The decline and fall of the so-called post-war rules-based international order has quickly moved from prophecy or speculation to directly observable fact. Whether in trade relations, diplomacy and politics, or indeed in security affairs, the notion that there might be any “rules” preventing the strong from acting as they wish and can is thoroughly passé. The point requires no demonstration: The “rupture” with the system of rules and laws was announced by Mark Carney himself, the personification of Davos Man if ever there was one, in his World Economic Forum speech this year.
The rules-based international order, developed around the UN system of institutions and post-1945 international law, has always been more of a myth, and certainly a misnomer, than anything of true substance. Carney himself, in the same speech, called it a “fiction” – in that it was based primarily on US power, not mere rules. But he also recognised, correctly, that despite the illusions and hypocrisies woven around it, this concept was useful – certainly to the countries of the Western alliance which did most to define it and sustain it.
What Henry Kissinger used to call “world order”, however, was slightly different. Kissinger used the term – indeed, he made it the central concept of his entire philosophy of statecraft – to refer to the combination of legitimacy and the distribution of power within the community of nations at any one time, that together provide stability to that international system.
Kissinger tended to be misunderstood in his emphasis on the “balance of power”, and was often caricatured as being wholly obsessed with power in a Machiavellian way, and dismissive of moral factors. But in fact his key preoccupation, both as a scholar and as a practitioner of foreign policy, was stability, which – as he always maintained – required, and requires, both a real balance of hard power in the system and a legitimising concept for what constitutes a “just” order.
This perspective on international relations and strategic affairs remains valid – certainly under a Westphalian system – irrespective of the historical period under consideration. The Kissingerian analytical framework holds whether one looks at 17th century Europe during the Thirty Years’ War or at the 20th century world during the Cold War.
By contrast, the idea of the rules-based international order is specific to the past eighty years only. Only in this period, especially after the end of the Cold War, has a great Globalist Triad emerged, composed of: An expansive corpus of Liberal-inflected international law, with particular growth in the area of so-called “human rights”; a globalised economy running on free trade rules and enabled by networked communications; and an informal system of (so-called liberal democratic) values and “accepted” codes of behaviour that have been applying in the postmodern society of nations of our recent times.
In the Kissingerian sense of “world order”, the Globalist Triad represented the legitimising function of a distribution of power that has been organised around the United States as the global superpower. What we are in the process of losing now – what Carney really was referring to at Davos – is therefore not just a relatively stable power structure as the US and its allies are increasingly yielding strategic ground to China, Russia and Iran. We are also losing the benchmarks of legitimacy in the international system with the retreat from law, trade rules and informal codes of behaviour.
This is arguably unprecedented in the modern world of Westphalian states. At any point since 1648, even when stability would slip with the shift in the balance of power and war broke out, there was at least a prevailing sense of legitimacy or basic codes of conduct recognised by all players. Rogue behaviour – such as Revolutionary France or the Third Reich – would stand out as the exception that confirmed the rule and prompted counter-action from the other powers.
None of this applies today, at least not at a systemic level. A quarter century of strategic bungling and setbacks, from the post-9/11 wars to Libya, Syria, the Russian invasion, and now the Iran war, coupled with China’s ascent, have eroded Western primacy and have severely altered, if not overturned, the balance of power. Adversaries have regained or built new military capacity and effectiveness; they can hardly be deterred any longer by pure military calculations. A core pillar of world order and stability is now gone.
The other – “legitimacy” – is also being torn down, with much of the demolition work being done by the United States itself. Of course, the Globalist Triad that anchored legitimacy for more than a generation had become unsustainable politically anyway. Trump himself, as well as the neo-populist Right, are the results of these excesses across each of the three components listed above, from international law – most clearly in the case of human rights law being used to funnel millions of illegal migrants into Western societies – to the turn against free trade and globalisation, and to the shipwrecking of liberal-democrat “values” on the rocks of woke.
But beyond this general, historical trend of the erosion of norms and accumulation of excess, there are specific actions and policies deliberately intended to hasten the downfall of the erstwhile world order. Under the present US administration there is open contempt for the UN and international law in general – as seen in the illegal attack on Iran and assassination of its leaders.
All this may indeed be well deserved and justified in practice, but such a hasty and blunt approach destroys the idea of having any limits to behaviour and gives licence to others to do what they please as well. It certainly reduces the scope for leveraging any notion of “justice” in order to mobilise popular will at home and among allies behind any serious response effort against some egregious behaviour by an adversary. More broadly, this is how standards disappear, and down this road lie untold enormities.
The use of threats, insults and coercion against close allies, such as over Greenland; the arbitrary weaponisation of tariffs – again, even against allied nations; the unrestricted military action abroad, without regard to almost any rules, from Venezuela to Iran; and perhaps even the open interference in the domestic politics of other Western nations, as signalled in the new US National Security Strategy – none of this is consistent or compatible with any known notion of “order”.
On the contrary, such behaviour – again, however understandable and even commendable it might be in each or some particular case – is simply a recipe for a world of chaos. From the illusions and overweening self-righteousness embedded in the outgoing rules-based international order, the pendulum – or liana – has swung fully the other way, where sovereignty matters little because there is no one and nothing to enforce it, or sanction its encroachment, beyond what each country can do for itself. Welcome to the jungle!
The future of defence is increasingly private