The ‘Rules-Based Order’ is a Comforting Myth

The ‘rules-based order’ may have died, but the liberal world should be glad.

Since the US invasion of Venezuela, there has been increased discussion about international law and the rules-based world order that emerged following the fall of the Soviet Union. Much of this debate has focused on whether the recent US military action against Venezuela is legal. Concern has been raised by politicians and commentators as to whether the US’ kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro will inspire autocrats across the world to ignore the rules-based order and just do what they want, regardless of what the UN or international treaties say.

However, there is one question that is seemingly being ignored in this debate: Does this world order actually exist, and if it did, is this really the moment that has killed it?

If you have been following the news coverage of the recent events in Venezuela, you might be mistaken in thinking that the rules-based order is something that is rigid, defined and normally well-enforced. Lots of countries, from Russia to the EU to the UK, have raised concerns about whether this action has broken the principles of non-intervention in other countries unless there are imminent threats coming from these countries.

We have been told by much of the media that, for all its flaws, the rules-based order has helped to keep the world safe from slipping back into the anarchy that existed before the establishment of the UN or even the League of Nations.

However, it’s important for us to stop and think about this rules-based order and ask a very simple question: has this been a myth that we have told ourselves, whilst everyone else outside the West has continued on as if it never existed?

Since Maduro’s capture, there seems to have been a collective amnesia among parts of the political class about global politics. On a recent episode of the Rest is Politics, Rory Stewart raised the question as to what the US action will mean for other countries. He asked whether the US’s action might inspire other countries to believe they are not bound by the rules-based order; he asked whether China could invade Taiwan, whether the EU could kidnap Lukashenko in Belarus and whether Russia could go after Ukraine.

But the flaw in his defence of international law should, to everyone, be very obvious. Russia has done, or tried, everything that Rory Stewart is trying to warn us about them feeling able to do in Ukraine. At the start of the war, they tried to kidnap Zelensky. When that didn’t work, they dug in for a long war and then chose to hold sham referendums to annex parts of Ukraine. If this action, by a member of the UN Security Council (created to uphold the rules-based order), did not mark the end of the rules-based world order, then I’m not sure how a much smaller-scale operation would.

Russia is, of course, not the only country to flaunt the rules. China occupies Tibet and commits atrocities in Xinjiang, North Korea has developed nuclear weapons, and Iran has sponsored groups that have undermined the sovereignty of Iraq and Lebanon. These countries have paid no heed to the rules-based order, but those countries that do adhere to it have been unable to enforce international law due to the principles of international law.

None of these countries debated whether their actions were in line with international law, instead they did what they wanted. If the rules-based order ever did exist in the peak of liberal dominance in the 1990s, then it no longer does, and it wasn’t the US action that killed it. For the autocracies of the world, this system was just a way to create an angry press release for whenever the West had acted against one of their regional allies. However, it was a concept that suddenly disappeared whenever they decided on a foreign policy position.

The rules-based order, if it ever existed, is dead. It died when the system failed to defend Syrians, Ukrainians and countless other people from autocratic regimes around the world, so let’s not mourn its death, let’s celebrate the liberal world’s liberation.

The West can be freed from the idea that its interactions with autocrats who have no care for international law are bound by a rules-based order and fight for the values that we believe underpin human dignity, regardless of what those who shoot students in the street think.