The Declaration of In(ter)dependence

In international relations, states’ independence cannot emerge in a vacuum. It is always relational: it depends on external conditions and opportunities, as well as on the relations among the members of the new polity being created. In other words, independence both requires and feeds on interdependence. The independence of the United States, and the Declaration that proclaimed it 250 years ago, are no exception.

As historian David Armitage brilliantly argued, the document was also – if not primarily – a dual “Declaration of Interdependence”: between the United States of America and “the powers of the earth,” among whom the new nation was assuming “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”; and among the members of this new nation, who “mutually pledge[d] to each other [their] Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor.” True independence thus rested on mutual dependence among the members of the new polity and on joining (and contributing to) the community of nations, together with the rights, duties, and indeed mutual dependencies that such membership entails.

Over the years, this interplay between independence and interdependence has frequently been reaffirmed and, to some extent, mobilized by American political and intellectual figures. In 1933, for example, when presenting the Farm Act, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace invoked the need for a “Declaration of Interdependence … a recognition of our essential unity and of our absolute reliance one upon another”.

In the 1970s – the decade in which a new era of global integration was set in motion – various “Declarations of Interdependence” were drafted, many of them ecological manifestos. Some appeared deliberately during the bicentennial of the 1776 Declaration. Among them, was the text drafted by the liberal historian Henry Steele Commager, presented to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, and endorsed by numerous members of Congress, NGOs, and UN agencies.

Paraphrasing the original Declaration, the preamble to Commager’s text stated that “when in the course of history, the threat of extinction confronts humankind, it becomes necessary for the people of the United States to declare their interdependence with the people of all nations.” “We must join with others to bring forth a new world order,” the document continued. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that the inequalities and injustices which afflict so much of the human race are the product of history and society, not of God or nature; that people everywhere are entitled to the blessings of life and liberty, peace and security, dignity, and the realization of their full potential; that … all the peoples and nations of the globe should acknowledge their interdependence and join together.”

In the following years, and particularly after the end of the Cold War, the phrase “new world order” would acquire a very different meaning. The United States would also make several attempts to escape the nexus between independence and interdependence: frequently acting unilaterally; embracing double standards to international law, which seemed to apply to others but not to itself; and declining to join – or, in the case of the International Criminal Court, actively opposing – efforts to extend the reach of multilateral global governance.

Global interdependence, however, remained an inescapable fact of life. In the strategic realm, nuclear weapons had created one of the most paradoxical conditions of modernity, rendering security dependent on a massive relinquishment of sovereignty: on accepting dependence on decisions made by others. In the economic realm, transnational, multi-stage supply chains connected, and made mutually dependent, different parts of the world as never before. Global finance created a condition in which the pension of an Italian retiree in Modena could be linked to a forty-year mortgage taken out by a young couple in Oklahoma.

Despite its efforts to escape this condition, even the United States, the preeminent power in the system, was inextricably entangled in this web of interdependencies. Its security – and indeed its survival – was, de facto, partly in the hands of others; its economy depended on an expanding public debt increasingly financed by foreign investors, whose percentage rose from 1% of U.S. GDP in 1970 to 35% in 2020. Its soaring private consumption – and, to some extent, its democratic stability – relied on industrial outsourcing, expanding imports and external deficits, cheap consumer goods, and low, stable inflation.

Unrealistic as it is, Trump’s “sovereigntism” is an attempt to free the United States from these interdependencies or to leverage them to a unilateral U.S. advantage. “We are defending America’s sovereignty without apology,” the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) bombastically proclaimed. “We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations,” echoed Trump’s second NSS, last November. This sovereignty is allegedly restorable by destructing supply chains via tariffs and industrial insourcing, or through the creation of an impenetrable antimissile shield – a “golden dome” – making the United States invulnerable, unassailable and “great again.”

The rejection of interdependence abroad is matched by its repudiation at home. Democrats are not fellow Americans who happen to hold different political views; they are “the enemy within,” intent on “destroying our country,” Trump has claimed. “Their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” the president shockingly declared in his most recent State of the Union address. There is, in other words, no mutual pledge of lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Perhaps for the first time in American history, the White House is occupied by a president who does not even pretend to articulate a common and unifying message; who not only makes no effort to heal the fractures of a deeply divided country but repeatedly rubs salt into the open wounds of a polarized America.

Independence without interdependence loses its original meaning. It becomes a jingoistic celebration of the worst excesses of a nation that, in order to grow, prosper, and flourish, has had to accept its place in the world and to confront its own fissures and divisions. By abandoning both international and domestic solidarity and by pretending to escape the constraints of interdependence, or to exploit them in order to impose its will coercively on others, Trump and the U.S. Right are not honoring the true spirit of the Declaration of Independence. They are, in fact, reversing its signficance, and ultimately betraying it.