ABSTRACT
President George W. Bush's national security strategy for the 21st century sketches a world requiring the benign hand of American power in response to terrorists, rogue states, and other evil-doers. Within the Bush Doctrine, sovereignty extends to whatever part of the world the United States wishes to project power. Portable sovereignty's effacement operates through the pretence that the carrier is just another warship, carrying sovereignty of the traditional warship variety. Portable sovereignty mixes the authority claims of territorially fixed states with the mobile aggressive capability of a floating air base. While sovereignty claims for carriers efface their own production by sliding themselves innocently into the history of naval ships, such claims eliminate the possibility of other meanings by construing the ocean as a big empty place just waiting for naval enhancement. Sovereignty's space in each case is the zone of in-distinction between violence and law.
