The weak are meat, and the strong do eat
(Cloud Atlas)
The international rules based order sets normative expectations, deters transgressions, and manages conflicts. It does so via a host of treaties and institutions mostly introduced soon after WWII, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN and its many affiliated organisations and treaties (WTO, UNLCOS, ICJ, World Bank, NPT, etc) to private members' clubs like the G7, EU, OECD, and NATO.
Like all institutional orders, it is maintained by and for the powerful actors in whose interests it was designed, especially the USA, the most powerful of all. This obvious fact is often willfully misinterpreted.
First, an order instituted by the powerful to protect and advance their own interests need not come at the expense of the less powerful, when compared to a situation without any such order. To the contrary, by constraining all it is often of even more value to the weak - who have no other source of protection - than it is to the strong. Merely because an international order can be judged as lacking compared to some hypothetical ideal ('fairness') does not mean that any rational state would prefer a world without it.
Second, this particular international order favours the interests of rich liberal democracies, which by world historical standards are unusually committed to a positive sum rather than zero-sum view of inter-state relations. Rich democracies are not threatened by the rise of other rich countries. It means more economic opportunities for them. (Poor countries, by definition, have nothing to sell - except whatever geology happened to leave underneath them.) Even better if they become democracies and hence acquire the stability and shared values to act as partners in managing the international order. So it is not surprising that economic and political development were high priorities for the current international order: opportunities were provided and many states took them up. In stark contrast to the colonial world that preceded it, most of the world's population now live in countries that are middle-income or higher.
In this the rules-based international order merely extends, incompletely, the political logic of national law-based orders. The institution of private property, for example, was famously attributed by Rousseau to the cynical concern of the rich to protect what they had managed to acquire from just the kind of depredations by which they had managed to acquire it. Their knives still dripping with the blood of their victims, the rich suddenly had very good self-interested reasons for institutionalising the principle that, from now on, no one may take what anyone else possesses without their permission. And they had the power to bring it about. Nevertheless, pace Rousseau, the institution of property constrained all from further such depredations, and thus granted the weak a previously unknown level of security and predictability that was immensely valuable to them and transformed absolute poverty (stunted, shortened lives) into merely relative poverty (complaints about fairness). Anarchy is not good for anyone, but it is worst for the poor and weak.
I. The End of US Hegemony
The postwar 'Westphalian' international order was particularly built on the principles of respect for national sovereignty (territories within present borders and all the people in them are ruled - 'represented' - by a single government); non-intervention (governments have exclusive authority over their territory), and the legal equality of states (power is excluded from international affairs). For example, the UN charter requires all states to renounce aggressive war, which is instead permitted only to protect the international order, via a legalistic procedure requiring the consent of the Security Council of major powers. Although these ideals have been violated repeatedly, they have nonetheless had a major influence in restraining inter-state conflicts, particularly the kind where powerful states threaten, coerce, extort, or just take the things they want from the weak.
Trump 2.0's aggressive foreign policy presents the greatest challenge to the postwar international order since its inception. He has thrown away the rules designed by previous American governments to protect and enhance America's hegemony in favour of exploiting short-term opportunities for bilateral extortion and coercion of weaker states (i.e. all other states). Instead of offering protection and predictability, the international order has been transformed into a source of vulnerability.
From an America First perspective this is an an extraordinarily stupid thing to do. Trump has thrown away an American global hegemony that cost many trillions of dollars over many decades to build, and which has paid back that investment many times over. America is not powerful enough to make every country do what it wants all the time. It can't even afford to expend all the missiles Trump has been showering on 3rd rate thugocracies, to little practical effect. Hegemony works by persuading enough other states of the benefits to themselves of tightly aligning themselves with the international order that suits America best, so that they themselves will be committed to maintaining its legitimacy and effectiveness. When it is working, hegemony exerts a gravitational force that pulls the whole world towards America's vision of how things ought to be. When it stops working, America becomes just another country, with no one interested in helping with its projects, such as regime change in Iran.
In addition, Trump's bullying and extortion of allies is creating the very conditions that make Graham Allison's previously ridiculous 'Thucydides Trap' thesis seem uncomfortably likely. Like Athens 2,500 years ago, Trump's callous and casual betrayal of allies' trust in order to extort them has left them antagonised and in search of alternative security arrangements: decoupling their economies; rebuilding indigenous military industrial complexes; reconsidering nuclear weapons; and seeking closer relations with America's main enemy, the rising power of CCP China. Trump has simultaneously strengthened America's main strategic competitor and weakened America's ability to deter it from aggressive expansion that might trigger a global war.
Of course, it's not all bad. There are at least two interesting and somewhat positive consequences of Trumps' assault on the Westphalian international order.
II. Immunity From Misrule
The Westphalian order was designed by status quo powers to maintain a peace that protected their own advantageous positions from challengers. Powerful governments could make an attractive offer to the rest:
Look, anarchy is terrible for every state, so a rules-based order is in every state's interests. Of course it just so happens to be particularly convenient to us to institutionalise a principle that you can't change things by war anymore, just after we won that super big war. But not having to worry about war is valuable for all states.
But that pragmatic and self-interested state-level concern always clashed with more foundational moral considerations, such as the idea that human rights apply universally to all people no matter which state's power they happened to fall under. This was also, officially, a part of the post-war international order, but even less consistently applied than Westphalian respect for state sovereignty because it clashes so directly with it. The dismal failure of the various ad hoc attempts to protect human rights, via the International Criminal Court, Responsibility to Protect, and so on, only serve to demonstrate the point: you can't plausibly commit to respecting states just because they are states and also to protecting their own people from them.
By removing the threat of external intervention, the Westphalian model shields governments from moral accountability and thereby enables deeper depredations upon their people. As a general principle, the less legitimacy a government has among its own people, the smaller its political base and the smaller its capacity to mobilise its theoretical resources to military effect. The governments that misrule Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uganda, Iran, Eritrea, N. Korea and so on are highly capable of murdering and torturing their own unarmed populations into submission. That is what their militaries are designed and equipped to do. But these same militaries are not really capable of resisting invasion by a state whose government has not alienated the majority of its population into wishing that the invader would succeed.
Granting all states automatic legitimacy at the international level gifted them with immunity from the most dramatic consequences of misrule: that rule by cruelty makes states vulnerable to attack by others. The Westphalian model thus freed governments from the need to maintain even the most minimal requirement for domestic legitimacy: guaranteeing their population freedom from political violence. While the international order has succeeded in reducing war, which is good, it also upheld a peace characterised by vast amounts of human suffering as governments have been effectively left free to wage war on their own populations.
Tyranny powered regimes around the world have watched in awe and terror as Trump casually threw away the principle of sovereign immunity. He has, for example, brought the monstrous Cuban regime to its knees just by ignoring international law and declaring a naval blockade on oil shipments. Suddenly the Castro dynasty is very interested in talking about how they can help improve their population's political, social, and economic rights. Even those regimes not in Trump's spotlight will be reconsidering the dangers to themselves of continuing to rule by tyranny.
III. The Quandary for Revisionist Powers
All states benefit from the Westphalian international order. Yet some thought they could go further to exploit opportunities created by the foundational principle of sovereign immunity and the cumbersome proceduralist and consensus based enforcement mechanisms. This is how we got tax havens and state-run amphetamine and ransomware rackets. But also, using threats to upset the international order to create leverage in bargaining with the powers - like America - most committed to maintaining the international order. Think of Maduro's threats to annex oil rich parts of neighbouring Guyana, or the Kim dynasty's adroit exploitation of its neighbours' interests in peace (including China) to extort economic aid and toleration for its international criminal enterprises
But it wasn't only pathetic loser states who saw low-risk opportunities to exploit the structural weaknesses of the rules based international order. China and Russia have been prominent in not only exploiting its weaknesses, but also demanding its revision in their favour. This is surprising since they are (successors to) two of the powerful states by and for whom the post war order was designed in the first place. They also enjoy its greatest formal privilege as permanent members of the Security Council: the power not only to block any enforcement of the rules-based order but also to block any change to those rules.
But Russia and China wanted more. They bloviated about the need for a new international order, free from US hegemony, where all states would be really equally respected and where they themselves would finally have the stature that their sense of their own civilisational superiority deserved. Their behaviour followed the latter, not the former principle. Both states relentlessly asserted their commitment to Westphalian principles, but this only meant that they didn't care about human rights. Backed by the principle that more guns means more right, they asserted expansionary claims to the territories of their neighbours (and each other!), and routinely bypassed formal multilateral procedures and institutions to bully weaker states into submission.
Especially as this ramped up over the past 15 years or so, the defection by two of the major world powers put enormous strain on the resilience of the international order and on those committed to upholding it (led by America). Now that America has also defected, one may say that their bluff has been called.
Russia and China did not really want a new international order (which is not to say they didn't have fantasies about ruling the world). They already had the best possible deal in this one. They were able to be co-rulers of the international order and to benefit from the predictability and economic opportunities it offered, while at the same time not being bound by its rules. They also got to watch their main strategic competitor increasingly distracted and frustrated by its efforts to maintain the order that its hegemony and their exploits both depended on.
What will Russia and China do now that their bluff has been called?
Putin's Russia, obviously is not a serious contender for world hegemon: it can only ever be successful as a regional empire and bully. Besides its lack of economic and global heft, it has vision that could induce others to align with it. Thus, it has no genuine allies, only transactional short-term relationships with other states, mostly losers ones like Iran and Venezuela, that last only as long as benefits exceed costs, and which, ironically, depend on a context of a well-functioning international order.
China, on the other hand, does have the economic and military resources to attempt taking on the role and recentreing the international order around its own interests. Officially it even has a political ideology that would ground credible shared commitments that go beyond mere transactionalism (i.e. anarchy).
Yet despite China's decades long efforts to persuade the Global South in particular of its commitment to their interests and the credibility of its promises, China too seems stuck in a transactional trap. Other states are happy to take its money, or rather its bribes, and to do minor, mostly symbolic things it wants in return (such as withdrawing recognition of Taiwan). But no state actually trusts China with its vital interests.
China has ongoing border disputes with most of its many neighbours, and habits of unilaterally declaring new interpretations of previous treaties. Its relationship with Russia is a nice example. In contrast to how Europe and the US supported Ukraine with vast donations of military equipment and ammunition, Russia has only been allowed to buy the components for such equipment from China. At the same time, China has taken advantage of Russia's distressed situation to demand steep discounts for its oil exports. China is making a profit from its supposed ally's war. It is living the Trump dream! As he watches his ally's decline Xi Jinping is probably also looking forward to exploiting that weakness to recover the 600,000 km he remembers the Qing empire as having.
An important reason for China's untrustworthiness is structural: the existential fear of the Chinese Communist Party. The entire state is organised around securing the continued rule of the CCP, and every institution and policy decision is viewed directly or indirectly through that lens. The mission of China's military, for example, is to protect the party, and only indirectly the territory and population of China. The current crackdowns on ethnic diversity are concerned with heading off the possibility of future sources of internal dissent (non-democracies know no other way to manage the dangers of diversity than enforced homogeneity: projects of internal colonisation). The same logic drives campaigns against lgbt and women's rights - a threat to demography; lawyers - a threat to make the law superior to the party's control; environmental activism - a threat to the heavy industry coal-powered economic base the CCP considers vital to winning geopolitical contests; and so on.
An inevitable result of such monomaniacal and paranoid self-interest is a zero-sum view of international relations, governed by the principle that others must not be allowed to gain any kind of advantage relative to China. This makes it impossible for CCP China to lead the world as a hegemon - a kind of team captain for an international order that recruits support by promising to make everyone better off. No one would gamble their long term interests on a state that has no interest in safe-guarding those interests, and no strategic vision beyond Trumpian bullying and deal-making.
