Image: US President Donald Trump, original image captioned ‘Long live the King’ courtesy of the White House, posted to social media accounts on 19 February 2025.
Sovereignty has been central to the identification and condemnation of crimes of aggression and annexation, and underpins the accountability of states for upholding human rights. It is the essential foundation of international law. The whole superstructure of the institution of international law depends on agreement that sovereignty is real. That consensus is now wobbling alarmingly.
Donald Trump’s contrarian understanding of the concept of sovereignty was apparent during his first term as president. Notions of international law and self-determination didn’t trouble him as he traded people and land in pursuit of national interests. Trump’s recent shocking reversal of policy and disinterest in sovereignty considerations in Gaza and Ukraine shouldn’t surprise.
Based on the European denunciations of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and calls for a Palestinian state, it would seem that they don’t share Trump’s understanding of the concept of sovereignty. The key to the difference is whether sovereignty is understood to be a real thing.
Sovereignty is a socially constructed institution. It only exists as a thing if everyone agrees on the rules, obligations, duties, rights, and authorities that it entails. That is, if humanity suddenly disappeared, the issue of sovereignty would vanish. Sovereignty has no physical substance or material reality.
Nevertheless, since the beginning of the twentieth century, sovereignty has taken specific form and meaning in international legal language. The sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin’s theory popularised new terms like sovereignty, ultimately producing a new political language appropriate for the modern state. Since, the international community has increasingly treated sovereignty as real and as determinative in both domestic and international politics.
It seems improbable that Trump has engaged with the history of political philosophy that saw sovereignty emerge as the foundational idea of the modern state, or with Bodin’s innovative application of the idea of sovereignty to the commonwealth. Likewise, it seems unlikely he has an appreciation of the further development of the concept of sovereignty over the centuries by Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a host of other theorists.
Trump’s first term actions should have alerted the international community that his concept of sovereignty was constructed on different rules from the prevailing understanding. Once agreement on the constitutive parts of sovereignty broke down, it was always going to become less relevant.
The 1981 UN Security Council resolution 497 effectively declared Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights illegal. In 2019 however, President Trump formally recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which had been seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.
In a 1975 advisory decision, the International Criminal Court concluded that neither Morocco nor Mauritania had sovereignty over Western Sahara. At the time, Western Sahara was legally regarded as a non-colonised territory with Spain the de jure administering state. Yet, in 2020, and in return for Morocco’s recognition of the state of Israel, Trump proclaimed US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara.
People and land were exchanged without consultation.
The concept of sovereignty that the international community accepts as being at the core of international law, can be seen as being less important to Trump. Before Trump, Europe and America consistently endorsed the inviolate nature of sovereignty; treating it as though it was a law of nature like the laws of relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics in physics.
Now Trump has exposed sovereignty as being socially constructed and inessential, and disposable, in relations between states. When we look at Trump’s second term foreign policy, it is clear that for him Ukraine’s sovereignty is not a solid thing, nor does he feel obliged to honour the Palestinian claim of a right to a sovereign state.
Perhaps the President’s understanding can be illuminated through the infamous Melian episode during the Peloponnesian War. Often regarded as the first statement of the realist school’s gospel, as it highlights amorality and power, and dismisses a divinely-ordered state of affairs, the Melian episode is in fact didactically more subtle than that.
Thucydides’ Athenian general tells the oligarchs he confronts that “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” However, following this frequently referenced quote, the Athenian goes on to say, “Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty, as compared with those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious”. This would resonate with Trump.
The Athenian adds that submission is the logical step, “because you would [then] have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you”. In other words, in the circumstances, the best outcome for all would be for the Melians to surrender their sovereignty to the Athenians without a fight, in order that the citizens of Melos could live as subjects rather than as the slaves as they would be following defeat.
Trump’s utterances on the removal of the Palestinians and over the failure of Ukraine to submit to Russia’s demands before the invasion occurred are consistent with the Athenian arguments. By pursuing some rationally unachievable goal against a superior force, the Palestinian and Ukrainian leaders have brought avoidable disaster on their peoples. For Trump these political leaders are delinquent.
Similarly, his offer and threats concerning Greenland and his conviction Canada will join the Republic have their origins in the same logic expressed by the Athenians; it is more sensible to surrender sovereignty for the protection of being the subjects of a great power. His insistence on their submission to American rule is for Trump just logical.
The simplistic amateur pseudo-psychological explanations of Trump’s foreign policy – ranging from his being obsessed with strongmen to acting like a property developer – dangerously overlook his systematic approach to sovereignty, albeit one that might be instinctive, and which Trump might not be able to articulate fully.
Understanding Trump’s attitude to sovereignty is the first requirement for operating in his world. Finding diplomatic language that preserves the core consensus on sovereignty, but makes working with Trump possible, is going to be the great challenge.
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