The Global Fight for Freedom

These pages hold one primary conviction: the overconcentration of power yields human suffering. History offers scant counterevidence.

Regional autonomy disperses power. Our founders knew this better than anyone, their aspirations having been thwarted by monarchy an ocean away. Still, a union of the states was required to meet external threats.

Convinced of that, James Madison and the Federalists proposed giving Congress the power to veto any law passed by any state, without limit. His own Constitutional convention voted him down. Alexander Hamilton went further: he argued states "ought to be abolished" as sovereign entities, though they could remain as "subordinate jurisdictions."

But it was Jefferson — of course, Jefferson, who wasn't even in the room — who best articulated a vision for balance, writing decades later:

"…the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally…It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself…that all will be done for the best."

The states' rights debate has raged ever since. A decade ago, it seemed the Federalist view had finally prevailed, decisively.

But today, the debate has been given new life — courtesy of the Trump administration's excesses.

And fresh bloodshed half a world away reveals why that is a very good thing for our Union.

Editor's note: still one long story this week, not three — Pakistan pulled me further than planned. Three-story format resumes next week, and I mean it this time.

Flashpoints

1. Bloodshed in the Himalayas, Echoes at Home

For more than a month this summer, thousands of protesters camped beneath the pristine peaks of the Himalayas outside Rawalakot, a hill town in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, refusing to leave until the government in Islamabad answered them. The internet has been down for more than 50 days. ATMs sit empty. Banks remain closed. When residents tried to march earlier this month, police cut the connection again — the second blackout in a week.

The unrest has coincided with a regional election held in staggered phases through the summer. Officials say more than 60 people have been killed since June, including seven security personnel.

In 1947, British officials drew the line dividing India and Pakistan in a matter of weeks, handing princely states like Kashmir a forced choice: join a Muslim-majority Pakistan or a Hindu-majority India. Kashmir's own maharaja, a Hindu ruling a Muslim-majority population, chose India. Pakistan invaded within months, and two nuclear powers have fought multiple wars over the territory ever since.

Each outbreak of violence is met with a familiar chorus in the West – the sins of colonialism blamed for modern day strife. The Pakistani government has its own villain — always India. A convenient enemy for a government that needs one.

But this time, nobody is buying it. This time, it's Pakistanis shooting Pakistanis, in the part of Kashmir Pakistan itself controls, over a grievance that has nothing to do with New Delhi.

The British empire is long gone. The system bleeding today is the one Pakistanis built for themselves: a 1955 scheme fused four historic provinces into a single bloc, built to outnumber the more populous Bengali east.

Power, centralized. Provincial interests, marginalized.

A House Divided

America has faced open rebellion over local grievances too. In 1832, South Carolina nullified a federal tariff it called ruinous; President Andrew Jackson readied troops, but Congress built an exit instead — Henry Clay's compromise tariff — and the Union held.

That compromise couldn't last forever. It took a civil war, three decades later — 620,000 dead — to finally settle how much power Washington could claim over the states, and centralized power won. Every rule has exceptions: the concentration of power to end slavery is a rare case vindicated by history.

But Pakistan wasn't built for compromise; its reckoning ended with fracture.

In 1970, East Pakistan's Awami League won a clean majority in the country's first fair election on a platform of a less centralized government and strong provinces. Islamabad's answer was to nullify the results rather than hand power to an East Pakistani-led government. What followed was the brutal “Operation Searchlight” crackdown and a war that killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

A country split in two, and Bangladesh was born.

Back in Islamabad, the lesson went unlearned. President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government wrote Pakistan a new constitution in 1973 — and extended the same logic to the territory it still held. Its charter for Kashmir set up a government run from Islamabad: a 45-seat assembly reserving 12 seats for refugees who live elsewhere in Pakistan, non-residents, many with ties to the military dictatorship now cracking down.

The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) formed in Kashmir in 2023 demanding more regional autonomy — Pakistan's version of states' rights. This year it asked Islamabad to abolish the 12 seats, and Islamabad answered by outlawing the group under counterterrorism law and arresting its leaders.

At War on All Fronts

But Kashmir is just the clearest recent proof of a fundamental flaw in Pakistan's governance model that is causing chaos and instability across the entire nation.

The security state is fighting on every border at once. On the Western Afghan frontier, tribal territories that have never had a real seat in Islamabad's government now supply the Pakistani Taliban's fighters and sanctuary. Deadly clashes have broken out repeatedly this yeat.

In the Northern Swat Valley, a suicide bomber walked into a peace rally earlier this month — residents who'd gathered specifically to demand the government stop the violence — and killed 17 people.

In the South, where decades of mineral wealth have flowed to Islamabad while the province remained dirt poor, July was the deadliest month on record: more than 400 dead as the separatist Balochistan Liberation Army escalates their violent campaign.

Each of these conflicts could have been solved politically decades ago through regional autonomy, proportional representation, and dialogue. Islamabad's response to all three fronts has been ruthless military crackdowns. And this month, authorities banned foreign media from reporting inside Kashmir altogether.

The Debate Returns to America

In 1965 Lyndon Johnson delivered the Democrats’ verdict on states’ rights, telling Congress "there is no issue of states’ rights or national rights — there is only the struggle for human rights." He was righting a real wrong: a century of laws that used state power to disenfranchise Black Americans.

But that view of federal power became progressive doctrine for the next six decades: states' rights, a relic of the past.

Politicians abandoned the argument. The courts didn't. For three decades after Johnson's speech, the Supreme Court mostly deferred to Washington — but starting in the mid-1990s, it began enforcing real limits again, ruling that Congress couldn't force states to carry out federal programs, and, in 2012, that threatening to strip a state of its entire Medicaid funding was "a gun to the head," in Chief Justice John Roberts's words — joined, tellingly, by liberal justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Now Democrats are rediscovering states' rights. When Trump federalized California's National Guard over California Governor Gavin Newsom’s objection last year, Newsom sued, invoking the same limits the Court had spent decades building. Minnesota's Tim Walz has reached for the same argument in his own standoff with the administration over federal immigration enforcement.

Whether either man believes in federalism as a principle or just found it useful is beside the point. That Jefferson’s wisdom once again has champions on the left is what matters.

Half a world away, the human suffering continues — not coincidentally, where the debate never really started.
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What to watch: whether Islamabad ever lets the JAAC's own stronghold vote at all. On August 24, Pakistan's new Kashmir government was sworn in — 46 lawmakers, not the full 53 — while seven constituencies in Poonch and Sudhnoti, the districts at the center of the protests, still hadn't voted. The government formed anyway.

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