The recent American military operation in Venezuela—striking targets across that nation, capturing its president and his wife, then transporting them to face trial in the United States—represents far more than another episode in Washington’s long and troubled relationship with Latin America. It signals something altogether more disturbing: the moment when national sovereignty, that cornerstone principle of the post-Westphalian order, became openly discretionary. When the most powerful state in the international system can simply reach across borders, seize a sitting head of state, announce plans to “run” that country temporarily, and appropriate its oil reserves for sale, we are witnessing not merely the violation of established norms but their deliberate dismantling.
What makes this particularly ominous is not the act itself—powerful states have always bullied weaker ones—but the brazenness with which it has been justified and the speed with which it may be normalised. When sovereignty shifts from being an inviolable right to a privilege contingent upon good behaviour (as defined by the powerful), we enter a world where the fundamental architecture of international relations collapses into something more primitive: a hierarchy of power dressed in the language of law.
The Fiction We Agreed to Believe
Sovereignty has always been somewhat fictional, of course. Small nations have never enjoyed the same freedom of action as large ones. Yet the fiction mattered. It established boundaries, not simply suggestions. It created expectations. It meant that even when powerful states violated the sovereignty of weaker ones, they felt compelled to construct elaborate justifications, to seek multilateral cover, to at least pretend that rules applied universally. The fiction constrained behaviour precisely because everyone agreed to maintain it.
What happens when the fiction is abandoned? When the United States can label a foreign head of state a criminal, send special forces to capture him on his own soil, bomb military and civilian infrastructure, then announce plans to seize and sell that nation’s primary resource—all without meaningful international opposition or even a pretence of UN authorisation? We’re not simply watching one country violate another’s sovereignty. We are watching the explicit assertion that sovereignty itself is conditional, that it can be revoked by those with sufficient military power, and that this revocation requires nothing more than the invocation of crimes, real or imagined.
The implications ripple outward in ways that most commentary has failed to grasp. This is not about Venezuela alone, nor even about American foreign policy specifically. It concerns the entire framework through which we have organised planetary coexistence since the mid-seventeenth century. That framework, flawed and frequently violated though it has been, at least established a principle: borders matter, internal governance is not subject to external veto, and the use of force across borders requires extraordinary justification. Strip away that principle and what remains?
The Geometry of Power
We are moving toward a world structured less by law than by concentric circles of power. At the centre sit those states whose sovereignty remains genuinely inviolable—not because of legal protections but because they possess nuclear arsenals, vast economies, or strategic depth that makes external interference prohibitively costly. Russia, China, India, major European powers: no one is sending commandos to Moscow or Beijing to arrest their leaders, regardless of what crimes they might be accused of committing.
In the next circle outward we find states whose sovereignty is contingent—respected when convenient, violated when expedient. These are nations that control resources others covet, that occupy strategic geography, or that have made themselves ideological enemies of more powerful neighbours. Their borders exist on maps but can be crossed by drones, special forces, or economic blockades whenever a great power decides that “law enforcement” or “counter-terrorism” or “humanitarian intervention” requires it. Venezuela has just been pushed decisively into this category, but it will not be alone for long.
Further out still are the truly weak: failed states, micro-nations, territories whose sovereignty is so threadbare that it barely registers. These places have never enjoyed meaningful sovereignty in practice, but at least the legal fiction offered some protection. As that fiction erodes, even that minimal shield disappears.
This geometry is not new, but its explicit acknowledgement is. For decades, powerful states maintained the pretence that sovereignty applied equally to all. They violated it routinely, of course, but they did so covertly or with elaborate justifications designed to preserve the appearance of legal compliance. What we’re witnessing now is the transition from hypocrisy to honesty—and honesty, in this instance, is far more dangerous than hypocrisy ever was.
The Sliding Threshold
Once you accept that borders can be crossed to capture a head of state for trial, the threshold for such operations inevitably slides downward. The logic is inexorable. If a president can be seized for alleged narcotics trafficking and corruption, why not a defence minister for war crimes? Why not an intelligence chief for cyber-attacks? Why not a corporate executive for environmental destruction or a journalist for incitement? The category of “wanted fugitive” expands to accommodate whatever political objectives the powerful wish to pursue.
This is how precedents work. They establish not merely that a specific action was permissible in a specific context, but that a type of action belongs within the repertoire of legitimate state behaviour. Today’s extraordinary measure becomes tomorrow’s routine operation. The targeted killing of alleged terrorists by drone, once controversial, is now barely remarked upon. The freezing and seizure of foreign state assets, once rare, has become a standard tool of economic warfare. The abduction of foreign leaders will follow the same trajectory unless something arrests its normalisation.
What arrests such trajectories? Historically, either catastrophic consequences that shock the international system into creating new constraints, or the mobilisation of sufficient countervailing power to make the behaviour too costly to continue. Neither condition currently obtains. The catastrophe has not yet arrived—or rather, it arrives in instalments too gradual to trigger systemic reform. And the countervailing power exists but remains fragmented, uncertain whether to resist the erosion of sovereignty or to exploit the same permissive environment for its own purposes.
The Contagion of Justification
Other major powers are watching closely. China has long maintained that its own concept of sovereignty should permit intervention in what it considers its sphere of influence. Russia has already demonstrated in Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine that it regards borders as negotiable when its perceived security interests are at stake. Turkey has conducted military operations in Syria and Iraq. Iran operates through proxies across the Middle East. India and Pakistan have fought repeated wars over Kashmir, each claiming the entire territory as rightfully theirs. Thailand and Cambodia have engaged in armed confrontations over the Preah Vihear temple complex, with both nations asserting historical claims that supersede current boundaries.
What the American operation in Venezuela provides is not a new capability—these powers already possess the means to violate their neighbours’ sovereignty—but a new permission structure. If Washington can openly seize a head of state, appropriate a nation’s resources, and announce plans to oversee its governance without triggering meaningful international sanction, why should Beijing or Moscow or Tehran exercise restraint when their own interests are at stake?
The language of justification will vary. Washington speaks of narcoterrorism and restoring democracy. Beijing might invoke the protection of Chinese nationals abroad or the recovery of historically Chinese territories. Moscow talks of defending Russian-speakers and preventing NATO encirclement. Tehran frames its interventions as resistance to imperialism and support for oppressed populations. Ankara justifies cross-border operations as counter-terrorism. New Delhi might cite the need to pre-empt threats from hostile neighbours. Bangkok and Phnom Penh both invoke ancient temple rights and colonial-era cartographic injustices.
The specific rhetoric matters less than the underlying claim: that sovereignty can be overridden when sufficiently important interests are at stake, and that each state gets to define for itself what constitutes a sufficiently important interest. This is not a recipe for international order. It’s a recipe for the disintegration of order into competing spheres of coercion.
The Arming of the Vulnerable
Weaker states are not passive observers of this transformation. They will respond, and their responses will make the world considerably more dangerous. The most obvious reaction is to acquire deterrents. If sovereignty cannot be defended by law, it must be defended by capability. This means missiles, air defence systems, cyber-weapons, and—most alarmingly—nuclear weapons or the protection of nuclear-armed patrons.
We have already witnessed this dynamic. North Korea’s nuclear programme exists precisely because Pyongyang watched what happened to non-nuclear states that crossed Washington and concluded that only a credible deterrent could guarantee regime survival. Libya abandoned its nuclear programme and was later subjected to regime change. Iraq was invaded on the pretext of possessing weapons it did not have. Iran has pursued nuclear capability to the threshold of weaponisation precisely because it understands that nuclear states are not invaded.
As sovereignty becomes more obviously conditional, more states will conclude that nuclear weapons or their equivalent are essential. This proliferation will occur not only horizontally—more states acquiring weapons—but also vertically, as existing possessors expand their arsenals and develop new delivery systems. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, already fraying, will become increasingly irrelevant. Why should a vulnerable state forgo the ultimate deterrent when the powerful demonstrate daily that international law offers no protection?
Beyond nuclear weapons, we should expect a surge in other forms of defensive capability. Advanced air defence systems, anti-ship missiles, drone swarms, cyber-warfare units—all the instruments that make external intervention costly without requiring the economic and technological base to project power globally. These are asymmetric deterrents, designed not to win wars against great powers but to make the initiation of such wars unappealing.
This arms race will be accompanied by a rush to secure external guarantees. Vulnerable states will seek binding security commitments from powerful patrons, trading bases, resources, or political alignment for promises of protection. We are already seeing this in the Pacific, where island nations are being courted by both Washington and Beijing with competing offers of security assistance. We see it in Africa, where former colonial powers vie with China, Russia, and Turkey for influence through arms sales and military training. We see it in Latin America, where the Monroe Doctrine has been revived by Washington even as China expands its economic footprint and Russia maintains military ties with sympathetic governments.
The result is not a stable balance of power but a patchwork of overlapping and contradictory commitments, each carrying the potential for miscalculation and escalation. When a state under the protection of one great power comes into conflict with a state under the protection of another, what prevents local disputes from metastasising into great power confrontations? The answer, historically, has been a shared commitment to sovereignty and non-intervention that allows local conflicts to remain local. Remove that commitment and every border dispute becomes a potential flashpoint between nuclear-armed rivals.
The Weaponisation of Everything
If sovereignty is negotiable, so too are all the arrangements that depend upon it. Property rights, for instance. When the United States announces plans to seize and sell Venezuelan oil, it’s not merely appropriating a resource but asserting that ownership itself is conditional. What a state possesses can be taken if that state is judged to have forfeited its sovereign rights. This opens extraordinary possibilities for economic warfare.
Sanctions, once a tool of diplomatic pressure, have evolved into instruments of economic siege. Asset freezes that were temporary measures have become permanent confiscations. The Russian central bank’s foreign reserves, accumulated over decades, were frozen and are now being discussed as a source of funding for Ukraine’s reconstruction. This is not a fine or a penalty imposed through legal process; it is simply the taking of property because the taker has the power to do so and believes the cause is just.
Other states are drawing the obvious conclusions. Why hold reserves in currencies that can be frozen or seized at the whim of their issuers? Why participate in a financial system where property rights are revocable? The answer is that increasingly they will not. We’re witnessing the fragmentation of the global financial system into parallel structures: dollar-based, euro-based, yuan-based, and various regional arrangements designed to circumvent the dominant currencies altogether. Cryptocurrencies, barter arrangements, gold transactions, shadow banking networks—all these proliferate as states and firms seek to insulate themselves from economic weaponisation.
This fragmentation carries costs. The global financial system, for all its flaws, has enabled an extraordinary expansion of trade and investment by reducing transaction costs and creating predictable rules. Fragment that system and those costs rise sharply. Capital flows less freely. Trade becomes more expensive. Investment retreats behind political boundaries. The efficiency gains of globalisation erode, and with them the prosperity that has lifted billions from poverty over recent decades.
But efficiency is not the only value, and prosperity means little if it can be confiscated at any moment. States will sacrifice economic optimisation for security, even if that security is partial and expensive. They will build redundant systems, stockpile critical resources, and cultivate alternative partnerships—all of which reduce aggregate wealth but increase resilience against economic coercion. The world becomes poorer but less vulnerable, at least for those with sufficient resources to construct these defensive architectures.
The Domestication of Repression
There’s a domestic dimension to this unravelling that deserves attention. When external sovereignty becomes precarious, internal governance tends toward authoritarianism. The logic is straightforward: if foreign powers are seeking to undermine or overthrow your government, then internal opposition becomes suspect. Dissidents are not simply political rivals but potential collaborators with external enemies. Civil society organisations that receive foreign funding are not advocates for reform but instruments of regime change. Journalists who criticise the government are not exercising press freedom but providing ammunition to hostile powers.
This is not paranoia. It’s often an accurate reading of geopolitical reality. Foreign powers do fund opposition movements. They do use civil society as a vehicle for influence. They do amplify critical journalism to undermine governments they oppose. The problem is that recognising these realities provides a perfect justification for crushing all dissent, whether it has foreign connections or not. The threat of external intervention becomes a licence for internal repression, and the two dynamics reinforce each other in a vicious spiral.
We see this pattern repeating across the globe. Governments facing external pressure—whether through sanctions, diplomatic isolation, or military threats—invariably tighten their grip domestically. Opposition parties are banned or neutered. Independent media are shuttered or brought under state control. Civil society is strangled through legal restrictions and selective prosecution. The security apparatus expands, and with it the reach of surveillance and the brutality of enforcement.
The tragedy is that this response, while predictable, makes the original problem much worse. Authoritarian regimes are more likely to engage in the kinds of behaviour—corruption, human rights abuses, aggressive foreign policies—that attract external intervention in the first place. But the intervention itself eliminates any incentive for reform. Why liberalise when doing so might empower groups that will collaborate with foreign powers seeking your overthrow? Why tolerate dissent when it provides cover for external subversion? Why allow a free press when it becomes a weapon in someone else’s information war?
The result is that populations suffer twice: once from their own government’s repression, and again from the external pressure that justifies and intensifies that repression. The Venezuelan people, for instance, have endured years of economic collapse, political persecution, and social disintegration under Maduro’s government. Now they face American military strikes, the seizure of their national resources, and the prospect of their country being “run” temporarily by a foreign power. Which of these afflictions is worse is beside the point; they compound each other, and the population bears the accumulated weight.
This dynamic is not confined to obvious authoritarian states. Even democracies facing external threats tend toward securitisation and the curtailment of civil liberties. Thailand’s periodic military coups have often been justified partly through reference to external threats and the need for national unity in the face of foreign interference. Cambodia’s slide toward one-party rule has been accompanied by rhetoric about defending sovereignty against Western manipulation. Turkey’s democratic backsliding has been framed as necessary to resist foreign-backed coup attempts and terrorism.
When sovereignty becomes precarious, the space for internal pluralism contracts. Governments of all types find it easier to justify exceptional measures, emergency powers, and the suspension of normal legal protections. And once these measures are in place, they tend to persist long after the immediate threat has passed, because they serve the interests of those who wield them.
The Hollowing of Institutions
The formal architecture of international order—the United Nations, international courts, multilateral treaties—remains intact. Buildings still stand. Diplomats still meet. Resolutions are still passed. But the substance drains away, leaving only the shell. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of sovereignty’s erosion: the institutions designed to protect it continue to function even as they become increasingly irrelevant.
The UN Security Council, paralysed by great power competition, cannot authorise action when the powerful wish to act and cannot prevent action when they do not. International law becomes a weapon wielded selectively: invoked against adversaries, ignored when inconvenient, reinterpreted to accommodate whatever the powerful have already decided to do. Treaties are signed and ratified, then violated or withdrawn from when they constrain behaviour. Courts issue rulings that are celebrated when they support one’s position and dismissed as political when they do not.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Hypocrisy at least acknowledges that there are standards being violated. What we’re witnessing is something far more corrosive: the transformation of law and institutions into instruments of power politics, stripped of any pretence to universality or impartiality. The rules-based international order, so frequently invoked by Western powers, reveals itself to be neither rules-based nor orderly, but simply the projection of particular interests dressed in the language of universal principles.
The danger is not merely that this undermines the institutions themselves, though it certainly does that. The deeper threat is that it destroys the possibility of creating better institutions in the future. If international law is merely power disguised as principle, why should weaker states invest in its development or respect its constraints? If multilateral institutions are simply forums where the strong impose their will on the weak, why participate except under duress? If treaties are binding only on those too weak to violate them, why negotiate in good faith?
The answer, increasingly, is that they will not. States will pursue their interests through whatever means are available, constrained only by the balance of power and the threat of retaliation. Cooperation will be transactional and temporary, lasting only as long as it serves immediate interests. Trust—already a scarce currency in international affairs—dries up almost entirely. In such an environment, even those problems that can only be addressed collectively—climate collapse, pandemics, mass displacement, systemic financial shocks—are treated as arenas for zero-sum manoeuvring. We haggle while the house burns, then debate who owns the ashes.
Borders as Scars
Living in Thailand for the past two decades, watching this region from the vantage point of ASEAN rather than Brussels or Washington, one becomes acutely aware that borders are not simply lines on a map. They are scars of older conflicts, negotiations between kingdoms, impositions of distant colonial administrators, compromises between generals who could not defeat each other but were unwilling to concede defeat. They are artefacts of a past that refuses to stay buried.
The long-running quarrel between Thailand and Cambodia over the Preah Vihear temple is a case in point. A Khmer sanctuary on a cliff, awarded to Cambodia by the International Court of Justice in 1962, yet accessible more readily from Thai territory. The dispute has flared into armed clashes, diplomatic spats, and a procession of maps drawn, redrawn and weaponised. Each side reaches for history to buttress its claim: medieval kingdoms, old treaties, colonial maps, sacred geography. The temple becomes not just stone but symbol: of identity, of grievance, of humiliation, of pride.
Look at a map of almost any border region and you will find similar stories. Pieces of land that mean more than their economic value because they have become repositories of collective memory. Kashmir, the South China Sea, the Balkans, Sudan and South Sudan, the Sahel, the South Caucasus—an atlas of contested meanings. Borders in these places are not just delimitations of sovereignty; they are containers for accumulated trauma, curated by politicians who find utility in keeping old wounds raw.
Yet for all the passion that clings to them, modern borders rest upon one comparatively simple bargain: the line may be arbitrary, even unjust, but everyone agrees not to cross it with guns. Grumble, litigate, argue at UNESCO, send lawyers to The Hague if you must, but do not send tanks. That was the tacit pact—honoured imperfectly, but honoured often enough that wars of conquest became the exception rather than the rule.
When powerful states demonstrate that even this minimalist pact no longer binds them, every simmering dispute receives a new injection of danger. If sovereignty has become conditional, why should a government in Phnom Penh trust that Thai politicians will forever resist the temptation to inflame nationalism over Preah Vihear when domestic politics grow fragile? Why should Bangkok trust that future Cambodian leaders, perhaps emboldened by external patrons, will not seek to revise understandings that currently hold? If Washington can abduct a president from Caracas, what message does that send to generals in Naypyidaw, or to those in Islamabad, or to any leadership that fears it might one day be designated a pariah?
Unchecked, this logic transforms every border into a potential battlefield, even when nobody truly wants a war. All it takes is one miscalculation, one spark in a region thick with dry tinder, and a local skirmish can escalate into something far more dangerous—especially once great powers have embedded themselves as patrons and guarantors on either side of the line.
When the Map No Longer Matches the Territory
The deeper paradox here is that while sovereignty frays at the edges, our civilisation remains trapped in a worldview that treats the nation-state as both natural and eternal. Children in most countries are still taught to imagine the world as a jigsaw puzzle of coloured shapes, each with its flag, anthem, and purported “national character”. They learn history as a story of these shapes: their rise and fall, their battles and alliances, their heroes and villains.
Yet the most significant flows on this planet don’t respect those shapes at all. Capital sluices through offshore accounts and derivative instruments with scant regard for customs posts. Data races under oceans and through satellites, indifferent to passports. Greenhouse gases ignore visas. Viruses attach themselves to human hosts, not nationalities. Arms, narcotics, rare earths, talent, and ideas move through channels defined less by law than by networks of power, technology and opportunity.
In such a world, what does it mean to insist that sovereignty is sacrosanct in some domains but optional in others? We arrest individuals at airports for offences committed physically thousands of kilometres away, citing universal jurisdiction. We cheer (or at least accept) drones crossing borders to kill “high-value targets”. We treat oceans as commons where navies patrol to secure shipping lanes for global trade. But then we feign shock when the same logic is inverted and deployed selectively against states themselves.
This cognitive dissonance is not accidental. It’s a structural feature of industrial economism—the worldview that has globalised over the past two centuries and now sits at the heart of almost every major institution. That worldview treats the planet as a stock of resources, human beings as inputs to production and consumption, and political arrangements as instruments for maximising throughput. Borders are useful in such a system so long as they stabilise expectations and safeguard property; they become dispensable when they obstruct access to what is deemed essential for continued expansion.
In that sense, the Venezuelan episode is not an aberration but a logical extension of an established pattern. When a state is recast as a malfunctioning business unit—its leadership labelled criminal, its assets declared forfeitable—intervention appears not as aggression but as corporate restructuring by other means. A hostile takeover, but with cruise missiles and special forces. The language shifts from sovereignty to “stability”, from non-intervention to “responsibility”, from plunder to “recovery of stolen assets”. Meanwhile, the underlying premise—that the oil must flow, and that those who can guarantee its flow are entitled to determine its ownership—remains largely unquestioned.
The Illusion of Safety
If this were merely a story about states, one could at least pretend that ordinary people might remain safely insulated from the storm. They will not. When sovereignty becomes negotiable, the zone of impunity widens—for some—and insecurity deepens—for most.
For those at the apex of power, the erosion of constraints can feel liberating. New instruments become available: targeted sanctions against rivals, extraterritorial arrests, seizures of foreign assets, information operations designed to tilt elections abroad. For a while, the system appears to reward those with the nerve to use its newfound permissiveness most ruthlessly.
But power in this era is not what it used to be. It is less a solid object one can hold than a turbulent field in which one participates. A state that authorises assassinations abroad cannot be entirely surprised when its own officials become targets. A security apparatus that uses spyware against foreign dissidents will eventually turn it inward on domestic opponents, and perhaps on internal factions of the regime itself. A financial system that allows the confiscation of a rival’s reserves simply can’t guarantee that its own reserves will be inviolable should the political winds change.
In that sense, what appears to be sovereignty’s degradation “over there” is actually a rehearsal for its degradation “here”, wherever “here” happens to be. The precedent doesn’t remain confined to its original context. Tools built for exceptional circumstances trickle down into everyday governance. The emergency becomes the norm. And once certain methods are seen to work, they are copied by actors across the spectrum: governments, corporations, cartels, insurgent groups, transnational movements. The repertoire of coercion expands, and with it the sense that nothing is truly anchored.
Fear thrives in such an atmosphere. Fear of losing territory. Fear of losing status. Fear of economic collapse. Fear of cultural extinction. Leaders learn to harness that fear—at home and abroad—to justify measures that, in quieter times, would have been unthinkable. Walls go up, literal and metaphorical. Surveillance architectures deepen. Education narrows. Public discourse hardens into clashing certainties. The more precarious sovereignty feels on the outside, the more brittle societies become on the inside.
What Comes After the Hierarchy of States?
If sovereignty is no longer the organising principle of the international system, what replaces it? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the core uncertainty that will shape the lives of our children and grandchildren.
One possibility is a return, in updated form, to zones of influence: empires without the old flags but with many of the old habits. Already we can discern overlapping constellations coalescing: an American-led security and finance network; a Chinese-centred economic and infrastructural sphere; a looser set of Russian, Turkish, Iranian and Gulf alliances; emergent regional configurations in Africa and Latin America. Formal borders remain, but effective authority bleeds across them, carried by investment, debt, military bases, media ecosystems, and digital platforms.
In such a world, local sovereignty depends largely on which patron you can attract and how dispensable you are to their grand design. For a small state sitting atop cobalt, lithium, oil, or strategic waterways, “choice” becomes a highly constrained matter. Align with one pole or another and accept the terms, or try to play them off and risk becoming the next venue for a proxy conflict. Thailand’s art of strategic ambiguity—balancing ties with the US, China, Japan and its ASEAN neighbours—may become harder to sustain in a climate where great powers are less tolerant of hedging.
Another possibility, hinted at in various experiments but not yet realised at scale, is that authority fragments downward as well as upward. Cities, regions, indigenous nations, transnational professional guilds, religious networks, digital communities—each begins to assume functions once monopolised by the state: dispute resolution, welfare provision, education, security, identity. Some of that’s already happening. Mayors negotiate climate action independently of their national governments. Corporations run private intelligence services and shape public policy. Tech platforms regulate speech more directly than most parliaments. Armed non-state actors provide “governance” in territories where the official state has withered.
The danger here is not anarchy in the romantic sense but a patchwork of overlapping sovereignties, many of them opaque, unaccountable, and deeply captured by concentrated wealth. The citizen becomes a subject of many rulers at once—governmental, corporate, algorithmic, ideological—none of whom can be straightforwardly voted out of office. Accountability evaporates into a maze of jurisdictions and contracts.
Is there a third path? Could we imagine a planetary compact in which borders still exist, but sovereignty is reinterpreted as stewardship rather than dominion? This is something I have been arguing for years. In such a frame, the primary obligation of any governing authority—whether state, city, or community—would be to sustain the conditions for life and dignity across interconnected ecosystems, rather than to maximise its own short-term advantage. Intervention across borders would not be legitimised by economic interest or ideological antipathy, but by a shared, enforceable commitment to protect that web of life when it is under grave threat.
At present this remains largely aspirational rhetoric, easily co-opted and repackaged by the very forces driving extraction and militarisation. Perhaps it’s too utopian. Yet fragments of this sensibility can already be seen in indigenous land rights movements, in certain regional attempts at environmental protection, and in the more courageous pockets of global civil society. The issue is whether these fragments can congeal into something stronger before the current dispensation exhausts itself in escalating competition and cascading systemic breakdowns.
A Different Kind of Question
When sovereignty was treated as fundamental, the typical questions in international affairs revolved around how to balance it against other values: human rights, free trade, collective security. Now that sovereignty is being treated as optional, a more unsettling question emerges: who, if anyone, speaks legitimately for the Earth as a whole?
At present the answer is: nobody. The United Nations aspires to that role, but it is structurally beholden to the very states whose competition is driving planetary destabilisation. Multinational corporations operate globally, but their primary fiduciary obligations remain parochial—anchored to shareholders, not to humanity or the biosphere. Civil society organisations occasionally speak in universal terms, but they lack coercive power and are themselves often entangled with state and corporate interests.
If no actor holds legitimate authority at the planetary scale, yet the consequences of our collective behaviour are planetary in scope, what happens as states pursue ever more openly predatory strategies under the banner of conditional sovereignty? Does the absence of an overarching arbiter doom us to a century of intensifying conflict punctuated by periodic attempts at ad hoc coordination when disasters strike? Or could the erosion of old certainties generate enough disillusionment with state-centric thinking that new forms of planetary governance become imaginable?
We should be wary of simple answers. Centralised global government, imposed in the name of efficiency or survival, would almost certainly entrench the very logics of control and extraction that have brought us to this point. Yet a pure return to jealous, armed sovereignties, each guarding its own turf while the shared atmosphere fills with heat and the oceans with acid, is hardly viable either. Somewhere between those poles lie arrangements we have not yet seriously explored because our conversations remain trapped in categories invented for another era.
An Invitation to Rethink the Frame
For most of recorded history, people did not think in terms of nation-states. Allegiance was owed to clans, cities, empires, caliphates, kingdoms, or spiritual communities. The idea that a coloured shape on a Mercator projection could command supreme loyalty, and that its government held a monopoly on legitimate violence within a fixed boundary, is relatively young. If that idea is now losing its grip, the appropriate response is not nostalgia for a golden age that never really existed. It is curiosity: what else might be possible?
I am not suggesting that we romanticise borderlessness. Those who live in refugee camps, in occupied territories, in zones where the state has collapsed, know that the absence of functioning sovereignty can be as deadly as its abuse. Lawless spaces quickly become playgrounds for the most ruthless. The challenge is not simply to remove an old organising principle but to evolve it.
Perhaps the starting point lies less in drafting new charters and more in interrogating the stories we have come to accept about what makes a polity “real”. If a line on a map can be unilaterally ignored by a powerful state today, what does that say about the legitimacy we ascribe to that line? If a government can be stripped of its right to control its own resources by external decree, what does that say about the stories we tell regarding ownership and entitlement? If communities are bound together by shared vulnerabilities that do not align neatly with borders—such as river basins, coastal zones, wildfire belts, migration corridors—should not those communities have some standing in shaping how power is exercised across those spaces?
One way or another, the informal hierarchy now emerging—where some sovereignties are sacrosanct and others revocable—will not and cannot remain stable. Hierarchies built on raw power rarely do. The question is whether we drift into whatever comes next through inertia and fear, or whether we allow the present turbulence to unsettle our assumptions enough that genuinely different architectures of belonging, responsibility and authority can be imagined.
The American strikes in Venezuela, the skirmishes around Preah Vihear, the creeping normalisation of cross-border raids, blockades, cyber-sabotage and asset seizures: these are not isolated incidents. They are early symptoms of a deeper shift in how our species organises power on a finite, interdependent planet.
If national sovereignty has become an optional extra, then the real work is no longer about defending or discarding it in the abstract. It’s about asking, with as much honesty as we can muster: what kinds of borders, what forms of authority, and what stories of legitimacy might allow eight billion people—and the more-than-human world on which they depend—to coexist without descending into permanent low-grade war?
That question is not a matter for diplomats alone. It belongs in classrooms, village gatherings, boardrooms, temples, parliaments, and online communities. It belongs to farmers whose crops fail when the rains do not come, and to dockworkers whose livelihoods depend on the vessels that cross those increasingly fraught maritime boundaries. It belongs to teenagers in Caracas and Bangkok and Nairobi and Warsaw who are inheriting a world in which the old certainties are dissolving, and who, whether they know it yet or not, will be the ones to decide what replaces them.
Perhaps the most dangerous assumption we can make right now is that nothing fundamentally new is possible—that we are condemned to replay, with higher stakes and smarter weapons, the dramas of empire and rivalry that have occupied us for millennia. The erosion of sovereignty, unsettling as it is, might also be read as a brutal invitation to stop treating the existing order as the terminus of history and start treating it as one provisional experiment among others.
What comes next is not written. But if we leave its design entirely to those who benefit most from the present dispensation, we should not be surprised if the result looks like a more technologically sophisticated version of what we already have: borders that can be crossed at will by the powerful, laws that can be suspended at convenience, and lives weighed on scales calibrated to the interests of a tiny minority.
The alternative begins, as it so often does, with a shift in the questions we are willing to ask.