The recent controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee has, unsurprisingly, reached a fever pitch on the right.

Unfortunately, the ideological fervor surrounding the question of Israel and the controversy swirling around Carlson’s person prevent people from appreciating the significance of the questions Carlson posed to Huckabee in their recent interview. The question that will be my focus here is one that I think gets to the very heart of the topic: What does it mean to say that Israel has a “right to exist?”

Huckabee kept insisting that Israel does have this right. But this is a peculiar property to attach to  a country as opposed to an individual. And, as Tucker noted, Israel appears to be the only country that has ever existed that is said to have a “right to exist.”

When examined carefully, and not through partisan political lenses, the phrase is odd. The notion that a state, whether Israel or any other political entity, has a “right to exist” is notable for its philosophical instability. It sits awkwardly within the liberal tradition from which rights language emerged. And even outside that tradition—viewed in nationalist or communitarian perspectives—the claim remains problematic.

The result is that “a state’s right to exist” functions less as a philosophical argument than as a moral boundary marker in a debate.

The language of rights is a product of Enlightenment liberalism. It came from such figures in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as John Locke, whose political theory helped shape modern constitutional governments that privilege individual rights.

In the Lockean tradition, rights are natural attributes of individual persons. Human beings, individually, possess the rights to life, liberty, and property prior to the formation of government. Political institutions are created to secure those individual rights.

Individuals have rights. Governments exist to protect them.

States from this perspective are not bearers of natural rights. They are the instruments for safeguarding them. They are the protective devices, established by consent to serve human purposes.

If a government systematically violates the rights of its citizens, liberal theory does not say that the state’s “right to exist” overrides all other concerns. On the contrary, Locke famously held that governments may be altered or abolished when they betray the trust of their people.

Within classical liberalism, then, it is strange to speak of a state as having a natural right to exist. Rights attach to persons. States are derivative.

This is not an anti-Israel argument. It is a conceptual clarification. If one remains within the liberal grammar of rights, the subject of rights is the individual, not the political arrangement.

Perhaps one may respond that the “right to exist” claim is not a liberal claim at all. Perhaps it derives from nationalism or from communitarian thought.

But even within such non-liberal intellectual traditions as nationalism and communitarianism, the phrase is an awkward construction.

Nationalist thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder did not ground political legitimacy in abstract rights language. They spoke of peoples, cultures, shared histories, languages, and inherited traditions. The nation, in this view, is an organic cultural reality—not, as it tends to be in liberal theory, a contract of sorts among sovereign individuals.

Similarly, modern communitarian critics of liberalism, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have argued that liberal rights discourse separates the individual unnaturally from the community. They question whether the “unencumbered self” of liberal theory corresponds to the way human beings live and think.

In both traditions, moral life is thicker than rights talk. Identity is historical and communal. The language of obligation, virtue, and belonging often supplants that of rights.

So even from within nationalism or communitarianism, the phrase “a state’s right to exist” is not natural.

Rather, nationalists tend to argue that a people have a historical homeland, a culture has a claim to political self-expression, and a nation may seek sovereignty to preserve that identity.

Notice that what is central is the people—not the state structure as such.

States rise and fall. Borders change. Regimes collapse and reform. But for the nationalist, the nation—the shared historical community—is the enduring reality.

Yet the nationalist argument, which is designed to establish that a people have a moral claim to political self-determination, is a radically different kind of claim than the notion that a particular state, in its current institutional configuration, possesses a timeless “right to exist.”

Thus, even outside of liberalism, the concept of a state having a “right to exist” remains conceptually imprecise.

Tellingly, neither Italy, Japan, Brazil, nor any other country is ever said to have “a right to exist.” States are recognized, criticized, sanctioned, reformed, and even dissolved—but the formula “right to exist” is never invoked.

Why, then, is it brought up in this instance?

Part of the answer may lie in the dominance of liberal rights language in modern global discourse. Rights talk has become the universal moral vocabulary of our age. Even arguments that are fundamentally nationalist are often translated into rights language because of the rhetorical force it carries today.

But another part of the answer may be sociological rather than philosophical.

In practice, the phrase “right to exist” often functions less as a carefully articulated philosophical claim than as a boundary-setting device.

To affirm a state’s “right to exist” signals moral alignment.

To question it signals transgression.

The phrase draws a line: beyond this point, discourse is no longer legitimate.

In this sense, it is a gatekeeping mechanism. It forecloses debate rather than clarifying it.

This, of course, does not mean that every instance of a person using the phrase is cynical. Many who use it sincerely intend to defend human beings from violence and annihilation. This is a perfectly reasonable and even laudable goal. But philosophically speaking, the wording is imprecise.

If the claim is that individuals in Israel have rights to life and security, that is straightforward liberalism. If, though, the claim is that the Jewish people constitute a historical nation with a claim to political self-determination, that is a nationalist argument.

But the claim that “the state has a right to exist” merges distinct traditions and obscures the underlying philosophical foundations.

To repeat, within classical liberalism, rights belong to individuals. Within nationalism, legitimacy flows from peoplehood and history. In neither framework is the state, as an institutional apparatus, the natural bearer of a “right to exist.”

If we care about serious political reasoning, we should say what we mean. Do we mean that individuals have rights? Do we mean that a nation has a claim to self-determination? Or do we mean simply that certain political questions are not open for debate? These are our options.

Until those distinctions are made, the phrase “right to exist” will continue to generate more heat than light.

And for a concept so morally charged, that should give us pause.