Americans don't understand sovereignity | Cheryl Hudson | Battle of Ideas North 2026

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Thank you, Claire. Um, now let me frame my six minutes around the claim that sovereignty in any meaningful sense barely exists anywhere at the moment. I think it matters, I just don't think it's there. And I want to explore that claim in the context of the decline of the American empire.

[00:00:22]We hear a lot about the crisis of the American-led international order, um, and everything about it really seems to be up for grabs, you know, it is really losing its coherence. The attack on Iran is only the most recent example of this lack of coherence. I don't think that the US has attacked Iran because Iran is strong and posing an unprecedented level of threat to the region.

[00:00:50]Rather, Iran was attacked in this moment because it is weak. It It has a collapsing economy, it's internally divided, it's fraught with social unrest, um, and it's increasingly isolated in the region, um, with weakened proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, and a lost ally in Syria. And its strategic partners, Russia and China, are not yet able to move decisively in the region.

[00:01:19]In other circumstances, Iran's weakness and isolation would provide the US with leverage at the negotiating table. Instead, the US has escalated to military action, and I see this as a demonstration not of strength, but as evidence of American weakness.

[00:01:39]Um, it reflects an insecurity, I think, about American power from the inside.

[00:01:46]The astonishing lack, I mean, the astonishing lack of strategic clarity about the reasons for the war is just a small part of the problem. It's not simply a matter of poor leadership or bad decision-making. I think it reflects a deeper, um, structural problem in the way that American sovereignty now operates. And I want to explain very briefly how the reason for its weakness by examining the nature of sovereignty and how it's operated in American national history.

[00:02:20]Now, generally, sovereignty operates in two different but connected senses. On the one hand, there's a national sovereignty or the capacity of the state to act. This is the power of institutions, of the military, and of economic reach. On the other hand, there's popular sovereignty, which is the authority that resides in and emanates from the people. And these two forms of sovereignty were brought together, perhaps for the first time, in the American Revolution, and were meant to operate together, and for a long time they did.

[00:02:55]The American founding rested on the idea that the people possess the ultimate right to govern themselves, while the state possesses the capacity to act meaningfully and independently on their behalf.

[00:03:09]But there's another ingredient. What animated the relationship between these two forms of sovereignty was a clear national purpose grounded in the aspirations of the people themselves.

[00:03:22]So, the Declaration of Independence articulated that purpose as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which was understood to mean the flourishing of human life with within a unified political community made possible by civic virtue.

[00:03:41]In other words, when popular right and state capacity or state power operate together for a common purpose, sovereignty is meaningful.

[00:03:54]But today, that relationship has broken down. And this is not something that happened this week or even this century, um, it started to erode decades ago.

[00:04:06]During the Cold War, anti-communism justified an enormous expansion of military, diplomatic, and economic power across the globe. The Soviet Union was a unifying external threat that aligned this expanded state capacity with a broadly shared national narrative about freedom and political legitimacy.

[00:04:30]But that alignment fractured, and if I had to pinpoint the initial rupture, I would put it at the Vietnam War. The The Vi- Vietnam was not simply a military defeat for the US. It exposed the limits of the Cold War narrative.

[00:04:46]For the first time, large numbers of Americans began to question whether the power of the state was truly acting in the name of the people or in pursuit of the principles that the nation claimed to embody.

[00:05:03]In many ways, the confusion that we see today is the long historical aftermath of that rupture.

[00:05:11]Neither side of the culture wars, uh, which by the way first emerged in the confusion of the 1970s, but neither side fully understands sovereignty in this relational sense. Both liberal globalists and neoconservatives detach power from the nation and from national purpose and from any requirement for democratic consent of the people.

[00:05:35]Both sides are forced to operate within their own hollowed-out or zombified versions of sovereignty.

[00:05:43]The irony is that Trump's Trump's populist appeal lay in his claim that American elites had abandoned the nation and the American people in favor of global ambitions.

[00:05:56]Yet the paradox of his presidency is that he has proven unable to reverse that trajectory, um, and in many ways he's continued it and extended it.

[00:06:06]The United States and everyone else no longer knows what national power is, um, or what it's for, um, and how to make it, uh, legitimate.

[00:06:17]Thank you.

[00:06:19]>> [applause] >> Thank you very much. Thank