If we don’t have a rules-based international order, and we can hardly rely on international law when the US continues to do so much to undermine it, where do we go from here?
by Sholto Byrnes, an East Asian affairs columnist for The National
Seven months ago, I wrote in these pages that US President Joe Biden had finished the rules-based international order off for good.
Despite he and his officials making the term central to his administration’s foreign policy, the fact that these “rules” clearly did not apply to America and its allies – notably Israel in its murderous campaign in Gaza – meant that it had been utterly hollowed out, and had become a byword for western hypocrisy in much of the world.
Since then, others have come to agree: Andreas Kluth, former editor-in-chief of the German news organisation Handelsblatt Global in February, Spencer Ackerman in The New York Times in April, Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times last month, followed by Elbridge Colby, an American defence analyst hotly tipped to be national security adviser if Donald Trump wins the next presidential race.
“I totally agree that we should dump the limp, lame, and hypocritical concept of the ‘rules-based international order’,” Mr Colby posted on X just over a week ago. Both he and Mr Rachman favour a return to the idea of “defending the free world”.
That, I believe, would be a dangerous path. It sets up an unnecessary binary – the “free world” must be defended against something else, presumably the “unfree world”, whatever that might be – and would formalise once again a western bloc that would be dominated by an America that has never made its disregard for international law clearer. Last month, the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, declared that no international body was “above American sovereignty”, and this Tuesday his colleagues in Congress voted to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court for having the temerity to apply for an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others.
One area where rules and laws – or the lack of universally agreed ones – really matters is the Asia-Pacific.
