When Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas River they don’t call out the National Guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring a suit in the Supreme Court of the United States and abide by the decision. There isn’t a reason in the world why we cannot do that internationally.

Truman frames interstate water disputes as a model for international conflict resolution. By pointing to Kansas and Colorado settling Arkansas River claims through litigation rather than force, he highlights a key achievement of federalism: a shared legal forum whose judgments are accepted as binding. The analogy argues that war is not an inevitable instrument of sovereignty; it is a choice made when parties lack (or refuse) legitimate adjudication. His final sentence presses a normative claim—if Americans can submit vital resource conflicts to law, nations could likewise submit disputes to international courts or arbitration and accept outcomes, replacing coercion with rule-governed settlement.