Self-Defense, Rather Than Reliance, Is the Price of Sovereignty

Commentary

Perhaps every international order is born of trauma. In 1945, the world wasn’t trying to design utopia. Two world wars had killed tens of millions of people, leveled cities, and convinced many that industrial-scale war could end civilization itself. The core danger wasn’t merely aggression; it was uncontrolled escalation.

So the architects did something bold yet pragmatic: They drew a line in time. From this moment forward, they said, we freeze the map. Territory cannot be changed by force. Past conquests, expulsions, and injustices—no matter how grievous—are not endlessly relitigated. History is not erased; it is bracketed to make stable law possible.

Without that bracket, “justice” becomes a moving target. Pick any time stamp—Roman Empire, Ottoman conquests, medieval kingdoms, colonial borders—and a different claim looks righteous. There is no neutral year. “Let bygones be bygones” wasn’t naive; it was a civilizational cease-fire.

The U.N. Charter, the outlawing of aggressive war, the new sanctity of borders: These were guardrails for a future. They stigmatized conquest so effectively that even powerful aggressors learned to justify their use of force as “defense” or “liberation.” They still fought, but they lied about why. That shift alone may have saved countless lives and averted nuclear catastrophe for decades.

What the System Replaced

For most of recorded history, legitimacy was earned through performance, not granted by recognition. Conquest was frequent, but holding territory demanded more: competent administration, roads, courts, taxation, security, prosperity, and some measure of dignity. Rome understood this. So did the Ottomans at their peak. Successful Chinese dynasties along restless frontiers knew it. Even some long-lasting colonial powers eventually learned that banners alone were not enough.

The default response to a bad rule was rebellion or regicide. Legitimacy was tested daily on the ground, after the fact. People rarely asked whether a ruler had arrived legally; they asked whether life felt safer and more predictable under the new order.

After 1945, this logic was reversed. Many states in the West became more juridical entities. Recognition, sovereignty, and legal title took precedence, while past international treaties that codified relations among states relied on their power to enforce, or break, them. For much of the West and its allies, the hardest part of sovereignty—security—was outsourced to the United States: nuclear umbrella, open sea lanes, ultimate deterrent. In exchange, allies aligned politically and economically while spending far less on defense than history normally required.

Over decades, this stopped feeling like a bargain and started feeling like nature. Sovereignty came to seem more like a legal status than a lived responsibility. Defense spending looked archaic. Strategic seriousness atrophied. Politics turned inward—toward welfare, identity, and moral signaling—because survival’s hardest questions had been deferred.

None of this was irrational within the system’s incentives. But legitimacy still decays when performance fails, no matter how flawless the paperwork.

Where the Order Overreached

The post-1945 system didn’t merely seek to restrain power; it gradually assumed that it could supersede the raw incentives driving human history: fear, ambition, the need to govern competently. Law, procedure, and universal norms were expected to do the heavy lifting that had historically been done by force, preparation, and effective governance.

This rested on several fragile beliefs: that material incentives would always align with declared norms; that security dilemmas could be managed indefinitely at arm’s length; and that fear, identity, and historical grievance would steadily weaken as drivers of state behavior.

Success bred a subtle hubris: the conviction that a historically unique moment (global exhaustion after total war, unmatched U.S. power, nuclear stalemate, sustained growth) represented a new, enduring equilibrium rather than a temporary confluence.

States grew comfortable being morally outspoken yet strategically thin, normatively righteous yet materially dependent. The true costs of sovereignty—industrial resilience, credible deterrence, difficult trade-offs—were externalized. When vital economic interests were at stake, even the loudest champions of human rights often practiced selective restraint (witness decades of booming trade with China despite the Tiananmen Square massacre and ongoing repression).

The rules themselves weren’t necessarily wrong. They were simply asked to bear more weight than any legal framework ever could.

When Construct Meets Reality

Today’s headlines vividly expose these limits.

Russia invokes deep history—Kievan Rus, imperial legacy, cultural unity—to justify erasing Ukrainian agency. International law responds: Ukraine is a recognized state with accepted borders and clear popular consent.

The Chinese Communist Party claims unbroken historical continuity over Taiwan. Yet Taiwan has never been governed by the Party, and its people overwhelmingly reject unification. Again, international law prioritizes stability and consent over narrative.

But cases such as Israel reveal the framework’s blind spots. Founded after 1945 with formal international authorization, Israel entered a region that rejected its legitimacy from day one. Its borders were shaped not by mutual treaty but by wars of survival against neighbors that denied its right to exist. Territory taken in 1967 came amid an imminent multifront threat.

The postwar system assumes previous sovereignty, mutual recognition, and peace as the default. None applied here. States such as Israel thus became legal anomalies: fully legitimate yet never fully normalized. Apply the same formal rules as to Russia, and vital context vanishes. Grant total exemption, and the system’s credibility erodes.

The deeper issue is structural: The framework was designed to stabilize an existing order, not to found states amid existential conflict or adjudicate unresolved trauma. Demanding perfect consistency across radically different contexts doesn’t yield justice; it creates abstraction that obscures reality.

Strategy Catches Up

The new U.S. National Security Strategy signals that old assumptions may no longer hold. Stripped of rhetoric, and perhaps even the authors’ intent, it starts from enduring great-power competition, not inevitable convergence. Military, industrial, and technological power are treated as necessities, not relics to minimize.

Crucially, alliances are reframed as systems of shared burden. Partners must become capable, resilient, and individually credible—not just symbolically aligned. The document repeatedly emphasizes the domestic defense industry, stockpiles, surge capacity, forward deterrence backed by real force, and allies able to act independently.

This recouples sovereignty with taking ownership. Once states begin seriously rebuilding deterrence—funding it, staffing it, justifying it to their own publics—they cross a threshold. They cease being semi-protected entities within a larger order and become fully accountable nation-states again. Laws, alliances, and norms can endure, but the comforting belief that security can be indefinitely outsourced or subsidized is ending.

States long accustomed to low-cost security are being pushed back into history’s oldest bargain: Sovereignty must be paid for—in budgets, political friction, industrial trade-offs, and, when necessary, blood. No charter or treaty substitutes for readiness.

Hubris and Nemesis

Civilizations fall when they forget the conditions that made their success possible. The Greeks called this hubris: not mere arrogance, but the delusion of having escaped limits that bind everyone else.

Born wisely from catastrophe, the postwar order suspended history’s most dangerous cycles. It wasn’t a mistake, but it was incomplete. Its achievements were extraordinary. Yet sustained success quietly nurtured the hubris that raw human incentives had been replaced by rules, that power had been tamed by law, that responsibility could be outsourced indefinitely without consequence. History suggests otherwise.

Nemesis, as always, comes as a correction. When guarantees weaken, laws lack enforcement, and moral language outruns preparedness, states rediscover that survival still has a cost. Law can then no longer pretend to float above power. It is being reembedded within it, where it has always ultimately resided.

Peace remains the highest goal, but now as something actively maintained, not merely declared. Viewed this way, today’s rearmament and strategic seriousness are not signs of disorder’s collapse, but of a deeper return to order.

This moment is not revolutionary; it is deeply conservative.

We seem to be returning to enduring first principles:

• Survival precedes legality.
• Law restrains power; it cannot replace it.
• Sovereignty is as much a responsibility as a right.
• Legitimacy flows from protection, governance, and lived stability.
• History can be constrained and moderated, never erased.

What lies ahead may feel harsher. Yet it may also prove more honest and ultimately more sustainable. This doesn’t mean that we abandon higher aspirations. In fact, abandoning morality is impractical. When leaders and nations forsake morality, decline is near. Nihilism breeds rot from within and weakness from without.

As Samuel Adams wrote in 1775, “when People are universally ignorant, and [debauched] in their Manners, they will sink under their own Weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” The lasting challenge is to build systems that encourage humanity’s better impulses while restraining destructive ones, grounding lofty ideals in stubborn reality.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.