The hardest case for treating other people as real is the one where they live on the far side of a border, under another government, and may even be on the other side of a fight. The argument's answer is that the rule does not change with distance: a civilian abroad is as real as a neighbor, so the same recognition owed a fellow citizen sets limits on what may be done across a boundary. Defending a community against being coerced from outside is legitimate on exactly the grounds that fund courts or public health. What is not legitimate is a permanent war industry that needs conflicts to keep going, or force aimed at a foreign population rather than the regime coercing them, because that population is precisely who the obligation is owed to. So the test for any use of force is whose foreclosed standing it actually protects, kept honest by how it is fought rather than by what it is called.

The political community is not the only political community. Different communities interact under conditions where mutual recognition is harder, slower, and more contestable.

Defense derives from [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality) and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) (Technology). If mutual recognition grounds the moral framework within a political community, the question is how that recognition reaches people governed by other communities — people with the same basic vulnerabilities but different institutions for coordinating their lives. International relations are not exempt from the recognition-failure-as-wrong logic; they simply make recognition harder to achieve. Technology ([§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)) matters because a population's weapons and infrastructure determine which other populations it can affect, and at what stakes. A population with nuclear, cyber, biological, or orbital reach therefore has recognition obligations across that reach, on the same logic [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) applies across time.

Those obligations are not exhausted by war. Trade can shift environmental and labor costs onto people outside a polity's borders; migration policy can treat displaced people as burdens rather than as subjects whose conditions are at stake; climate policy can consume a shared atmosphere while leaving others with its consequences. The chapter does not derive a world state or a single global program. It does derive a constraint: a political community may not secure its own conditions by systematically offloading their costs onto people beyond its border. Where cross-border problems require common institutions, those institutions must recognize the affected populations rather than merely aggregate the interests of the states with the most power.

A defense procurement program whose contractor margins, lobbying spend, and revolving-door movement of officials all grow during peacetime (when the threat assessment that originally justified it has receded) is the case the section is written against. A defense budget that scales down with the threat and scales up with it, and whose contractor base does not lobby Congress to keep particular conflicts open, is the framework-compatible direction. The present account does not pick a dollar number; it picks the responsiveness pattern.

Three results follow.

*Defense is shared infrastructure when it protects the political community; it is extraction when it turns against the people and institutions it is supposed to protect.* The argument is not pacifist. It derives the legitimacy of defense directly from the political community's obligation to maintain itself against external coercion, on the same logic as the legal system or public health. The constraint runs not on the existence of defense but on its political economy: where defense industries operate as permanent extractive concerns rather than as wartime-mobilized capacity — where defense investment outruns the threat assessment that would justify it, where contractor margins and the revolving door between procurement and industry exceed democratic oversight, where ongoing-conflict postures are favored because the industry depends on conflicts continuing. In each of those cases, defense has been turned against the arrangement it was built to protect. Eisenhower's January 1961 farewell address articulated the prediction sixty-five years before this section was written; the argument names why the pattern is structural rather than accidental. The defense political-economy also has a workplace-and-employer register: military command structure is the most stringent Private Government instance in any §9 domain (Anderson, *Private Government* 2017): service members surrender substantial civilian rights under UCMJ for the duration of service, and the contractor workforce of the US Defense Department exceeds the uniformed service-member count; the [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) enforcement-employer-architecture critique applies symmetrically at the military-employer register. The race-stratification of defense burdens applies on both axes. Externally: US enlisted ranks have disproportionate Black and Latino representation, historical segregated service (Truman EO 9981 1948), and Vietnam-era educational-deferment draft inequities. Internally: militarization of domestic policing (the 1033 Program transferring military equipment to police departments) and racially disproportionate domestic deployment continue the pattern the Kerner Commission diagnosed in 1968. Mills's *The Racial Contract* (1997) and *Black Rights / White Wrongs* (2017) develop the canonical analytic engagement with the racial-stratification structural record. The [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) 'Government work discharges the obligation' result names the foundational form this section inherits: defense is one of the ways the political community discharges the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) obligation, not a function each citizen separately discharges in private capacity.

*The proportionality between deterrence investment and recognition-building investment is the load-bearing constraint.* Recognition-building investment (diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange, joint scientific work, refugee-and-migration capacity, treaty architecture) is the means by which mutual recognition scales across arrangement boundaries at all. Deterrence investment is the means by which the political community maintains its standing under conditions of recognition-failure. Both are required, and the framework derives that political communities whose deterrence investment systematically outruns their recognition-building investment will systematically over-produce conflict, on the same logic that engagement-extraction over-produces information-environment degradation in [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>). The constraint is the proportion, not either side standing alone.

*Cross-boundary recognition-failure follows the same logic as within-arrangement recognition-failure, located at greater distance.* Civilians of other arrangements, refugees, populations under occupation, and future participants of any arrangement currently being put at risk are participants whose constitutive vulnerabilities the framework has already established. Operations that produce mass civilian casualties, that destroy the institutions on which other populations' continued participation depends, or that foreclose the future of an arrangement that has not itself committed recognition-failure of comparable magnitude are precluded on the framework's own terms. The just-war tradition's discrimination, proportionality, and last-resort constraints are not a separate moral system grafted on; they are what the recognition-failure logic looks like when the failure is located across arrangement boundaries.

This yields a single diagnostic at the level of cause: any use of force across the boundary must answer whose foreclosed standing it protects. A war of annexation or resource-seizure answers no one's (it extends the aggressor's reach by foreclosing the seized population's standing) and is unjust on its face; a war that halts the wholesale foreclosure of a population, the enslaved or the exterminated, answers in the clearest terms the logic admits, because slavery and extermination are the total foreclosure of the constitutive standing the obligation protects. The diagnostic is not met by the actor's stated aim, which is always couched as liberation; it is met by structure: whether the response built recognition first, targeted the foreclosing regime rather than the foreclosed population, and bound itself to the surrender it offered. Cause and conduct remain distinct axes: a war can answer the diagnostic at the level of cause and still fail it in conduct, and a just cause launders no atrocity.

That the diagnostic is answered structurally follows from where the obligation lands. The constitutive vulnerabilities [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) governs are borne by individuals, not by regimes; recognition therefore belongs to the person, at every scale from the household to the political community. Two consequences follow. First, where another arrangement forecloses its own participants (denying the subsistence conditions [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derives, or coercing them directly) the framework's first-line response is the recognition-building investment this section has already made load-bearing: aid, and the installation of the subsistence floor, extended to that population so far as the governing regime permits delivery. Force is the residual, and when it is reached it is targeted at the regime that forecloses, never at the population it forecloses, because that population is precisely the set of subjects the obligation is owed to, and to make war on them is to commit the cross-boundary recognition-failure the operation purports to answer. Second, the ought that force compels is not derived from the offending regime's conduct (deriving an ought from that would be a category error) but is the obligation [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) already establishes; force compels compliance with a standard fixed independently of the regime it constrains. That standard is the recognition of the regime's participants as subjects, which at this distance is the protection of their possibility-space across the boundary: the same criterion [§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) applies to internal coercion, one obligation worked at two ranges.

The same individual-locus fixes where liability to force ends: liability tracks the active threat, so a genuine surrender withdraws it and force pressed past that surrender inverts the moral position. The framework's full account of combatant liability — surrender and its terminus, perfidy, and the limits that hold the line — is derived in [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>), where the in bello conditions are worked out; its staging against the moral-equality-of-combatants tradition belongs to [§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>), where that debate is joined.

The just-war tradition reached for what this section recovers structurally. Augustine's *City of God* and Aquinas's treatment in the *Summa* (II-II, q. 40), Vitoria's lectures on the Indies and Suarez's reworking, Grotius's *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* (1625), and Walzer's *Just and Unjust Wars* (1977) in modernity each located the binding force of legitimate use of force in either divine authorization, natural law, or a cosmic moral order standing behind the apparatus. Eisenhower's farewell address sits in the lineage with its warning that the same apparatus could be turned against the arrangement it was built to protect. The Inversion is the same one §6 ran on the divine attributes: the constraints the tradition derived from a transcendent ground (just cause, discrimination, proportionality, last resort, legitimate authority) are what political life generates in plain view, once the participants on both sides of the boundary are correctly identified as subjects whose constitutive vulnerabilities are governed by the same [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) logic. The constraints are real, demanding, and constitutive of what a political community can coherently do across its own boundary: answerable to the conditions [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) already established, not to a backup ontology.

*The framework engages the international-relations-tradition objections from three directions.* Three counter-traditions are developed in full at [§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>): the pacifist tradition (Tolstoy, *The Kingdom of God Is Within You* 1894; the historic peace churches' Mennonite and Quaker witness; Gandhi; Hauerwas, *The Peaceable Kingdom* 1983), the realist tradition (Thucydides on the Melian Dialogue; Hobbes, *Leviathan* 1651, ch. 13; Morgenthau 1948; Mearsheimer 2001), and the cosmopolitan tradition (Kant, *Perpetual Peace* 1795; Rawls's Kantian extension in *The Law of Peoples* 1999; Beitz, *Political Theory and International Relations* 1979, as the Rawlsian-international-justice founder; Nussbaum's capabilities-extension in *Frontiers of Justice* 2006 Part II; Pogge, *World Poverty and Human Rights* 2002 institutional-cosmopolitanism; Habermas, *The Postnational Constellation* 1998/2001 and *The Divided West* 2006 discourse-ethical extension; McMahan, *Killing in War* 2009 revisionist just-war on combatant equality; May, *Aggression and Crimes Against Peace* 2008 analytic just-war; Buchanan, *Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination* 2004 on intervention and recognition; Klein, *The Shock Doctrine* 2007 on defense-industry-capture political economy; Held 1995; the modern transnational-institutionalist literature). The framework grants the central concession in each case. Pacifism's diagnostic on lethal force as recognition-failure is granted: every use of force is a recognition-cost, and an architecture that treats force as routine rather than as the residual response to recognition-failure already underway reproduces the failure it claims to prevent. Realism's diagnostic on anarchy is granted: cross-boundary recognition under anarchy is harder, slower, more contestable, and routinely fails. Cosmopolitanism's diagnostic on cross-boundary scope is granted: the recognition obligation does extend across boundaries ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) together require it), and transnational institutional architecture is one framework-compatible implementation. Where the framework parts is on the load-bearing claim of each: the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) protective obligation against external coercion is itself a recognition obligation pacifism's refusal of defense leaves unaddressed; the empirical record of treaty architecture, alliance behavior, and successful diplomatic resolution under anarchy contradicts realism's collapse of cross-boundary recognition into impossibility; and the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) rights-protection derivation runs through political-community-level architecture rather than its dissolution. The framework converges with pacifism on recognition-cost, with realism on harder cross-boundary conditions under anarchy, and with cosmopolitanism on cross-boundary scope; it parts from each on whether the conclusions they draw from those concessions follow.

What remains open. Treaty design, alliance architecture, force structure, doctrine, posture, specific weapons-system policy, and defense-budget levels remain design questions. So do framework-compatible reform paths for the defense industry: in-house government production, cost-plus contracting reform, revolving-door restrictions, concentration limits, or other approaches. The fixed constraints are proportionality between deterrence and recognition-building, exclusion of defense-industry extraction, and protection against cross-boundary failures of recognition. Designs that satisfy those constraints remain open to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) and to the relevant design literatures. Designs that violate them (deterrence investment that outruns recognition-building until it helps produce the conflicts that justify the next round of capture, or operations that cross the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) line against populations the argument is bound to recognize) are precluded.


- [9.11.1 What is Disputed](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.11.2 What is Required](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.11.3 What is Predicted](<9.11.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.11.4 What is Confirmed](<9.11.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.11.5 What is Concluded](<9.11.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [9.10.5 What is Concluded](<9.10.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.11.1 What is Disputed](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
