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American Heritage interviews Ralph Peters: You’ve argued that nineteenth-century concepts of international relations may be outmoded. In fact, aren’t you pretty skeptical about national sovereignty, international organizations, and international law?

The idea of absolute state sovereignty is relatively new, and it derives from agreements among kings, emperors, kaisers, and czars for their mutual benefit. What we’re left with from the state making of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe is a legacy that tells us we cannot intervene in states as they slaughter their own citizens because they’re sovereign. By that logic, Hitler would have been perfectly legitimate as long as he killed only German Jews. It’s patently flawed logic. Any state that benefits only a dictatorship, oligarchy, or clique, that oppresses, brutalizes, and even massacres elements of its own citizenry, has no legitimate claim on sovereignty—period. Sovereignty is fine for contemporary Japan, the European states, or, for that matter, India. Mexico is now coming along and trying very hard. But states like Iraq, Milosevi«c’s Yugoslavia, and a number of African thugocracies have no legitimate claim on sovereignty.

http://www.americanheritage.com/xml/2003/1/2003_1_feat_0.xml

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