An organizing principle around territorial integrity might have some value.. my sense is that the impact will be minor. It is largely a talking point. Just as impact of institutions such as the UN has been minor (certainly as compared to the mindshare and financial resources consumed by these institutions). The major changes in the world have overwhelmingly occurred outside these constructs.
The world has always been driven by raw power (economic, political, cultural, military). In some sense this is natural (as in competition of the fittest). However, it turns out that in such a world willing cooperation in groups can generate great power, and in order to maintain a functional society, generally one needs to motivate a significant part of the population. This is true everywhere except in very narrow economic structures such a Petro states. Why? A very small number of people can control the key resource and they really don't care about the rest of the population.
If we look at the breakdown of cooperation or as you put it Pax America [which I don't think ever really existed, at least as presented], it is invariably driven by Petro states: Venezuela (Guyana), Russia (ukraine), Iran (Israel, etc)....
The best way to address these issues is actually to drain the power from the Petro-state by reducing the value of their basic good. Moving to alternative fuel sources will have far more impact on these issues vs any declaration of a principle around territorial integrity.
Yes... however the alternative is even worse. At some point, the shift to a more diversified structure needs to happen. One hopes this can be done peacefully, but there is no guarantee.
Yup...a bit more fortitude in the mid 70s might have saved a lot of heartache. Now is a good time.... there are energy alternatives and workforce shifts possible.
What a thoughtful, insightful, interesting, helpful essay!
I learned a lot: "All land is stolen land." That's a bumper sticker, but if essayed out, it holds water in that "everybody came from somewhere else."
And I agree that territorial integrity is a viable strategy for all nations at all times. Of course, there'll be exceptions, unique situations, and confusing issues, but the strategy has legs, in my opinion; if some other, new idea comes along that seems better, we'll download it. We make progress, if we do, one step at at time, no? Patience is a virtue and a requirement for maintaining a modicum of peace and world order.
I see a variant of indigenism in Russian and Chinese territorial claims. It's not so much "Chinese people have always resided in these lands", but "Historically these lands have been part of the domain of Chinese civilization". Ditto for Russia. It's kind of a bizarre indigenist-imperialist fusion, a right to historically conquered lands.
There are two political ideologies that make these claims -- irredentism and revanchism.
Irredentism is more psychological. It's rooted in loss and redemption. Irredentism holds that a piece of historic land lost to modern borders is a source of psychic anguish for the culture, which aspires to be reunited with the land.
Revanchism is more militant, because it's an ideology of revenge and honor. Revanchism holds that all losses will be avenged and scores settled, and actively make overtures of violence and plan toward that end.
Is there a specific term for the kind of irredentism which claims justification via the territory's existing ethnic makeup, like Nazi Germany did with the Sudetenland or Russia did with Crimea?
And the best policy for the US to accomplish this is it increase its own geopolitical clout, notably fast economic growth per capita with a large inflow of merit-based immigrants.
So obviously the Venezuelan thing is made up just because of oil. But I was curious about their historical claim on the territory. The Wikipedia summary on the arbitration of 1899 sure reflects poorly on the US and UK.
No Venezuelan was allowed to be on the panel. (The final panel was 2 Americans, 2 British, and 1 Russian.) Venezuela wasn't even allowed to pick their own representatives: the US picked for them. The British said they'd ignore the decision if they didn't like it. The Russian demanded a unanimous decision, for appearances. The US side (representing Venezuela) found the British arguments preposterous but in the face of the above folded. No explanation was given for the final decision, which gave Britain 90% of the disputed territory, including all of the gold mines. Faced with a combined Britain, UK, and Russia, Venezuela reluctantly accepted the arbitration result.
Perfect, thank-you Tran. So.. first we all agree that current borders are all the arbitrary result of past power, blood, and money. Then we agree that they are now inviolate, and now power, blood, and money are to be used to defend them. It's a start, I guess.
Terrible territorial decisions were made all over the world, in particular, in Africa, but I believe peace and civility requires drawing the line somewhere and agreeing to no longer challenging internationally recognized borders.
Talking about Westphalian sovereignty as the unit for resisting foreign domination as opposed to indigeneity, you run into a problem.
Most places in the world were brought into sovereign Westphalian states through the intercession and control of external powers. Sure, Swiss people are happy with their sovereign borders but most places outside of Europe are not. Africa is famous for "Europe drew some lines without local input"
It would be like asking everyone to to be happy with the shirt they have on when some people have shirts that they went to a shop and had fitted, while the rest are wearing hand me downs from someone of a different age, weight, gender, and made from garbage bags.
I am saying that the piece that you wrote really hand waves the problem of people finding themselves "wearing" a Westphalian territory not of their choosing.
War isn't a good way to solve the issue,
My critique is that the piece doesn't really acknowledge the limits of the territorial integrity paradigm.
This paradigm leaves Kurds in Turkey, rohingyas in Myanmar, Uighurs in China, out to dry.
War from external powers to "free" these people would be awful, probably worse than living as a disadvantaged minority, but that is a trade-off that the piece does not acknowledge.
There is an implied distinction between wars to seize territory and add to the country and wars to change the domestic politics of the country, but it is not fleshed out.
I agree that many modern states have borders that aren't optimal. But I think trying to optimize those borders through war and conquest is worse than simply keeping them as they are.
You are imputing this idea that I want to solve borders through war and conquest.
I do not. Nor did I ever say that.
My contention was that "keeping borders as they are" has a lot of really big and obvious downsides that a "territorial integrity" paradigm, by its very nature, leaves unresolved.
It is fine to leave them unresolved. There are tradeoffs and sometimes every option has downsides. That is all ok.
But be open about the downsides.
Be open that placing territorial integrity as the cornerstone means that the Kurds in Turkey will have a boot stomping on their face for the next few decades. That sucks. A war to "free" the Kurds would probably suck more, but acknowledge that a territorial integrity focus leaves minorities within nation states in a very difficult position.
That is a known and terrible downside.
The attractiveness of the indigeneity argument is that it, at least rhetorically, addresses this downside head on.
I agree that it is generally an unworkable idea, but "keeping borders as they are" is seen as an unworkable idea for a lot of people in the here and now. And this piece didn't address that at all.
My sense was that the argument was not just, "keeping borders as they are" but more about rejecting war as a tool to change those borders.
Either way, I enjoyed both the article and your critique, but the reality is that the only time the world has seen prolonged peace was when there was a hegemonic power (or powers that worked together in a form of quasi hegemony) that kept the peace. I think most people agree that is no longer possible. So some of these arguments may be moot.
In a very Tolkien way, the US is a spent force. The debt is becoming unmanageable, the population is highly divided on even basic facts, and we still have to pay for the baby boomers retirement. The US will still be the world's most powerful country, but it won't have the bandwidth to intervene externally in any but the most minor ways. Even send weapons to Ukraine is becoming difficult, both logistically because we cannot make the materials, and politically because we are so divided.
The rest of the West is pretty much dying of old age. The demographics for most Euro powers is horrible and they basically went into retirement post WWII and are not coming back.
Finally, there is probably some technological revolution underway. The later, if true opens the door for other, more aggressive powers to leapfrog existing militaries and try their hand at conquest. I am not a military person but my impression is that there are a lot of smart military people thinking there may be paradigm shift underway, similar to what happened pre-WW2. If that's true, the US's legacy advantages will be nullified.
In a very real way, I suspect this is just a global revision to the mean.
I think a more valuable way to spend our energy is determining how best to use our diminished resources to mitigate the coming chaos. No idea what that might be, but I suspect it is much less ambitious than any of us would care for.
Maybe we could just figure out a way to humanely treat immigrants while not bankrupting our major cities or creating cultural chaos. Unfortunately, that might be more than we can do.
Dec 11, 2023·edited Dec 11, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
I'm unsure, but maybe recognizing the right of peoples to self-determination complicates a territorial-integrity-centric outlook because it provides another pathway for legitimating territorial changes beyond conquest (one that's sometimes connected with indigenism). Russia's pretext for annexing Crimea, for example, partly relied on theories about self-determination. Can/should the US reject the right to self-determination? If not, borders and sovereignty are (maybe justly) vulnerable sometimes, and a US policy of protecting territorial integrity could easily wind up reintegrating indigenism and liberal interventionism through the backdoor (e.g., if we supported an independent Kurdistan).
I think all of the 90s conflicts in the Balkins are where the rubber hits the road on this potential contradiction (and is weirdly absent from the modern discourse around all of these things given that those conflicts were massive and were mostly succesfully resolved). There was a genuine conflict between Serbia saying "these borders have stood for decades, we own Bosnia / Kosovo / whatever" and the principle that the people living in those territories should get to declare independence if they wanted to. I *think* we mostly settled on the solution of "STFU about 16th century battles and just ask the currently alive people who live there what country they want to be part of," but we're not great at applying that principal more broadly (for instance in Gaza and the West Bank or Kashmir etc.).
Wasn't it often the case that rather than nations creating states, it was states that created nations?
In medieval civilizations there was typically one civilization-wide written language (eg Latin in western Christendom, Sanskrit in India, or classical Chinese in the Far East) coexisting with a ton of non-standardized spoken vernaculars, but in the early modern era (perhaps driven by the introduction of the printing press) rulers tended to pick one vernacular (usually but not always that of their capital city) and elevate it to the status of "official" language, standardizing it and imposing it on their subjects.
Perhaps it is because the cursive-only Arabic script is so ill-suited to printing that the Arab world is still linguistically medieval to this day (ie the fusHa/amiya dichotomy)?
In Europe... sure, that is generally how it happened.
But in the rest of the world, not so much.
Why is the Cambodia Thai border where it is today? Deep seated nation formation where Khmer rulers made a decision about written language?
No, The French STATE and the Thai STATE had a discussion about it back in the 1800's.
Why is the Burma India border where it is today?
Is it because there was a long campaign and a plebiscite among the Chins, the Nagas, the Jingphos, the Mizos and the other people that populate that border area?
No, the British STATE decided to split Burma off from the wider Indian Raj in 1937 for administrative reasons.
For most of the world, it was European STATES deciding where the lines were actually drawn. This may have had some relation to the process of wider literature and nation formation on the ground... but that was a fact to be "taken under advisement" by the powers drawing the lines.
The Arabic thing is just a holdover of there being a small religiously trained literate group who were custodians of the written language, much like Catholic priests in the Europe. The reason Urdu is written in Arabic script is because the only literate people in India 150 years ago were religious people. If you were muslim and spoke hindustani, you wrote it in the script you were trained in, Arabic. If you were Hindu and spoke hindustani, you wrote it using the script you were trained in, sanskrit. Once there was partition, then the nation process happened as above.
But again.... who was drawing the line...? It wasn't the locals. It was the British.
The arabic thing isn't the printing press as China had printing for hundreds of years before Gutenberg and they still had a similar split between classical Chinese and the vernacular.
Using Scandinavia as a model for the entire planet seems unpromising. Until recently, cold Scandinavia has not attracted immigration because it hasn't been seen as a desirable destination. Thus, by an accident of history/geography they are homogeneous. The same is true for many islands in the Pacific.
However, in most of the world the ship of homogeneity sailed a long time ago, and there is no way to go back.
Gaza is a clear case of recognized international boundaries. The 1949 armistice defined the borders, and there was even some territorial exchange for this purpose. In 2005, the Israeli government itself clarified that it would not allow any Jewish settlement within the Gaza Strip. The West Bank and certainly Jerusalem are a more ambiguous case.
In what sense is the legality of settlements or annexations in the West Bank and Jerusalem ambiguous, if we derive legality from international law and precedent, which I presume is the basis for the territorial principles discussed in the post?
The sovereignty issue over Jerusalem is a difficult question that has never been resolved in international law. Regarding the territories, the last agreement which is a consensus in international relations is the Oslo Agreement, and it left the ownership of Area C and the question of the Palestinian state as an open issue towards the talks on a permanent arrangement.
Interpreting the arrested status of the process of establishing a Palestinian state and effective sovereignty initiated by the Oslo Agreement as an argument supporting the widespread and ongoing establishment of settlements is a mockery of the very idea of principles governing territorial control.
478 is not 'complicated' in its condemnation of unilateral Israeli actions regarding Jerusalem, whatever the lack of agreement about a final disposition.
I did not say that the settlements enjoy international legitimacy. But the West Bank is not an example of an area where there is international consensus about its borders. On the other hand, there is consensus around Gaza. That's all I said.
On humanitarian interventionism - I can't be the only one who, at the sad time of John McCain's passing, had the poetic thought that the idea he symbolised was dying with him.
I'm Venezuelan so I am familiar with this topic, also note that a friend of mine a couple of years ago wrote a legal opinion for Guyana which changed my mind on this dispute.
Venezuela may or may not have gotten screwed by the 1899 arbitration result. One of the arbitrators wrote a letter to be opened AFTER HIS DEATH which explained that Venezuela had been screwed. He died and the letter was opened in 1948, fifty years after Venezuela had accepted the result of the arbitration. So from a legal point of view, Venezuela had a major uphill climb to reverse the arbitration result.
Since the 1960s this topic got drilled into the head of all Venezuelans with unwavering ferocity to the point that an otherwise rational Venezuelan will probably lose all rationality when discussing the Esequibo.
In 2004 Chavez decided he wanted Guyana's vote at the UN and other international arenas, so his then-assistant-and-now-president Maduro reaffirmed Venezuela's acceptance of Guyana's sovereignty over the disputed area, weakening Venezuela's legal case even further.
But what is driving this topic a the moment is Maduro's internal political weakness heading into the scheduled 2024 presidential elections. In a failed attempt to rally support, on December 3 Maduro ordered a referendum about the Esequibo. But the utterly anemic attendance at the polls stands in stark contrast to very high attendance at the opposition primary held just a few weeks earlier on October 22.
The perhaps-unexpected result of the December 3 referendum is that it is now abundantly clear to every Venezuelan that Maduro has very little support within the country.
“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.”
Lest we forget, 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles turned back a 41-mile-long heavily armed Russian convoy. Each Russian tank in that convoy cost US$3 million.
This isn’t a piece that I would present in Edinburgh or Cardiff. Or parts of Belfast. Or probably any First Nations reservation.
Facts in the ground and territorial integrity do matter, but arguing against people being indigenous actually would lead, would have led, to imperialism not ever being challenged.
The principle of territorial integrity doesn't preclude independence movements. It simply precludes invasions and conquest. Those are very different things.
The Irish were not indigenous in their own myths and oral histories. The current Irish killed them and took their land. I don't mean that as a put down...I love anything Celtic, but meerly pointing out that that a Firbolg First Peoples Movement would have a historic precedent.
Same with the Scotts. I am of Scottish ancestry, and we have the proud distinction of being driven from Ireland, probably for being hooligans, going to Scottland to kill everyone and take their land. We then went around the world killing and taking land for the British as a whole.
Native American's are a bit different in that they did come to a place genuinely devoid of people. However, once they had control of that land they balkanized and spent a lot of time killing each other, and in the case of the Meso Americans, do so in pretty horrific ways.
Long story short...all those groups may not like it now but their ancestors, like all our ancestors, did the same things.
I appreciate how succinctly this article covers the topic, encapsulating a couple undergrad lectures I attended decades ago.
That said, I do find the idea that the US is the spoiler of empires a bit rich, when it is an empire itself and shows no interest in divesting its remaining holdings.
Fwiw, the US is about the most benign empire one could ask to have around, and one reason that its territories are not straining to leave, even where it hasn't overwhelmed the conquered population.
X is to social media what crypto is to currencies: unstable, ephemeral with the half-life of a jar of mayonnaise in Death Valley, with the mercurial power to destroy lives and livelihoods across the socio-economic spectrum. Why not just start each morning with a gargle of nitroglycerin? The irony is that many of its dupes are very talented, very smart individuals who could make positive impacts on society and culture. It’s not enough to be smart. Character outweighs intelligence in the long term. I’ll take EQ over IQ any day of the week.
"Liberal interventionism isn't going to present a real challenge to territorial integrity in the next decade or two."
Liberal interventionism has been the driving force of US policy since the late 80's. Liberals believe in their universal principles with theological vigor. The EU conditioned Ukrainian aid on Kiev passing an LGBT law. This confirming that we're fighting to queer the Donbas, whether Ukrainians want it queered or not. Liberal interventionism is only accelerating.
"For one thing, the U.S. no longer has the power to play world police."
If this is true, why even write the essay? If we're too weak to do anything, our policy doesn't matter. If we're strong enough to do something, our ruling class tends to fall into liberal interventionism.
"I believe that territorial integrity should be the U.S.’ central guiding principle. 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."
I concur with the sentiment, but sentiment is a poor basis for foreign policy. Look at a map of Asia and tell me how this applies. Kashmir? Tibet? Burma? Bangladesh? Korea? Taiwan? Philippines? And don't even get started on the --stans. Even Europe isn't clear cut: did Spain invade Catalonia or are Catalans engaging in indigious separatism? What about Finnish Karelia? Is Cyprus Greek or Turkish or independent? And we'll need a reality TV show to sort out Africa, a continent whose map must be redrawn every few years. When Sudan invades S. Sudan is that a "territorial integrity breach" or is it putting down an "indigenous rebellion"? Wash, rinse, repeat... annually.
Here's a novel theory for US military policy: "We are the champions of freedom everywhere but the guarantors of only our own. We go not in search of monsters to destroy." I like that one better. Absent a threat on the scale of Hitler (and Putin isn't Hitler, people), it's time to start using those 2 large oceans to our advantage again.
I'm willing to apply that to Taiwan and Ukraine (countries I have no interest in having my daughters drafted to defend) and also to Israel and Azerbaijan (countries I would be ideologically tempted to defend.) Enforcing a "look not for monsters to destroy" principle prevents both the Left and Right from giving into their respective temptations.
I don't think liberal interventionism has been our driving force. I think our policy is inconsistent to the point where we don't really have a driving force.
I'm about 15 years older than you, Noah, and nearly every military intervention of my life has been publicly justified on the basis of liberal interventionism. Reagan's coups in Central America... fighting socialism. Bush's defense of Kuwait... defending the international order. Clinton's Yugoslavia... ethnic self-determination. Bush Jr's Afghanistan and Iraq... (arguably) human rights. Bush Jr's color revolutions... democracy promotion. Obama's Libya and Syria interventions... human rights. Biden's Ukraine... territorial integrity. I could probably go back to Woodrow Wilson with this if I wanted to.
There's no ideological commonality among these, except a belief that the US military is a tool to be used for the promotion of abstract, universal, "liberal" norms. Both Left and Right justify their interventions on this basis, at least in public. Both have far too low a threshold. American lives (and the lives of the adversaries that we kill in the name of "saving" them) are deemed by both parties to have far too little value.
Oceans represent a huge practical barrier to invasion and always have. The Taiwan straight is only 90 miles wide, but so far it has prevented a Chinese invasion. Across 3000+ miles of ocean, an amphibious invasion of the mainland United States would be essentially impossible. Sure, an adversary could bomb our coasts, but the last 40 years have taught everyone that air power alone doesn't win wars. Short of nuclear ICBMs (for which we ought to build a missile defense system) our oceans remain a great protective shield.
Countries don't need to be invaded any more to be defeated, or at least removed from the chess board. So oceans no longer matter as much.
From the safety of a seat overseas, one could:
- Use cyber warfare - permanently damage a significant portion of the electricity grid (e.g. have reactors go critical, open sluices enough to catastrophically damage downstream dams). Brick multiple manufacturer's entire vehicle fleets. Cause Starbucks' coffee machines to malfunction.
OR, much more destructive:
-help convince 40+% of an electorate to distrust their political institutions, or that their enemies are their domestic political opposition, or that their democracy is less important than political victory, etc.
I sure do regret that Bush et al have made such a mess out of the humanitarian interventionism doctrine.
I know that for Americans, this has mostly equated to loss of life and budget + opportunous attacks from all ideological sides equating every American action with imperialism.
But for us who grew up in countries such as Croatia, where US was the key player (diplomatically and militarily) stopping ethnic cleansing and genocide, that interventionism saved lives. There is a reason why we still today trust US more than Germany or France and why wanted to join the NATO. And why our soldiers are in Poland right now. Something is lost when the best we can come up with is “preserve territorial integrity, but what happens within borders is fair game no matter how bad it gets”.
An organizing principle around territorial integrity might have some value.. my sense is that the impact will be minor. It is largely a talking point. Just as impact of institutions such as the UN has been minor (certainly as compared to the mindshare and financial resources consumed by these institutions). The major changes in the world have overwhelmingly occurred outside these constructs.
The world has always been driven by raw power (economic, political, cultural, military). In some sense this is natural (as in competition of the fittest). However, it turns out that in such a world willing cooperation in groups can generate great power, and in order to maintain a functional society, generally one needs to motivate a significant part of the population. This is true everywhere except in very narrow economic structures such a Petro states. Why? A very small number of people can control the key resource and they really don't care about the rest of the population.
If we look at the breakdown of cooperation or as you put it Pax America [which I don't think ever really existed, at least as presented], it is invariably driven by Petro states: Venezuela (Guyana), Russia (ukraine), Iran (Israel, etc)....
The best way to address these issues is actually to drain the power from the Petro-state by reducing the value of their basic good. Moving to alternative fuel sources will have far more impact on these issues vs any declaration of a principle around territorial integrity.
This is perceptive, but dwindling power foments resentment and desperation. These states could prove even more dangerous under such circumstances.
Yes... however the alternative is even worse. At some point, the shift to a more diversified structure needs to happen. One hopes this can be done peacefully, but there is no guarantee.
The best time to drain the power of the petro-states was 50 years ago. The second best time is now.
Yup...a bit more fortitude in the mid 70s might have saved a lot of heartache. Now is a good time.... there are energy alternatives and workforce shifts possible.
What a thoughtful, insightful, interesting, helpful essay!
I learned a lot: "All land is stolen land." That's a bumper sticker, but if essayed out, it holds water in that "everybody came from somewhere else."
And I agree that territorial integrity is a viable strategy for all nations at all times. Of course, there'll be exceptions, unique situations, and confusing issues, but the strategy has legs, in my opinion; if some other, new idea comes along that seems better, we'll download it. We make progress, if we do, one step at at time, no? Patience is a virtue and a requirement for maintaining a modicum of peace and world order.
I see a variant of indigenism in Russian and Chinese territorial claims. It's not so much "Chinese people have always resided in these lands", but "Historically these lands have been part of the domain of Chinese civilization". Ditto for Russia. It's kind of a bizarre indigenist-imperialist fusion, a right to historically conquered lands.
There are two political ideologies that make these claims -- irredentism and revanchism.
Irredentism is more psychological. It's rooted in loss and redemption. Irredentism holds that a piece of historic land lost to modern borders is a source of psychic anguish for the culture, which aspires to be reunited with the land.
Revanchism is more militant, because it's an ideology of revenge and honor. Revanchism holds that all losses will be avenged and scores settled, and actively make overtures of violence and plan toward that end.
Is there a specific term for the kind of irredentism which claims justification via the territory's existing ethnic makeup, like Nazi Germany did with the Sudetenland or Russia did with Crimea?
Brink back Westphalia.
And the best policy for the US to accomplish this is it increase its own geopolitical clout, notably fast economic growth per capita with a large inflow of merit-based immigrants.
So obviously the Venezuelan thing is made up just because of oil. But I was curious about their historical claim on the territory. The Wikipedia summary on the arbitration of 1899 sure reflects poorly on the US and UK.
No Venezuelan was allowed to be on the panel. (The final panel was 2 Americans, 2 British, and 1 Russian.) Venezuela wasn't even allowed to pick their own representatives: the US picked for them. The British said they'd ignore the decision if they didn't like it. The Russian demanded a unanimous decision, for appearances. The US side (representing Venezuela) found the British arguments preposterous but in the face of the above folded. No explanation was given for the final decision, which gave Britain 90% of the disputed territory, including all of the gold mines. Faced with a combined Britain, UK, and Russia, Venezuela reluctantly accepted the arbitration result.
Perfect, thank-you Tran. So.. first we all agree that current borders are all the arbitrary result of past power, blood, and money. Then we agree that they are now inviolate, and now power, blood, and money are to be used to defend them. It's a start, I guess.
Terrible territorial decisions were made all over the world, in particular, in Africa, but I believe peace and civility requires drawing the line somewhere and agreeing to no longer challenging internationally recognized borders.
This is quite half baked.
Talking about Westphalian sovereignty as the unit for resisting foreign domination as opposed to indigeneity, you run into a problem.
Most places in the world were brought into sovereign Westphalian states through the intercession and control of external powers. Sure, Swiss people are happy with their sovereign borders but most places outside of Europe are not. Africa is famous for "Europe drew some lines without local input"
It would be like asking everyone to to be happy with the shirt they have on when some people have shirts that they went to a shop and had fitted, while the rest are wearing hand me downs from someone of a different age, weight, gender, and made from garbage bags.
So your proposed alternative is for these countries to create more reasonable borders through war? I don't think that's a good idea.
That isn't MY proposed alternative.
I am saying that the piece that you wrote really hand waves the problem of people finding themselves "wearing" a Westphalian territory not of their choosing.
War isn't a good way to solve the issue,
My critique is that the piece doesn't really acknowledge the limits of the territorial integrity paradigm.
This paradigm leaves Kurds in Turkey, rohingyas in Myanmar, Uighurs in China, out to dry.
War from external powers to "free" these people would be awful, probably worse than living as a disadvantaged minority, but that is a trade-off that the piece does not acknowledge.
There is an implied distinction between wars to seize territory and add to the country and wars to change the domestic politics of the country, but it is not fleshed out.
I agree that many modern states have borders that aren't optimal. But I think trying to optimize those borders through war and conquest is worse than simply keeping them as they are.
You are imputing this idea that I want to solve borders through war and conquest.
I do not. Nor did I ever say that.
My contention was that "keeping borders as they are" has a lot of really big and obvious downsides that a "territorial integrity" paradigm, by its very nature, leaves unresolved.
It is fine to leave them unresolved. There are tradeoffs and sometimes every option has downsides. That is all ok.
But be open about the downsides.
Be open that placing territorial integrity as the cornerstone means that the Kurds in Turkey will have a boot stomping on their face for the next few decades. That sucks. A war to "free" the Kurds would probably suck more, but acknowledge that a territorial integrity focus leaves minorities within nation states in a very difficult position.
That is a known and terrible downside.
The attractiveness of the indigeneity argument is that it, at least rhetorically, addresses this downside head on.
I agree that it is generally an unworkable idea, but "keeping borders as they are" is seen as an unworkable idea for a lot of people in the here and now. And this piece didn't address that at all.
My sense was that the argument was not just, "keeping borders as they are" but more about rejecting war as a tool to change those borders.
Either way, I enjoyed both the article and your critique, but the reality is that the only time the world has seen prolonged peace was when there was a hegemonic power (or powers that worked together in a form of quasi hegemony) that kept the peace. I think most people agree that is no longer possible. So some of these arguments may be moot.
In a very Tolkien way, the US is a spent force. The debt is becoming unmanageable, the population is highly divided on even basic facts, and we still have to pay for the baby boomers retirement. The US will still be the world's most powerful country, but it won't have the bandwidth to intervene externally in any but the most minor ways. Even send weapons to Ukraine is becoming difficult, both logistically because we cannot make the materials, and politically because we are so divided.
The rest of the West is pretty much dying of old age. The demographics for most Euro powers is horrible and they basically went into retirement post WWII and are not coming back.
Finally, there is probably some technological revolution underway. The later, if true opens the door for other, more aggressive powers to leapfrog existing militaries and try their hand at conquest. I am not a military person but my impression is that there are a lot of smart military people thinking there may be paradigm shift underway, similar to what happened pre-WW2. If that's true, the US's legacy advantages will be nullified.
In a very real way, I suspect this is just a global revision to the mean.
I think a more valuable way to spend our energy is determining how best to use our diminished resources to mitigate the coming chaos. No idea what that might be, but I suspect it is much less ambitious than any of us would care for.
Maybe we could just figure out a way to humanely treat immigrants while not bankrupting our major cities or creating cultural chaos. Unfortunately, that might be more than we can do.
The piece is missing something about the concept of self-determination and how that interplays with territorial disputes and indigenism.
What did you have in mind?
I'm unsure, but maybe recognizing the right of peoples to self-determination complicates a territorial-integrity-centric outlook because it provides another pathway for legitimating territorial changes beyond conquest (one that's sometimes connected with indigenism). Russia's pretext for annexing Crimea, for example, partly relied on theories about self-determination. Can/should the US reject the right to self-determination? If not, borders and sovereignty are (maybe justly) vulnerable sometimes, and a US policy of protecting territorial integrity could easily wind up reintegrating indigenism and liberal interventionism through the backdoor (e.g., if we supported an independent Kurdistan).
That's a good point.
I think all of the 90s conflicts in the Balkins are where the rubber hits the road on this potential contradiction (and is weirdly absent from the modern discourse around all of these things given that those conflicts were massive and were mostly succesfully resolved). There was a genuine conflict between Serbia saying "these borders have stood for decades, we own Bosnia / Kosovo / whatever" and the principle that the people living in those territories should get to declare independence if they wanted to. I *think* we mostly settled on the solution of "STFU about 16th century battles and just ask the currently alive people who live there what country they want to be part of," but we're not great at applying that principal more broadly (for instance in Gaza and the West Bank or Kashmir etc.).
Wasn't it often the case that rather than nations creating states, it was states that created nations?
In medieval civilizations there was typically one civilization-wide written language (eg Latin in western Christendom, Sanskrit in India, or classical Chinese in the Far East) coexisting with a ton of non-standardized spoken vernaculars, but in the early modern era (perhaps driven by the introduction of the printing press) rulers tended to pick one vernacular (usually but not always that of their capital city) and elevate it to the status of "official" language, standardizing it and imposing it on their subjects.
Perhaps it is because the cursive-only Arabic script is so ill-suited to printing that the Arab world is still linguistically medieval to this day (ie the fusHa/amiya dichotomy)?
In Europe... sure, that is generally how it happened.
But in the rest of the world, not so much.
Why is the Cambodia Thai border where it is today? Deep seated nation formation where Khmer rulers made a decision about written language?
No, The French STATE and the Thai STATE had a discussion about it back in the 1800's.
Why is the Burma India border where it is today?
Is it because there was a long campaign and a plebiscite among the Chins, the Nagas, the Jingphos, the Mizos and the other people that populate that border area?
No, the British STATE decided to split Burma off from the wider Indian Raj in 1937 for administrative reasons.
For most of the world, it was European STATES deciding where the lines were actually drawn. This may have had some relation to the process of wider literature and nation formation on the ground... but that was a fact to be "taken under advisement" by the powers drawing the lines.
The Arabic thing is just a holdover of there being a small religiously trained literate group who were custodians of the written language, much like Catholic priests in the Europe. The reason Urdu is written in Arabic script is because the only literate people in India 150 years ago were religious people. If you were muslim and spoke hindustani, you wrote it in the script you were trained in, Arabic. If you were Hindu and spoke hindustani, you wrote it using the script you were trained in, sanskrit. Once there was partition, then the nation process happened as above.
But again.... who was drawing the line...? It wasn't the locals. It was the British.
The arabic thing isn't the printing press as China had printing for hundreds of years before Gutenberg and they still had a similar split between classical Chinese and the vernacular.
Using Scandinavia as a model for the entire planet seems unpromising. Until recently, cold Scandinavia has not attracted immigration because it hasn't been seen as a desirable destination. Thus, by an accident of history/geography they are homogeneous. The same is true for many islands in the Pacific.
However, in most of the world the ship of homogeneity sailed a long time ago, and there is no way to go back.
Perhaps Scandinavian countries are so bad at integrating immigrants now precisely because they have so little practice at it?
The EU 's principle that you can go and work in any member country has helped all of Europe get more used to living with “The Other.”
The immigrants that are giving Scandinavia such problems aren't EU natives though: they're mostly from the Middle East or Africa.
Gaza is a clear case of recognized international boundaries. The 1949 armistice defined the borders, and there was even some territorial exchange for this purpose. In 2005, the Israeli government itself clarified that it would not allow any Jewish settlement within the Gaza Strip. The West Bank and certainly Jerusalem are a more ambiguous case.
In what sense is the legality of settlements or annexations in the West Bank and Jerusalem ambiguous, if we derive legality from international law and precedent, which I presume is the basis for the territorial principles discussed in the post?
The sovereignty issue over Jerusalem is a difficult question that has never been resolved in international law. Regarding the territories, the last agreement which is a consensus in international relations is the Oslo Agreement, and it left the ownership of Area C and the question of the Palestinian state as an open issue towards the talks on a permanent arrangement.
Interpreting the arrested status of the process of establishing a Palestinian state and effective sovereignty initiated by the Oslo Agreement as an argument supporting the widespread and ongoing establishment of settlements is a mockery of the very idea of principles governing territorial control.
478 is not 'complicated' in its condemnation of unilateral Israeli actions regarding Jerusalem, whatever the lack of agreement about a final disposition.
I did not say that the settlements enjoy international legitimacy. But the West Bank is not an example of an area where there is international consensus about its borders. On the other hand, there is consensus around Gaza. That's all I said.
Edit, by 'complicated' I meant 'difficult'.
On humanitarian interventionism - I can't be the only one who, at the sad time of John McCain's passing, had the poetic thought that the idea he symbolised was dying with him.
I'm Venezuelan so I am familiar with this topic, also note that a friend of mine a couple of years ago wrote a legal opinion for Guyana which changed my mind on this dispute.
Venezuela may or may not have gotten screwed by the 1899 arbitration result. One of the arbitrators wrote a letter to be opened AFTER HIS DEATH which explained that Venezuela had been screwed. He died and the letter was opened in 1948, fifty years after Venezuela had accepted the result of the arbitration. So from a legal point of view, Venezuela had a major uphill climb to reverse the arbitration result.
Since the 1960s this topic got drilled into the head of all Venezuelans with unwavering ferocity to the point that an otherwise rational Venezuelan will probably lose all rationality when discussing the Esequibo.
In 2004 Chavez decided he wanted Guyana's vote at the UN and other international arenas, so his then-assistant-and-now-president Maduro reaffirmed Venezuela's acceptance of Guyana's sovereignty over the disputed area, weakening Venezuela's legal case even further.
But what is driving this topic a the moment is Maduro's internal political weakness heading into the scheduled 2024 presidential elections. In a failed attempt to rally support, on December 3 Maduro ordered a referendum about the Esequibo. But the utterly anemic attendance at the polls stands in stark contrast to very high attendance at the opposition primary held just a few weeks earlier on October 22.
The perhaps-unexpected result of the December 3 referendum is that it is now abundantly clear to every Venezuelan that Maduro has very little support within the country.
“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.”
Lest we forget, 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles turned back a 41-mile-long heavily armed Russian convoy. Each Russian tank in that convoy cost US$3 million.
This isn’t a piece that I would present in Edinburgh or Cardiff. Or parts of Belfast. Or probably any First Nations reservation.
Facts in the ground and territorial integrity do matter, but arguing against people being indigenous actually would lead, would have led, to imperialism not ever being challenged.
The principle of territorial integrity doesn't preclude independence movements. It simply precludes invasions and conquest. Those are very different things.
The Irish were not indigenous in their own myths and oral histories. The current Irish killed them and took their land. I don't mean that as a put down...I love anything Celtic, but meerly pointing out that that a Firbolg First Peoples Movement would have a historic precedent.
Same with the Scotts. I am of Scottish ancestry, and we have the proud distinction of being driven from Ireland, probably for being hooligans, going to Scottland to kill everyone and take their land. We then went around the world killing and taking land for the British as a whole.
Native American's are a bit different in that they did come to a place genuinely devoid of people. However, once they had control of that land they balkanized and spent a lot of time killing each other, and in the case of the Meso Americans, do so in pretty horrific ways.
Long story short...all those groups may not like it now but their ancestors, like all our ancestors, did the same things.
I think that if the US is going to be the international border police it might want to practice on its own borders first.
I appreciate how succinctly this article covers the topic, encapsulating a couple undergrad lectures I attended decades ago.
That said, I do find the idea that the US is the spoiler of empires a bit rich, when it is an empire itself and shows no interest in divesting its remaining holdings.
Fwiw, the US is about the most benign empire one could ask to have around, and one reason that its territories are not straining to leave, even where it hasn't overwhelmed the conquered population.
I'd favor asking citizens of our territories whether they would favor full statehood (including senators and voting House members) or independence.
X is to social media what crypto is to currencies: unstable, ephemeral with the half-life of a jar of mayonnaise in Death Valley, with the mercurial power to destroy lives and livelihoods across the socio-economic spectrum. Why not just start each morning with a gargle of nitroglycerin? The irony is that many of its dupes are very talented, very smart individuals who could make positive impacts on society and culture. It’s not enough to be smart. Character outweighs intelligence in the long term. I’ll take EQ over IQ any day of the week.
"Liberal interventionism isn't going to present a real challenge to territorial integrity in the next decade or two."
Liberal interventionism has been the driving force of US policy since the late 80's. Liberals believe in their universal principles with theological vigor. The EU conditioned Ukrainian aid on Kiev passing an LGBT law. This confirming that we're fighting to queer the Donbas, whether Ukrainians want it queered or not. Liberal interventionism is only accelerating.
"For one thing, the U.S. no longer has the power to play world police."
If this is true, why even write the essay? If we're too weak to do anything, our policy doesn't matter. If we're strong enough to do something, our ruling class tends to fall into liberal interventionism.
"I believe that territorial integrity should be the U.S.’ central guiding principle. 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."
I concur with the sentiment, but sentiment is a poor basis for foreign policy. Look at a map of Asia and tell me how this applies. Kashmir? Tibet? Burma? Bangladesh? Korea? Taiwan? Philippines? And don't even get started on the --stans. Even Europe isn't clear cut: did Spain invade Catalonia or are Catalans engaging in indigious separatism? What about Finnish Karelia? Is Cyprus Greek or Turkish or independent? And we'll need a reality TV show to sort out Africa, a continent whose map must be redrawn every few years. When Sudan invades S. Sudan is that a "territorial integrity breach" or is it putting down an "indigenous rebellion"? Wash, rinse, repeat... annually.
Here's a novel theory for US military policy: "We are the champions of freedom everywhere but the guarantors of only our own. We go not in search of monsters to destroy." I like that one better. Absent a threat on the scale of Hitler (and Putin isn't Hitler, people), it's time to start using those 2 large oceans to our advantage again.
I'm willing to apply that to Taiwan and Ukraine (countries I have no interest in having my daughters drafted to defend) and also to Israel and Azerbaijan (countries I would be ideologically tempted to defend.) Enforcing a "look not for monsters to destroy" principle prevents both the Left and Right from giving into their respective temptations.
I don't think liberal interventionism has been our driving force. I think our policy is inconsistent to the point where we don't really have a driving force.
I'm about 15 years older than you, Noah, and nearly every military intervention of my life has been publicly justified on the basis of liberal interventionism. Reagan's coups in Central America... fighting socialism. Bush's defense of Kuwait... defending the international order. Clinton's Yugoslavia... ethnic self-determination. Bush Jr's Afghanistan and Iraq... (arguably) human rights. Bush Jr's color revolutions... democracy promotion. Obama's Libya and Syria interventions... human rights. Biden's Ukraine... territorial integrity. I could probably go back to Woodrow Wilson with this if I wanted to.
There's no ideological commonality among these, except a belief that the US military is a tool to be used for the promotion of abstract, universal, "liberal" norms. Both Left and Right justify their interventions on this basis, at least in public. Both have far too low a threshold. American lives (and the lives of the adversaries that we kill in the name of "saving" them) are deemed by both parties to have far too little value.
Oceans aren't much of a defence any more. As the planet warms, General Winter will be of less assistance to polar nations as well.
Oceans represent a huge practical barrier to invasion and always have. The Taiwan straight is only 90 miles wide, but so far it has prevented a Chinese invasion. Across 3000+ miles of ocean, an amphibious invasion of the mainland United States would be essentially impossible. Sure, an adversary could bomb our coasts, but the last 40 years have taught everyone that air power alone doesn't win wars. Short of nuclear ICBMs (for which we ought to build a missile defense system) our oceans remain a great protective shield.
Countries don't need to be invaded any more to be defeated, or at least removed from the chess board. So oceans no longer matter as much.
From the safety of a seat overseas, one could:
- Use cyber warfare - permanently damage a significant portion of the electricity grid (e.g. have reactors go critical, open sluices enough to catastrophically damage downstream dams). Brick multiple manufacturer's entire vehicle fleets. Cause Starbucks' coffee machines to malfunction.
OR, much more destructive:
-help convince 40+% of an electorate to distrust their political institutions, or that their enemies are their domestic political opposition, or that their democracy is less important than political victory, etc.
I sure do regret that Bush et al have made such a mess out of the humanitarian interventionism doctrine.
I know that for Americans, this has mostly equated to loss of life and budget + opportunous attacks from all ideological sides equating every American action with imperialism.
But for us who grew up in countries such as Croatia, where US was the key player (diplomatically and militarily) stopping ethnic cleansing and genocide, that interventionism saved lives. There is a reason why we still today trust US more than Germany or France and why wanted to join the NATO. And why our soldiers are in Poland right now. Something is lost when the best we can come up with is “preserve territorial integrity, but what happens within borders is fair game no matter how bad it gets”.