Politics & Power Quote by Richard Perle

Sovereignty, in Richard Perle's framing, is less a sacred shield than a performance contract. The line turns a bedrock principle of international order into a conditional license: states get the privileges of noninterference only if they meet a baseline standard of governance. It works because it borrows the moral language of responsibility to smuggle in a political redefinition of rights. "Entitlement" sounds like something a mature system should be skeptical of; "obligation" sounds like adulthood. The sentence isn’t arguing, it’s assigning homework.

The subtext is a brief for intervention without saying "intervention". If a regime "will not perform the role of a government" (a deliberately vague standard), then it has "forfeited" protections that would otherwise constrain outside actors. That verb matters: forfeiture implies due process has already occurred, that the world is merely collecting what is owed. It also flips sovereignty from an inherent attribute of a people into a revocable privilege granted by the international community or, more realistically, by powerful states that get to decide who has failed the job.

Perle’s context is the post-Cold War, pre- and post-9/11 moment when American strategists argued that traditional noninterference was outdated in the face of "rogue states", terrorism, and humanitarian catastrophe. The rhetoric is managerial and legalistic on purpose: it makes coercion sound like accountability, regime change like a compliance mechanism. The sharpness of the quote is also its tell; it’s a doctrine looking for a definition, and the ambiguity is the point.