Sovereignty Means Ukraine, Iraq, Kosovo and Libya

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law. So did the Western wars and interventions that hollowed out the sovereignty principle before Washington and its allies rediscovered it in 2022.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western governments framed the response around a single organizing principle: the inviolability of state sovereignty. Ukraine’s territorial integrity, its right to exist as a recognized state within internationally acknowledged borders, was treated as a matter of international law. Violating it was a crime. The rules-based international order depended on it.

That framing is not wrong as applied to Russia’s invasion. The invasion violated the UN Charter. On March 2, 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution ES-11/1 by 141 votes to 5, deploring Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and demanding that Russia withdraw its forces. Russia’s occupation and claimed annexation of Ukrainian territory have no legitimate legal basis under the Charter framework.

But the framing has a problem. The governments invoking these principles most loudly in 2022 spent the preceding decades doing things that are difficult to reconcile with the sovereignty principles they were now defending. Naming that contradiction does not require defending Russia. It requires being honest about what sovereignty has meant in Western foreign policy, and why its selective use matters for anyone trying to build a coherent analysis of international order.

What the Charter actually says

The legal baseline is Article 2(4) of the UN Charter: all members must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

The Charter provides two narrow routes around that prohibition. The first is self-defence under Article 51. The second is Security Council authorization under Chapter VII. Neither creates a general democracy-promotion exception, a regime-change exception, or a unilateral humanitarian-war exception. The Charter’s architecture was built to prevent individual powerful states from deciding for themselves when another state’s sovereignty may be violated.

That is the standard Western governments invoked against Russia. It is also the standard against which their own record has to be measured.

Iraq broke the rule directly

On March 20, 2003, the United States, United Kingdom, and allied states invaded Iraq. The public justification moved through weapons of mass destruction, preemptive self-defence, and eventually liberation from Saddam Hussein. The Security Council did not authorize the invasion. Washington and London tried to obtain a further resolution specifically authorizing force and abandoned the effort when it became clear it would not pass.

In September 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the invasion was not in conformity with the Charter. Asked directly whether it was illegal, he answered yes. The Guardian reported Annan’s statement that, from the UN Charter’s point of view, the war was illegal. UN News also reported his warning that Iraq demonstrated the danger of acting without Security Council approval.

The legal debate was real. Defenders of the war argued that earlier Security Council resolutions on Iraq already provided authority to use force. Most international legal opinion rejected that position. A 2022 review in Cogent Social Sciences concluded that the U.S. justifications contravened the UN Charter rules and rendered the war illegal under international law.

The weapons of mass destruction used to sell the war did not exist. The invasion shattered Iraq, killed and displaced enormous numbers of people, and destabilized the region. Iraq’s sovereignty was not violated by an official enemy of the rules-based order. It was violated by the state that now presents itself as the order’s primary guardian.

Kosovo made the exception portable

The Kosovo case is more complicated, which is exactly why it matters. In 1999, NATO launched a bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to halt Serbian state violence against Kosovar Albanians. The humanitarian rationale was not invented from nothing. Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement were real. The question is not whether the crisis was severe. It is whether NATO had legal authority to wage war without Security Council approval.

NATO’s own account says that after diplomatic efforts failed, it launched an air campaign on March 24, 1999. The campaign lasted 78 days. What it did not have was explicit Security Council authorization. A UK parliamentary evidence record described Operation Allied Force as an armed intervention in a foreign state and an intervention in its internal affairs.

In February 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. The United States recognized it. The International Court of Justice later issued an advisory opinion finding that Kosovo’s declaration of independence did not violate international law. But the Court’s conclusion was narrow. It did not rule that Kosovo had a general right to statehood, nor did it settle recognition, secession, or territorial integrity as universal questions.

The United States understood the danger of precedent immediately. In a 2010 State Department briefing, Philip Gordon said the Kosovo opinion was closely tailored to the unique circumstances of Kosovo and did not set a precedent for other regions or states.

That was the Western position: military intervention without Security Council authorization could be treated as morally necessary, support for unilateral independence could be treated as legally manageable, and the precedent could be declared non-transferable once it became inconvenient. Russia and China then treated Kosovo as precedent when it suited their own interests. Their use of the argument was self-serving. So was the Western insistence that its own exception belonged only to itself.

Libya turned protection into regime change

Libya was different from Iraq and Kosovo because the intervention began with Security Council authorization. On March 17, 2011, Resolution 1973 authorized member states to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack in Libya, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form. NATO later described its operation as support for that UN mandate.

What Resolution 1973 did not authorize was a regime-change war. Its legal frame was civilian protection. The political mission quickly became something broader. NATO’s intervention helped produce the conditions for Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow, capture, and killing. That outcome was celebrated in the West as liberation, but it also demonstrated how a protection mandate could be stretched until it functioned as a war for state collapse.

The consequences were not theoretical. Libya fragmented into rival armed authorities, became a transit zone for weapons and fighters, and helped destabilize the Sahel. In 2016, Barack Obama said the worst mistake of his presidency was failing to plan for the aftermath of Gaddafi’s ouster, while still defending the intervention itself.

That distinction is revealing. The failure was framed as poor planning after a legitimate intervention, not as a deeper problem with using a civilian-protection mandate to pursue a political outcome that shattered the target state. Libya became the model for why Russia and China later viewed humanitarian authorizations as regime-change traps. They were not wrong to see the pattern. They were wrong to use it as permission for their own coercive projects.

The pattern is selective legality

Three cases establish the pattern. Iraq was an invasion without Security Council authorization, justified through claims that collapsed. Kosovo was a NATO war without Security Council authorization, followed by support for unilateral independence and insistence that the case set no precedent. Libya was an authorized civilian-protection operation that moved into regime-change logic and left the target state broken.

These cases are not identical. They do not need to be. The common thread is that the legal framework was bent, stretched, or broken when it obstructed Western strategic aims. When the Charter was useful, it was invoked. When it blocked policy, it was reinterpreted or bypassed.

This matters for Ukraine because Russia’s invasion does not become less illegal because the United States invaded Iraq illegally. Illegality does not license counter-illegality. The Charter prohibition on aggressive war exists precisely because every state that commits aggression has a story about why its case is different.

But the Western record does reveal what the rules-based international order actually is in practice. It is not a neutral system applied consistently by disinterested guardians. It is a language of enforcement used most aggressively against adversaries and most creatively reinterpreted for allies and for the states powerful enough to write exceptions around themselves.

Consistent anti-imperialism requires one standard

Consistent anti-imperialism does not require pretending these cases are the same as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They are not the same. Russia’s invasion involved direct territorial conquest, occupation, attempted annexation, mass displacement, and a war that has killed and wounded vast numbers of people. Ukraine has the right not to be invaded, occupied, or dismembered.

What consistent anti-imperialism requires is applying the same standard of analysis across cases, regardless of whose flag is on the aircraft. The 2003 Iraq invasion was illegal when the United States and Britain did it. The Kosovo bombing bypassed the Security Council when NATO did it. The Libya operation exceeded the political meaning of civilian protection when NATO did it. The Ukraine invasion violated the Charter when Russia did it.

None of those judgments cancels the others. All of them have to stand at the same time. The alternative is not principle. It is bloc discipline.

Defending Western violations while condemning Russian violations is not internationalism. Condemning Western violations while defending Russian ones is not anti-imperialism. It is campism wearing a radical vocabulary. The test of opposition to imperial aggression is whether it survives contact with an aggressor whose enemies you also oppose.

Sovereignty means something or it means nothing

Sovereignty as a principle means something or it means nothing. If it means something, it applies to Iraq in 2003, Serbia in 1999, Libya in 2011, and Ukraine in 2022. It applies when the violator is Washington. It applies when the violator is Moscow. It applies when the victim state is politically inconvenient.

The governments that invoke sovereignty now as an absolute principle are the same governments that have repeatedly undermined it in living memory. That is not a reason to abandon the principle. It is a reason to demand that it actually be applied consistently, without the convenient exceptions that turned international law into a language of selective enforcement.

The problem is not that Western governments defend Ukraine’s sovereignty. They should. The problem is that they defend sovereignty as a universal principle only when doing so serves their own side of the global order. The principle becomes real only when it restrains the powerful as well as condemning their enemies.

Until then, the rules-based international order will remain what it has been for decades: a system where rules exist, violations are real, and enforcement depends less on law than on power.

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