Abstract

This paper examines how historical memory shapes conflicts between national security and national sovereignty. It argues that memories of past events tend to intensify such conflicts, leading states to prioritise their own security even at the expense of another state’s sovereignty. Three cases are used to trace this pattern: the Russia-Ukraine war, the 2003 Iraq War and United States drone strikes in Pakistan. Establishing the connection between historical memory and the tension between security and sovereignty allows for a fuller account of each conflict and clarifies how competing interpretations of the past both generate and sustain disputes between states.

Introduction

National security and national sovereignty are two fundamental principles that shape relations between states. Governments have a responsibility to protect their populations and territory from perceived threats, while sovereignty establishes a state’s right to govern its territory and conduct its affairs without external interference. The United Nations Charter recognises the sovereign equality and territorial integrity of states while also restricting the use of force in international relations. In particular, Article 2(1) establishes the principle of sovereign equality, Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state, and Article 51 recognises the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence (United Nations, 1945). Although these principles can coexist, they may conflict when a state considers actions necessary for its own security to be a violation of another state’s sovereignty. Understanding this tension requires examining how states’ interpretations of the past influence their perceptions of present-day threats.

Historical memory plays an important role in how societies and governments understand both past events and contemporary international relations. Because interpretations of history can shape national identity and political attitudes, they can also influence how states perceive threats and formulate security and foreign policies. Research suggests that collective memory can influence foreign policy, national identity, interstate relations and security policy (Bachleitner, 2021; Klymenko, 2022). Countries do not always share the same interpretation of wars, territorial disputes, foreign interventions or security threats. An event that one state remembers as necessary for its defence may be remembered by another as aggression, occupation or a violation of sovereignty. These competing interpretations can influence national narratives and political decision-making, affecting how governments identify threats and determine which actions they consider necessary or legitimate. As a result, historical experiences can continue to shape security policies long after the events themselves have ended.

This tension can be observed in many cases, including the Russia-Ukraine war, the 2003 Iraq War and United States drone strikes in Pakistan. The Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates how competing interpretations of history, territory and national identity can contribute to different understandings of security and sovereignty (Kordan, 2022; Klymenko, 2026). The 2003 Iraq War provides a case in which the United States justified military intervention through perceptions of security threats, including concerns about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its previous conduct, while the intervention was contested in relation to Iraq’s sovereignty and the legality of the use of force (Sifris, 2003; U.S. Congress, 2002). Similarly, United States drone strikes in Pakistan demonstrate how experiences of terrorism and the development of counterterrorism policies after 9/11 influenced the justification of military action beyond conventional battlefields, raising questions about sovereignty when strikes occurred within the territory of another state (Shah, 2010).

Together, these cases allow for a comparison of how historical memories and interpretations of the past influence the relationship between security and sovereignty. This topic is important because competing interpretations of history can affect decisions about the use of force and make disputes over sovereignty more difficult to resolve. This paper therefore asks: how do historical memories and different interpretations of the past shape the relationship between national security and national sovereignty? It argues that historical memories and different interpretations of the past can intensify tensions between these principles by shaping how states understand threats, security needs and the legitimacy of military action. These differing perceptions can lead states to prioritise their own security even when doing so challenges the sovereignty of another country.

The paper examines three case studies to compare how historical interpretations influence states’ approaches to security and sovereignty, and to identify broader patterns across these cases.

The Russia-Ukraine War

The Russian government bases its strategic narrative on the concept of historical unity, tracing its cultural and political origins to Kievan Rus. As a powerful medieval East Slavic state centred in Kyiv from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Kievan Rus united territories stretching from modern Ukraine to northern Russia under a shared Orthodox Christian faith, common language roots and a single ruling dynasty. Moscow uses this heritage to claim that Russians and Ukrainians constitute a single people (Klymenko, 2026). Consequently, Russian leaders interpret Ukraine’s movement towards the West as an unnatural division of historically unified lands rather than a sovereign choice. Vladimir Putin expanded on this concept in his July 2021 essay, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, arguing that the shared medieval roots of cities such as Kyiv and Novgorod render modern political borders secondary to a deeper civilisational bond (Putin, 2021).

The essay also claims that a separate Ukrainian identity was created by foreign countries such as Poland and Austria-Hungary in order to weaken Russia. Furthermore, it blames early Soviet leaders for drawing internal borders that placed historically Russian lands, such as Crimea and the Donbas, inside Ukraine (Putin, 2021). Because of this history, the essay presents Ukraine’s modern ties to the West as an artificial split of one nation. Instead of treating Western integration as ordinary foreign policy, the Russian government uses these historical memories to argue that outside powers are turning a fraternal nation into a hostile base directed against Moscow (Kordan, 2022).

Ukraine remembers the past as a long struggle to survive Russian and Soviet control. A major historical memory for Ukraine is the Holodomor, the great famine of 1932–1933, when millions of Ukrainians starved under Soviet rule (Applebaum, 2017). For Ukraine, this history demonstrates that ceding control to Moscow leads to destruction.

Russia’s strategic mindset is itself shaped by historical memory, and specifically by invasions from the west such as Napoleon’s campaign in 1812 and Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1941. This fear is compounded by geography: the European Plain offers no natural barriers, such as mountain ranges, between Western Europe and Moscow. These past experiences and geographic vulnerabilities lead Moscow to interpret modern NATO expansion as a direct continuation of Western encirclement (Sarotte, 2021). Consequently, Russia views Ukraine as an essential military buffer zone that keeps Western armies far from its heartland, which drives its efforts to block Ukraine’s Western integration.

Ukraine’s outlook stems from centuries of imperial domination, systemic Russification and lost sovereignty under both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This history of subjugation leads Ukraine to perceive Russia’s current aggression as an existential attempt to rebuild a former empire and eradicate Ukrainian statehood (Kordan, 2022). Joining Western institutions such as NATO and the European Union represents Ukraine’s primary strategy for preventing historical recurrence and preserving its sovereignty.

These opposing historical memories create two incompatible views of the current war. Russia operates from a defensive mindset rooted in geographic exposure and past Western invasions, treating control over its periphery as an absolute security necessity. Ukraine operates from a mindset of self-preservation, viewing Western integration as its only safeguard against a legacy of imperial control. Because both nations interpret the conflict through these deeply ingrained historical lenses, the war becomes an existential struggle over sovereignty and regional order, in which one side’s requirement for security directly triggers the other’s fear of destruction.

The 2003 Iraq-United States Conflict

The 2003 United States invasion of Iraq offers a second example of how historical memories and divergent interpretations of the past create friction between national security and national sovereignty. The United States carried a collective trauma from surprise attacks, both recent and historical, through which its concept of national security had been repeatedly reconditioned and reshaped. Given the attacks it had endured, the United States framed Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons programmes as an intolerable threat and used this perception to justify pre-emptive military action. For Iraq, shaped by memories of Western intervention and anti-imperial resistance, the United States’ 48-hour ultimatum represented an illegitimate subversion of national sovereignty in the name of disarmament. This was raised explicitly in Baghdad’s appeals to the United Nations (United Nations Security Council, 2003). Ultimately, the 2003 conflict illustrates the contested boundary between legitimate self-defence and sovereign violation, a boundary constructed by the historical narratives each nation uses to interpret threat and legitimacy.

To understand the incentive behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is necessary to trace the institutional trauma that settled on 7th December 1941, when the United States suffered a devastating surprise attack by Imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor. The aerial assault claimed 2,403 American lives and wounded 1,355 (Statista Research Department, 2022). Described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a date which will live in infamy”, the attack shattered the long-held American sense of isolationism. This sudden devastation instilled a lasting anxiety in Washington regarding the state’s vulnerability to unprovoked assault. Reflecting on the defeat, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, which institutionalised a permanent, forward-stationed national security state through the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, in order to eliminate the flaws blamed for the defeat (U.S. Senate Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, 1946). This institutionalised military framework gradually expanded the boundaries, and lowered the threshold, for anticipatory action, laying the groundwork for a future United States pre-emptive posture towards perceived existential threats. This was demonstrated during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the launching of a naval quarantine was claimed to be essential if the state was to counter the nuclear hazard posed by the USSR (Avalon Project, 2026). The event set a precedent for military intervention before an attack could materialise. The state’s anticipatory defence policy continued to be evident in the 1986 Libya strikes (Reagan, 1986) and in Operation Infinite Reach in 1998 (Zenko, 2012), normalising targeted operations against prospective dangers and entrenching a pre-emptive mindset across the defence framework.

The American pre-emptive defence doctrine radicalised following the attacks of 11th September 2001. Recorded as the most lethal terrorist attack in history, the incident took 2,976 lives (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2016), surpassing the death toll at Pearl Harbor. Mass civilian casualties inflicted at the heart of the homeland in peacetime produced a collective trauma greater than that of 1941. As General James Mattis put it: “our mission was clear: destroy the enemy who had struck our homeland on 9/11 and prevent another attack on the American people” (Mattis, 2021). The unprecedented scale of domestic loss led the Bush administration to conclude that the containment which had provided stability during the Cold War was outmoded against extremist regimes. Ultimately, the institutional grief and vulnerability of 9/11 gave the United States a reason to shift its doctrine from implicit anticipatory defence to explicit pre-emption, a shift consolidated in the 2002 National Security Strategy.

The institutional memory of both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 shaped how the Bush administration interpreted Iraq’s weapons programmes in 2002 and 2003. The United States perceived Saddam Hussein and Iraq through the lens of post-9/11 vulnerability and the unresolved legacy of the 1991 Gulf War. The historical memory of Operation Desert Storm, which documented Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds, together with a record of continuous Iraqi obstruction of United Nations weapons inspectors, convinced United States decision-makers that Iraq had both the capability and the intention to deploy weapons of mass destruction. This was reflected in the warning given by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 2002, when she stated that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” (The 10 Best 10 Worst U.S. Foreign Policy Decisions, 2026). At this stage, Iraq was framed through the traumas of Pearl Harbor, the unresolved legacy of the 1991 Gulf War and the attacks of 9/11. The pre-emptive mindset ingrained within the Bush administration held that inaction would place the country at fatal risk, and this acted as the final push towards the decision to invade.

From the Iraqi perspective, the state was shaped by a deeply entrenched collective memory of Western colonialism and anti-imperial resistance. Since the arbitrary construction of borders under the British mandate following the First World War, modern Iraqi national identity had been formed through continuous resistance to foreign political domination (Roadman, n.d.). For the Ba’athist regime and for society more broadly, the devastating aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, including catastrophic infrastructure destruction, international economic sanctions and continuous intrusive inspections, had confirmed Baghdad’s conclusion that United Nations disarmament mechanisms were not instruments of international peace but were instead designed to undermine Iraqi sovereignty.

Baghdad interpreted the intrusive inspections conducted by UNMOVIC and the IAEA, along with the subsequent United States ultimatum demanding that Saddam Hussein leave the country within 48 hours, as direct subversions of state sovereignty under the guise of disarmament. Iraqi officials consistently grounded their defence in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter (Baraka, 2007), which prohibits the use or threat of military force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. To Baghdad, because Iraq had never launched an attack on the United States, American action constituted an illegitimate exercise of force: a unilateral overreach that bypassed the United Nations Security Council and violated the principles of international law.

Iraq’s deep-seated historical memory of oppression collided with the post-9/11 United States doctrine of pre-emptive defence. While Bush justified military intervention on grounds of national security, arguing that the elimination of weapons of mass destruction necessitated anticipatory action, Iraq held to a framework in which national sovereignty was fundamentally inviolable. To Bush, any regime harbouring dangerous weapons, or perceived to threaten the country’s stability, immediately forfeited its right to sovereignty. To Iraq, however, surrendering to United States demands amounted to submitting to Western colonial rule once again. This fundamental clash in national perception created a profound misunderstanding, in which the United States took Iraqi defiance as proof of hidden weapons, while Iraq viewed complete compliance as the death of its national independence.

United States Drone Strikes in Pakistan

The War on Terror was a critical turning point for the United States. It changed the country’s relationships with other states and marked a shift in attitude following 9/11. One of the countries where this is most apparent is Pakistan. Pakistan, despite being an ally of the United States, faced what it declared to be violations of its sovereignty. These manifested in several ways, most notably through drone strikes and through the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. This marked a point at which the alliance between the United States and Pakistan became unstable and began to deteriorate, as tensions increased and mutual dislike grew (Congressional Research Service, 2011). The case shows how historical memory, in this instance the attacks of 11th September, can affect the extent to which countries value their own national security above another country’s sovereignty.

The drone strikes conducted by the United States were claimed by Pakistan to be an attack on its sovereignty. The strikes lasted from 2004 to 2016 and killed thousands of people, including hundreds of civilians (New America, 2026). These deaths created public outrage in Pakistan. Many of the strikes and raids conducted there also provoked anger in relation to Pakistani sovereignty, since they were experienced as an invasion of that independence. This fostered anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and created further instability in the region. Together, these effects heightened tensions between the two states and weakened relations between them as allies (Irfan, 2023).

Historical memory also shapes the Pakistani perspective on the drone strikes, through the Cold War and Pakistan’s geographic position, particularly in relation to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Cold War was an era of superpower proxy wars, and Pakistan, in its position next to Afghanistan, was used as a channel for United States resources directed against the Soviet Union during that war. This resembles its position during the War on Terror (Vivekananda International Foundation, 2021). Pakistan’s concerns about sovereignty can therefore be seen as closely comparable to those raised during the Cold War, when superpowers disregarded borders and countries’ rights to govern themselves. The United States’ military use of Pakistan generated hostility towards the United States among Pakistani citizens, drawing on a historical and repeating sense of being used and exploited.

The United States position during the drone strikes is largely explained by historical memory, and directly by 9/11. This is evident both in the use of drones and in the willingness to use them within an ally’s territory. The United States was prepared to act by almost any means in the name of counterterrorism because of the devastation of 9/11. Given the determination that such an event should never happen again, the objective was to eliminate the threat at source. Laws passed after the attacks allowed the United States to act pre-emptively against threats from terrorists and rogue states. This also produced a shift towards the use of drones, including in Pakistan (Council on Foreign Relations, 2021).

The effect of memory on conflict is seen most clearly when comparing United States policy before and after the September attacks. The clearest example is the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, established through the Homeland Security Act of 2002 in November of that year as a direct response to terrorism against the United States (Braniff, 2025). A second example is the change in public opinion. When asked whether they would sacrifice civil liberties if they believed it necessary to curb terrorism, 62% said no and 29% said yes in April 1997; by September 2001, 55% said yes and 35% said no (Hartig & Doherty, 2021). This near-reversal indicates that the United States government would be more likely to take harsher action in the name of national defence, because public opinion supported it.

The drone strikes in Pakistan show how historical memory intensifies conflicts conducted in the name of national security, and how it gives states greater justification for acting against another nation’s sovereignty. From the Pakistani perspective, the historical memory of the Cold War and of the country’s position during the Soviet-Afghan war caused citizens to feel further exploited and under attack from the United States government, particularly in relation to civilian deaths, because the pattern appeared to be repeating. This has present-day implications, since relations between Pakistan and the United States remain strained. From the United States perspective, historical memory plays a substantial part in the reasoning behind the drone strikes. The memory of 9/11 supplied the justification for acting against another nation’s sovereignty out of fear of further damage, as seen both in post-9/11 policy and in the shift in public opinion, which pushed national security and another nation’s sovereignty further apart as priorities.

Conclusion

Across the three cases, this paper demonstrates that historical memory shapes the conflict between national security and national sovereignty by influencing how states interpret threats, past experiences and the legitimacy of using force. Although the Russia-Ukraine war, the 2003 Iraq War and United States drone strikes in Pakistan differ significantly in their causes and in their forms of military action, all three reveal a similar pattern: states interpret present security concerns through narratives of the past, and these interpretations can lead them to prioritise their own security over another state’s sovereignty.

The cases demonstrate in particular that historical memory influences how a threat is understood. In Russia and Ukraine, competing memories of shared history, of Russian and Soviet rule, and of foreign invasion contribute to opposing understandings of security. Russia interprets Western influence in Ukraine through its historical experience of invasion and its conception of a shared Russian-Ukrainian past, while Ukraine interprets Russian power through memories of domination and the loss of independence. In the United States, memories of Pearl Harbor, of previous conflicts in Iraq and especially of 9/11 contributed to a security environment in which potential threats were understood through the possibility of catastrophic attack. This shaped both the decision to invade Iraq and the willingness to conduct counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s own history of foreign intervention contributed to interpreting these actions as threats to its sovereignty rather than simply as American security measures.

Despite these differences, the cases show that the relationship between security and sovereignty is not necessarily a simple trade-off. Instead, one state’s attempt to achieve security can become another state’s source of insecurity. Russia’s attempt to protect what it considers its strategic security has been experienced by Ukraine as a threat to its existence as a sovereign state. Similarly, United States’ attempts to prevent perceived security threats in Iraq and Pakistan were understood by those states as violations of their sovereign authority. Historical memory intensifies this dilemma because it gives states reasons to distrust the intentions of other actors and to interpret present actions through previous experiences of threat, intervention or domination.

The comparison therefore establishes that historical memory is not merely a background factor in international conflict. It functions as a lens through which states determine what constitutes a threat and what actions appear necessary in response. However, historical memory does not independently cause conflict. Political interests, military capabilities, domestic politics and geopolitical circumstances also influence state behaviour. The importance of historical memory lies in the way it gives these interests meaning and legitimacy.

This has broader implications for understanding conflicts over sovereignty. If security policies are partly rooted in historical narratives, resolving such conflicts cannot depend only on addressing immediate strategic interests. Competing interpretations of the past may also need to be recognised because they influence how states perceive present compromises. At the same time, this paper does not establish that historical memory will inevitably produce conflict. An important area for further research is therefore why some historical memories are mobilised to justify confrontation while others contribute to reconciliation. Further research could also examine how governments, education systems and the media shape collective memory, and whether changing these narratives can reduce perceptions of threat.

Ultimately, the three cases demonstrate that states act in the present while interpreting the present through the past. When those interpretations produce incompatible understandings of security, sovereignty and national survival, actions intended as self-defence by one state can be experienced as aggression by another. Historical memory therefore helps to explain why the boundary between national security and national sovereignty remains contested, and why understanding contemporary conflicts requires attention not only to what states fear today, but also to what they remember from the past.

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