Trump Has a Peculiar Definition of Sovereignty
The president claimed at the UN that defending a country’s sovereignty is the best way to defend its democracy. But his interpretation of sovereignty mostly aggrandizes himself.
Donald Trump shows little interest in most points of political philosophy, but he’s revealed an obsession with at least one term. “If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty,” he said in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly . He fixated on the same term in his previous two speeches in that forum. , in announcing that the United States would no longer recognize the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, he declared, “We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy.” In his speech, he proposed that the UN’s success “depends on a coalition of strong and independent nations
