Shmuel Nili’s book is an excellent, and timely, intervention into the moral analysis of international justice. It begins by identifying an overlooked category of moral inquiry: what should wealthy, democratic states do, in the face of resilient injustice abroad? Most philosophers have asked what Nili calls the first-best question: what justice is, and what just governments—at home and abroad—are called upon to do. Some have asked the question of how rightly to assist unjust states in their transition to justice—a question termed by Nili the second-best. Nili’s interest, however, is in the third-best question, in which the unjust state is likely to remain an unjust state, for an indefinite term. What moral restrictions emerge for the governments and institutions of the “consolidated democracies” (32) of the world, in face of these deeply unjust circumstances?

This question becomes urgent, notes Nili, because the leaders of the world’s repressive regimes generally choose to place their stolen wealth in financial institutions located within the borders of democratic states (17–18). The consolidated democracies, notes Nili, are thereby “entangled,” morally speaking, in the repression and theft of individuals resident within unrepresentative states abroad (50–52)—states in which the “hermetic seal” of the rule of law, as Nili has it, is broken, with some perpetrators (like cartels or kleptocrats) functionally immune from the demands of law, and some victims functionally unable to obtain vindication of their legal rights (27–47). Nili argues that the entanglement of democratic states creates, through the priority of relational harms, a particular duty to act on behalf of those repressed abroad—even when such action might do nothing, or even work against, the cause of international justice more broadly (92–94). To take one prominent example: having wrongly used its financial agency to support the malign actions of a foreign despot, a democratic state might have a relational obligation to the people harmed by that state to facilitate the exile of that state’s leader—even when that exile falls far short of the demands that might be articulated by theorists of international criminal justice (73–110).

Nili demonstrates the power of this relational idea in the context of the War on Drugs, given the ways in which that American policy had such devastating effects upon the rule of law in Mexico and in Central America (111–50). He demonstrates, further, the ways in which his “relational priority principle” might give rise to demands for reform within the domestic financial sector, so as to disgorge foreign money obtained by means of theft; these demands, moreover, might persist even when that disgorgement does little if anything to help the particular individuals from whom the funds were stolen. Nili relies here upon the notion of collective integrity; the consolidated democracy, on his view, acts wrongly in keeping that unjustly obtained money, even when the disgorgement of those funds will not improve the cause of global justice (163–69). Nili concludes with some reflections on migration law, and the real (and difficult) problem of international extortion of migrants, and the ways in which wealthy countries might have distinct duties as regards those migrants whose comparative wealth makes them targets for financial crimes (226–62).

This book is exceptional in a number of ways. It opens up, to begin with, a genuinely novel area of philosophical reflection about global justice; Nili is right, I believe, to think that we have focused too much on what a just world would look like, and how we might get there, and not enough on how to live in this unjust world, with something like integrity or honor. He is also right, I think, to suggest that there is something morally pernicious about the ways in which wealthy democratic states have used their institutional power and financial institutions to defend the interests of the very same kleptocrats whose acts they criticize abroad. The book is, moreover, carefully argued, empirically sophisticated, and—despite that—eminently readable.

There is, nonetheless, one primary worry I would press about the book’s logical structure—namely, the extent to which entanglement, as Nili understands it, can be avoided. Nili argues that his notion of entanglement is related to complicity, but is more capacious, opening up space both for actions and for omissions (98). Entanglement, moreover, is generally described in moralized terms by Nili, and he takes as his target states that are “culpably entangled” in kleptocracy abroad (162).

Is there anything that a wealthy state like the United States can do, however, that does not give rise to entanglement, so understood? Take the case of trade; a state which engages in trade becomes, on Nili’s view, entangled with another society, such that it might have to make some reparation for the harms that emerge from that entanglement. But the refusal to trade is also a sort of action—one with the power to harm others. We need only look to the embargo on Cuban goods by the United States, which was intended to harm the fiscal health of the Cuban government and which did, in fact, have a profoundly negative effect upon Cuba and upon the Cuban people. The United States, though, seems to be entangled with any country, regardless of whether it trades or refuses to do so. Nili’s analysis of entanglement seems to presuppose that the state that brings about damage to another state’s people has chosen wrongly, and must make reparation for that wrongful choice. But it seems plausible, at least for a country with the influence of the United States, that there are no options which do not entangle—in which case, it might seem difficult to ground reparative duties upon a moralized notion of entanglement. If there is no option open to the United States that does not entail entanglement, then it seems hard to condemn such entanglement as always morally pernicious. Nili imagines the people of the impoverished world saying to the United States: your policies that got us into this mess (130). But if the impact of the United States on the world is such that there is no policy open that does not risk entanglement, and thereafter particularistic duties of compensation, then how can such a moral story be told? That moral story seems to ask for clean hands; but there may be no available option on which the hands of a superpower can remain clean. If the United States cannot escape from Nili’s particularistic duties by acting well, then perhaps the moral problem is not with the facts about American fiscal policy, but with the global structures that allow hegemons like the United States to exist.

I would, however, present this worry primarily as a point at which I would like to hear more, rather than as one that ought to be taken as a reason to disagree with his view. Nili’s book is, again, a wise and humane intervention into global justice, with the potential to open up genuinely new spaces for philosophical reflection. It deserves, and will likely receive, a great deal of philosophical attention.