel them to do things, they’re not exactly self-governing, are they?

The philosophical debate over liberal interventionism in the 90s and 00s was interesting, but it’s pretty much moot at this point. For one thing, the U.S. no longer has the power to play world police. And the Iraq War showcased a gaping flaw in liberal interventionism — the people in the powerful country who make the decision whether to invade may not actually be liberal at all. A hegemonic power that seeks to control smaller countries by force can usually drum up some sort of humanitarian-sounding justification for intervention. But in practice this quickly degenerates into the rule of the weak by the strong — the old law of the jungle.

Indigenism (sometimes called autochthonism) will be a much tougher challenge for the principle of territorial integrity. Indigenism is the idea that a group of people — a specific race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, etc. — collectively have permanent rights to a piece of land. Basically, it’s a claim of “We were here first, so this is our land.” Under this principle, it’s acceptable to violate territorial integrity if the group doing the violating is taking back what’s rightfully theirs — for example, many pro-Palestine activists believe that Palestinians are indigenous to the territory that currently makes up the state of Israel, and thus have a right to conquer Israel. And some Israeli ultranationalists believe that Jews are in fact indigenous, and thus have a right to expel Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

Indigenism is appealing for some of the same reasons that territorial integrity is appealing. The idea that the land’s rightful owners shouldn’t be dispossessed by foreign conquerors appeals to a basic human sense of fairness. And the idea that every racial or religious or ethnic group has some inalienable homeland to which they can always return confers a sense of security and permanence.

But as a guiding principle for international relations, indigenism has faults that far outweigh its strengths. First, the idea that a specific race or religion or ethnicity collectively owns a piece of land very easily lends itself to institutionalized racism. It implies that people who live in places they’re not “indigenous” to are permanent guests, whose claim to their homes will always be inferior and subordinate due to their race or religion. Indigenism thus inherently weakens the concept of individual equality and human rights.

An even bigger problem with indigenism is the question of who is actually “indigenous”. National mysticism — the belief that different groups of humans were created separately on different plots of land — is just flat-out false. All humans came from somewhere else. And furthermore, they came to these places gradually, in many repeated waves — it’s not like each piece of land was discovered, virgin and untouched, by a group of original settlers whose descendants live there to this day. Instead, each place was settled by small family groups, larger tribes, war bands, and so on, who competed for resources, fought and killed each other, intermarried, and renamed and reimagined their groups repeatedly. All land is stolen land — in fact, it has been stolen many, many times.

In other words, it’s pretty impossible to tell who was on a piece of land first, because the “who” isn’t well-defined. And then on top of that issue, there’s the fact that most of this messy, gradual process of conquest, murder, intermarriage, and so on happened long before history was systematically and reliably recorded. Should the group with a rightful claim to a piece of land simply be the last group who declined to document their conquests? That seems more than a little arbitrary and unfair.

This is why online discussions of indigeneity very quickly degenerate into farce — claims that Jesus was a Palestinian, arguments over whether Israeli cuisine actually exists, and so on. Nor are these anywhere close to the most ridiculous arguments in the indigeneity discourse. But if you accept that one or another modern group represents the true original inhabitants of a plot of land and another group are “settler colonialists” worthy of dispossession or expulsion, then it’s very difficult to avoid these ridiculous debates.

And in practice, claims of indigeneity are not much of a barrier to war. Russia will claim that Russians are autochthonous to Ukraine; China will claim that Chinese people are indigenous to Taiwan. Both the Israelis and Palestinians already claim indigeneity. Notions of indigeneity will be made to support the quest for a Greater Azerbaijan, or a Greater Romania, or a Greater Venezuela, or whatever. In the end, the victory will simply go to the side with the army powerful enough to back up their claims. Again, we emerge back into the law of the jungle.

Note: Some people believe that rejecting indigenism means permitting any successful conquest to stand — that without a notion of which group the land truly belongs to, any conquerors can simply set up shop on their newly conquered land and claim to be the rightful inhabitants. This is not so. First of all, property rights to land can be enforced at the individual level; if someone took your mother’s land by force, international law can still tell you that you have a right to it. Second of all, territorial rights can be enforced at the level of the nation-state, rather than the racial or religious or ethnic group. So rejecting indigenism doesn’t mean that any act of conquest or expulsion must be respected thenceforth as “facts on the ground”.

In any case, both liberal internationalism and indigenism are fatally flawed as principles for determining who should invade whom. Territorial integrity — the idea that nobody should invade anybody — has much greater potential to make all the people of Earth feel secure in their homes.

How to base U.S. foreign policy around territorial integrity

The model for a U.S. foreign policy based on territorial integrity already exists. When the U.S. sent troops to help defend South Korea in the 1950s and Kuwait in the 1990s, we earned massive amounts of international goodwill. Those operations were military successes as well — South Korea and Kuwait both still exist.

In the world of modern warfare, defensive operations like this are even more likely to result in success. With the advent of cheap FPV drones, light long-range ATGMs, and other technologies, the kind of breakthrough advances by massed armored vehicles that characterized warfare in the 20th century appear to be far more difficult and rare; the advantage now lies with the defender. This means that it’s easier for countries to defend their borders than ever before.

That’s why Ukraine provides another template for U.S. policy. Unlike in South Korea and Kuwait, the U.S. didn’t send any of our troops to fight; we merely sent weapons, money, and advice. And the operation has so far been a success — even if Ukraine can’t take back the 18% of its territory Russia still occupies, the fact that there still is a country called Ukraine is something of a miracle.

Helping countries defend themselves against the onslaught of more powerful neighbors should be a cornerstone of American policy in the decades to come. The countries of Asia — India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and perhaps Indonesia — will be grateful to us for bolstering their independence and security with our offshore assistance. Indeed, they already are.

In other regions of the world like Latin America, the U.S. may not have enough money, equipment, and bandwidth to help countries like Guyana defend themselves. But even then, we can send a small amount of resources. And we can use diplomacy to discourage or repel invasions by coordinating with friendly countries like Brazil who also believe in the principle of territorial integrity.

In the Middle East, although it makes sense to give Israel the chance to destroy Hamas, the U.S. needs to make it clear that we don’t support Israeli conquest of Palestinian land. Biden’s move to levy sanctions against violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank was a good step in this direction. A lasting peace in Israel and Palestine will require both parties to reject the idea of owning all the land “from the river to the sea”.

Territorial integrity has the potential to score diplomatic points as well as military ones for the U.S. It’s a message that resonates throughout the world — no one wants tanks rolling over their borders. Instead of an empire — even a liberalizing one — the U.S. needs to paint ourselves as the spoiler of empires and the defender of the weak. Which, on our best days, is exactly what we’ve been.

I am not claiming that territorial integrity is a perfect principle, or that it’s a permanent solution to the question of who owns Earth’s limited land. But like so many other institutions and principles worth defending, it’s better than all the alternatives that have been tried from time to time.

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