Musings on Democracy and the Limits of Sovereignty

17 Apr, 2026

You may be familiar with the adage that my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins¹. The idea being, of course, that it is reasonable to conceive of one's freedom having reached its limit when one's actions would have an impact, especially an adverse one, on other people. The idea that one could inflict unprovoked physical violence upon others and justify it under the guise of personal autonomy strikes most people as absurd. Broadening our scope from literal violence to offenses less cut-and-dry tends to be where reasonable, and often impassioned, disagreements arise. For reference, see contemporary debates about almost any controversial topic, from what distinction may exist between "free speech" and "hate speech" to how much taxation a government is entitled to extract from its populace to whether your lazy neighbor should be punished for failing to maintain his property and thereby depressing the value of your own. From hot button issues to irritating yet relatively inconsequential pet peeves, the barrier between your freedom and the wellbeing of those around you as affected by that freedom is arguably at the center of most of things we find worthy to argue about. Everyone may draw a different line, but everyone agrees that a line belongs somewhere.

As Trump's war in Iran carries on, its status unsteady from one day to the next, it occurred to me that this attitude may well deserve its place in the realm of geopolitics as well. Our ill-fated 2024 election here in the United States has, for this among an embarrassment of other reasons, had an enormous effect on countless millions, perhaps billions, of people around the world, and yet the vast majority of people whose lives with which we have interfered were completely disenfranchised. Would not the dead Iranian schoolchildren² have had a vested interest in the competence of our leadership? Would not the companies whose exports were thrown into disarray have enjoyed the opportunity to offer some input on Trump's discordant tariff policies? For a country whose founding mythos rests on ideas such as "no taxation without representation³," the idea that there are people who are affected by our elections but who have no right to participate in them seems backward, almost hypocritical. Why do we enjoy the right to elect a man who sows chaos and destruction the world over? Should his antics impact merely the electorate responsible for his authority, then we have but ourselves to blame, but as we swing our foreign policy fist squarely into almost every other nose out there into which it could be swung, how much influence can we let ourselves have on the world stage before it begins to reflect poorly upon the structure of world governance?

The right of each nation to self-governance and -sovereignty is widely considered sacred and is precisely why aggressing upon other nations (by initiating a superfluous war on dubious pretenses, for example) is seen as so reprehensible. But we don't seem to hold this lofty principle with much consistency. Certainly retaliatory tariffs and the capricious termination of longstanding humanitarian aid are responsible for much suffering and death, just not with the immediacy and drama of a carpet-bombing. Why, then, do we not see such meddling in the affairs of other nations as threats to their sovereignty and wellbeing? One could certainly argue that no country is entitled to American aid, but one should be able to cogently verbalize exactly where the line is drawn between Americans serving their own interests via foreign policy and Americans serving their own interests via directly and immediately committing violence upon other nations' citizens. Both the withholding of expected humanitarian aid and the bombing of cities are, I would argue, acts of violence. I'm not saying that there is no significant difference with which to explain why one is acceptable and the other is not, but I am saying that it is not so neat and tidy that "one is war and the other is European parasites leeching off my tax dollars" is a sufficient explanation.

Is this a manifesto in favor of the dissolution of national borders and the creation of one world state? I don't think so. Certainly there are many steps between where we are now and where we'd be then. I don't think we'd need to eliminate the idea of sovereign nations altogether to achieve the ideal of treating other countries with respect. Perhaps the answer is working toward a world where the idea that other nations' citizens don't get to vote in our elections doesn't seem like a nagging little glitch in how we conceive of rights and liberty. But for the time being, the United States is wildly swinging its fists, and I don't think we ought to ignore the noses we've been striking.

#compassion #philosophy #politics