In Overcoming the Constraints of Sovereignty, Sidney Goldberg illustrates the ethical issues involved in sovereignty with a metaphor:
Remember the movies in which a gang of criminals would rob a bank and then outrace the county police to the border of another county, cross the border, and leave the county police fuming in frustration because their authority prevailed only in their own county? I used to think this was the most stupid situation from an ethical point of view, even though the law was being upheld.Take this hypothetical case: You’re walking along the border of a neighboring country and there’s nobody in sight on either side, except for a guy who’s beating up an old lady in the neighboring country. You’re bigger and stronger than that guy and you know you could stop him, but to do so you would have to illegally cross the border. What to do? It’s a no-brainer because saving the woman’s life is on a much higher ethical plane than abiding by the laws of sovereignty. So you chase off the perpetrator and save the woman’s life.
What if two guys with baseball bats are beating up the old lady, who certainly will die from the blows? In this case, you don’t go to her help, because they will kill you, too, and there will be two deaths instead of one.
Extrapolating to the big picture, where the United States finds a people who are suffering under the yoke of a tyrant, and it is a tyrant that we can eliminate and thereby ease the suffering, we should go ahead and do it. This would violate the laws of sovereignty in favor of the obligations of ethics. This action should be taken unless it causes even more deaths and suffering than the existing tyranny. In that case we have to put it on a back burner until a better opportunity for change occurs.