In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two. In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.

Sovereignty is widely considered near but not quite absolute. An ongoing debate is tied to the question of whether there ought to be legitimate grounds for intervening (including with military force) in the internal affairs of other countries, for example, to prevent genocide, defined as the purposeful destruction of a group of people based on thei

Furthermore, as seen within the larger framework of circulatory histories, when the imperative to compete for survival in the modern world spread to other societies, several Asian societies with dominant traditions of dialogical transcendence sought to confessionalize their religious traditions for national mobilization and exclusivity.