Note 5 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTION
Reading edition
Justice Sutherland for the Court in the 1936 case of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, 299 U. S. 304, 316-18:
“And since the states severally never possessed international powers, such powers could not have been carved from the mass of state powers but obviously were transmitted to the United States from some other source....
“It results that the investment of the federal government with the powers of external sovereignty did not depend upon the affirmative grants of the Constitution. The powers to declare and wage war, to conclude peace, to make treaties, to maintain diplomatic relations with other sovereignties, if they had never been mentioned in the Constitution, would have been vested in the federal government as necessary concomitants of nationality.”