On: Sovereignty

Sovereignty is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot. Politicians invoke it when they want to sound principled. Nations wave it like a flag when they feel threatened. And yet, when you look closely at who actually gets to exercise it, the word starts to feel less like a universal right and more like a privilege reserved for the powerful.

I am writing this from the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. I came here knowing what I know, and honestly, that awareness alone sits heavy. You walk around this island and see American infrastructure, American businesses, and American flags. And then you remember that the people here cannot vote for the president of the country whose flag flies above them. That is not a distant political fact when you are standing in the middle of it. It is frustrating in a way that is hard to put into words.

Puerto Rico has existed in this in-between space since 1898, when the United States acquired it from Spain through a treaty negotiated between two foreign powers. The island was transferred like property. The Supreme Court later formalized this through the Insular Cases, which invented the legal category of “unincorporated territory,” describing Puerto Rico as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” That phrase, written in 1901, is still the legal foundation of Puerto Rico’s political reality today. More than 400,000 Puerto Ricans have served in the U.S. Armed Forces since 1917. Five have received the Medal of Honor. And still, if you live on this island, you cannot vote for the Commander in Chief you may be asked to serve under. The people here have voted on their status multiple times. Congress has never acted on the results. Unresolved status is a governance strategy.

But Puerto Rico is not alone in this condition.

On January 3rd, 2026, the United States military entered Caracas, Venezuela, bombed its capital, and extracted its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, who was transferred to federal custody in Brooklyn, New York. President Trump stated afterward that the U.S. is “going to run the country” until a transition of power could be arranged.

Let me be honest about how I feel about this. Maduro is an authoritarian. He rigged elections, brutalized his opposition, and oversaw the collapse of a country. I am not interested in defending him. But watching this unfold, I found myself somewhere between conflicted and deeply disturbed. Not because of Maduro, but because of the precedent. The United States entered a sovereign nation without its consent, without a UN mandate, and without a declaration of war, and then the president said we are going to run the country now. Run it how? With what plan? A transition to what, exactly? As an American, I have to ask what this actually does for me, for us. Because it does not feel like justice. It feels like a demonstration of power with no clear road out. The operation was conducted entirely under a U.S. federal indictment, making it unilateral by design. At the UN Security Council emergency session that followed, Russia’s representative argued that the U.S. was proclaiming itself a supreme judge with the right to invade any country, label culprits, and enforce punishments irrespective of international law.

You do not have to be a defender of Maduro to ask the obvious question: if sovereignty is a right, who decides when it can be suspended?

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible, or more painful, than in the question of Palestine.

I will be direct here because I think the moment calls for it. I have watched videos of children being killed. Not as statistics. As children. On my phone, on my timeline, in my face. And I keep asking the same question: for what? Both Israel and Hamas need to find a way to stop the killing. That part feels clear to me. But so does this: the United States needs to support an independent Palestine.

Palestine has a population, a defined territory, a governmental structure, and declared statehood in 1988. The UN General Assembly recognized its right to self-determination in 1974. As of 2025, 157 of the 193 UN member nations recognize it as a sovereign state. By any democratic logic, that represents consensus. And yet Palestine is not a full UN member. In April 2024, twelve of fifteen Security Council members voted in favor of Palestinian membership. The United States cast the lone veto. One country overruled the expressed will of most of the world. The U.S. has now done this 19 times on matters related to Palestine since 1972. Each time, the message is the same: Palestinian statehood is not for Palestinians or international law to decide. It is subject to American approval. And American approval has not come.

What is happening there is the systematic elimination of a population, and the country that lectures the world about sovereignty and human rights keeps standing in the way.

I study power and institutions. And what I see here is not a contradiction in the accidental sense. It is the system working exactly as it was built to work.

The same country that entered Venezuela uninvited in the name of justice has blocked Palestinian statehood nearly two dozen times in the name of negotiation. The same country that calls sovereignty sacred when it applies to American interests calls it conditional everywhere else. The same country that grants citizenship to Puerto Ricans and then denies them a vote has appointed itself the sole arbiter of which peoples deserve to exist as nations.

Sovereignty, at its core, means something simple: the right of a people to determine the conditions of their own lives. Not to be transferred between empires. Not to be invaded when inconvenient. Not to need the approval of a more powerful nation just to exist.

By that standard, there are a lot of places in the world, including one island I am currently standing on, where that right is still waiting to be honored.

The question is not whether these people deserve it. They do. The question is who decided they could not have it? And whether we are willing to be uncomfortable enough with that answer to actually do something about it?

Talk soon,

Tyreke