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If all countries in the world have natural sovereignty (and yes, they all do), then how can Donald Trump legally put sanctions on Iran (sanctions for the benefit of Israel)? [1]. What would my late college PoliSci teacher think of those Iran sanctions? (He taught us about national/natural sovereignty). He would actually hate them, as he told our class, several times. As an indicator, he once said that even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had natural sovereignty, and he was no fan of Saddam’s.

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[1] About sovereignty: “The sovereignty alluded to by Jefferson is of an altogether more robust sort, and is not contingent on the whim of any foreign power, monarchical or otherwise. This modern notion of sovereignty is usually traced to the Peace of Westphalia, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War, Europe’s last great religious war. So long and devastating was that war, which included most of the powers of continental Europe in a no-holds-barred tilt between Catholic and Protestant powers, that the exhausted powers of Europe were forced to reconsider what it meant to be a nation at all. The reluctant conclusion was that, in recognition of irreconcilable differences between Catholic and Protestant forces, and in acknowledgement of the fact that these two great religious forces were likely to endure, each side needed to accept the other’s right to govern themselves as they saw fit. This meant that, in theory at least, interference by one nation in another’s internal affairs as a result of ideological or dogmatic differences was no longer to be countenanced; every independent nation, no matter how large or small, was to be regarded as an equal in the conduct of its internal affairs and its diplomacy.” — from an article titled “Can a Nation Exist Without Sovereignty?” by Charles Scaliger, January 13, 2017, at https://thenewamerican.com.