The Trouble(s) with ‘Sovereignty’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, November 22, 2020

 

Some of the more intelligent observers in the United States have begun to understand that the United States committed itself to a serious blunder when the Trump administration torpedoed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (National Review has an excellent editorial on the subject.) The decision was a poor one, and the rationale — sovereignty — is complicated.

 

Though never framed in such terms explicitly, the TPP represented a U.S.-led Asia-Pacific bloc to counter the influence of an ever-more-masterful China. The United States has vacated the field, but that does not leave the field vacant, and so instead of a Washington-led counter-China bloc in the form of the TPP, the Asian-Pacific powers have just signed onto a Beijing-led counter-American bloc in the form of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, an alliance that includes many steady U.S. allies (Japan, Australia, South Korea) but will almost inevitably be dominated by its biggest national member, China, the economy of which is slightly larger than all of the rest of the RCEP members combined.

 

The sovereignty concerns related to TPP were bipartisan: President Trump cited sovereignty concerns in his arguments against it, but so did Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) who is not closely aligned with the president’s agenda. It is likely that the United States would have withdrawn from TPP irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 election: That celebrated Gibraltar of principle and steadfastness, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who praised TPP to the heavens as “the gold standard in trade agreements” in her four dozen or so public endorsements of the accord, turned against it as soon as she felt the other crazy-haired septuagenarian anti-trade populist demagogue in the 2016 election, Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), breathing down her neck.

 

There are here two relevant aspects to sovereignty. There is sovereignty in principle, in the sense that Liechtenstein reserves to itself the right to make the sovereign decision to invade Germany, and there is sovereignty in practice, about which Liechtenstein would learn a fast hard sharp painful lesson if it should attempt to invade Germany or, indeed, Montenegro. Liechtenstein has a very broad theoretical right to act but a very narrow practical ability to act. Conversely, the United States and China both are signatories to many international agreements that in principle restrain their ability to act in certain ways, which in reality provide at most a few speedbumps on the road to the pursuit of superpower self-interest.

 

The European Union is in part an attempt to deal with the question of sovereignty as it applies to Europe’s liberal democracies (some more perfectly realized than others) which in theory remain sovereign even as they cede a substantial share of decision-making to Brussels. The rationale for this is straightforward enough: The largest European economy, that of Germany, is one-fifth the size of the U.S. economy and one-quarter the size of the Chinese economy. The next-largest European economy, France’s, is smaller than that of California, No. 3 Italy has an economy roughly the size of Texas’s, and on down the list. No European nation has the military power to stand long against the United States, China, or some future aspiring hegemon.

 

From that point of view, the European Union is not an affront to national sovereignty but an amplifier of it: How much practical sovereignty could Belgium exercise outside of the European Union against economic pressure (or other pressure) from the United States, China — or Amazon? How much practical sovereignty would an independent Scotland enjoy outside of the European Union? Belgian and Scots pride may not want to concede the fact, but the answer is: approximately squat.

 

Some smaller countries manage to exercise some real sovereignty: Neither Norway, population 5.3 million, nor Switzerland, population 8.5 million, is a member of the European Union. The Norwegian krone endures in the euro era, and the Swiss franc thrives.

 

The United Kingdom believes it can better exercise effective sovereignty standing on its own, with its 67 million people and the world’s fifth-largest economy. (The falloff in those national economy rankings is pretty steep: The U.K. economy is one-half the size of Japan’s and one-eighth the size of the U.S. economy.) The United Kingdom may be right about that. It may be wrong. Time will tell. American conservatives were naturally inclined to sympathize with the Brexiteers and their insistence upon sovereignty and democracy in the face of an overweening European bureaucracy, but whether the United Kingdom can actually secure its interests more effectively outside the European Union is as much an empirical question as a philosophical one, and in any case it is likely (and desirable) that the United Kingdom will maintain very close relations with the European Union even as a non-member.

 

The foregoing examples have something useful to teach us, especially as Washington begins to discover unexpected limitations on its practical efficacy. E.g.: The Trump administration was right to identify the theft of intellectual property as a critical issue in U.S.-China relations; the president has wide authority to act in this arena, and President Donald Trump was very much inclined to exercise those powers to the fullest. And yet even with the will to act and the means to act, the Trump administration managed to accomplish almost nothing of any consequence in eliminating Chinese appropriation of American firms’ intellectual property. Partly that is a testament to the incompetence of the Trump administration and its China team, which is led by Peter Navarro, a feckless crackpot. But more important, this situation is a testament to the fact that the U.S. ability to secure U.S. interests vis-à-vis China depends upon much more than Washington’s willingness to act and the constitutional powers of the American president. Securing meaningful reform from Beijing will require a multilateral framework of precisely the sort that sovereignty-minded U.S. populists have been walking away from for years.

 

A sovereignty that undermines the ability to achieve U.S. goals is rhetorical sovereignty, not real sovereignty.

 

The question for the United States — one question, anyway — is: How should we go about preserving and expanding our ability to act not only in principle but in fact? This is a very difficult question, and one that American policymakers are in some ways poorly placed to answer owing to the narrowness of contemporary American vision. We are fixated on nation-state competitors such as China and Russia, but competitors to U.S. power and counterforces to U.S. action now include forces that are more powerful and more slippery than traditional political actors. We are reasonably adept at confronting transnational forces (some of them genuinely global) in the form of ideologies such as Communism or quasi-ideologies such as Islamism, but we are less prepared to deal with epidemics magnified by cheap and accessible travel, accelerating economic disruptions from emerging technologies, fast capital, climate change, and other factors that cannot be bribed, bombed, or sanctioned into submission.

 

Sovereignty or “sovereignty”? It is not entirely clear that Washington knows which it wants, that it can tell the two apart, or that it even understands that there is a difference.