The rules-based international order is dead. Or so was claimed during the Vietnam war. And during the Iranian revolution. And the invasion of Panama. And after Haiti, after Kuwait, after Yugoslavia. It was claimed after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. In between, many more times were the bells rung for its demise. Today, its death is once again proclaimed after the US operation in Venezuela.

The mere intervention of the United States in the affairs of another country, does not automatically mean much of a difference to how the world has worked for a while as these examples show. There will be many who speak of the specifics of the Venezuelan case and whether it is different or not. While that discussion takes place elsewhere, I think that the very idea of the rules-based international order is worth talking more about.

Forget the internationalization, what even is a rules-based order? This itself is a surprisingly inconclusive question. On its surface, it’s where different people constrain their behaviour and act only based on pre-agreed rules. But who decided these rules? Who polices them? Fundamentally, this is almost (and probably is exactly) the problem of the legitimacy of governance that Western philosophy has alternated between a largely-Abrahamic authoritarianism and largely-Indo-European republicanism.

But lets take it down to a much smaller group. Lets take a group of people that live in an environment of scarce resources but without a necessarily united goal. Without any preexisting cooperation requirements, it might make sense to fight over resources - but this weakenes everyone’s actual goals. Then, the presence of some rules to govern their behaviour can make sense. They can all even sit together and write out some rules of engagement.

However, the big question is, what if someone breaks the rules? Obviously, you want to avoid this from happening in the first place, which means you need to both have consequences if it happens and incentives to prevent it from not happening. But if someone ever makes a bad decision and breaks the rules anyway, spreading costs to others, what do you do? If you don’t act, then others will follow and break the rules as well - it makes sense to now try and break the rules again to prevent more costs coming to you.

That places some monopoly of violence somewhere within the group. It could be a distributed monopoly, where everyone acts to punish the wrongdoer - something like how a group might jointly decide to exile a vagrant. It could also be more concentrated, with the ability to punish being concentrated - much closer to a king deciding to execute a criminal. In essence, these are the two forms of political organization in Western thought again. Both have strengths and both have weaknesses. Distributed responsibility reduces the potential for abuse, but requires consensus to avoid delays and inaction. Concentrated responsibility allows rapid action, but runs the risk of power being abused.

What happens if we apply this to the world order after the WW2? Throughout the Cold War, we arguably had three orders - the US-led order, the USSR-led order, and an overall order that determined the rules of engagement between these. The overall order - the UN system, being built through consensus by the victors of WW2 helped both sides to broadly agree and broadly follow it - though both sides still sought to find loopholes to let themselves act how they wanted. Critically, I think we can understand this as both sides claiming ownership over the rules, and how their interpretation and their authority to police them was more than the others. In essence, it was a power struggle for the throne, and the prize being the baton of law enforcement.

We know that this struggle ended with an American victory. In the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had a clear world that was American. The “Pax Americana” was at its absolute strongest here. ou still had the post-WW2 overall rules as well, but the undisputed enforcer of these were the US. No one else was even close to challenging the US. We can argue whether the US fairly enforced its power here or not, but one outcome is not particularly controversial. This period coincided with one of the longest US economic expansions, the expansion of global consumer technology, of global trade, and the lifting up of billions of people out of poverty. A second gilded age in many ways, though perhaps more argent in nature than golden.

Since then, the sparkle of that age of silver has dimmed somewhat. The very fact that the economic centre of the American world was scarred by 9/11 is itself the proof that enough players in the world felt that the American policeman could be brought down. Since then, we’ve also had the rise of China, the military resurgence of Russia, and belligerent powers across the world. Some are aligned directly with the Pax Americana, others a bit more circumspect. Yet once again, we are at a point where the rules have multiple players starting to claim ownership over them. In fact, at least some of them might be arguing that the rules don’t even exist anymore.

Fundamentally, my argument is that any rules based order only survives if there is either complete and perfect agreement on everything - a very tall ask - or in the absence of such, has a means of policing. This could be a distributed means or a concentrated means - republican or authoritarian. Someone might want to break the rules, or consider it fair to, but can they actually do it? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in steps since 2014, and the ongoing of question of China and Taiwan, is then less about whether the rules allow it, but whether they WANT to break the rules and if they do, if they CAN. Those are different questions to whether the US operation in Venezuela is justified, but even more than whether it is justified, the reality is that they clearly WANTED to and they COULD. For now, that is still the order of the world we live in.

Every year, at its close, enough people tend to look back at what the year past was like. In the modern world, enough of this is publicly done. You see people talking of the successes, of failures, of joy, of pain, and of every little infinity in between those that combined, comprise the human spirit. At the end of 2025, however, there was something slightly different that I thought I noticed. While my perspective is undoubtedly biased by who I know and what they are, I think it’s not too presumptuous to claim that the past year was one where many people saw change and the uncertainty that change brings.

Curiously, I don’t necessarily recall the same being said during the year. During the year, I recall closer to the usual. Some would be happy with their lot in life, others less so. Yet in retrospect, even those that felt the year positively, still seemed to look back at it as one of change. On the surface, this makes sense. We’ve had at least three wars in play across the year with at least three nuclear powers directly involved. We’ve had a trade war that took the price of global trade to its highest in a century. We’ve had the snowballing effect of LLMs onto society, both positive and negative. From a bird’s eye view, there is a lot going on, and a lot of big things changing.

What’s happening under the radar though? I think to answer this, you have to look at why things are the way they are at any time. The way the world works at any given time, the values at play, the institutions that uphold all of this, and even the very types of thoughts that we have are all things, that I would argue as forming the “structure” of the world. Different elements are connected to each other in different ways, these connections affect other connections, all this affects elements back again, and in all combinations create a dynamic, moving, and complex creature. The extremely non-linear way that this works to create a functional creature, I think, is hard for anyone to properly note down. We might hold some basic ideas, and some might hold even some advanced theories, but in the end, no human mind (nor even a computer model - but this is a topic for another day) can fully understand every single relationship at play and how they all combine to form the world as we know it.

Sometimes, this creature behaves. The larger, more visible connections tend to dominate the behaviour of the whole, and there are enough spaces inside to hide all the little things that don’t fit in so that we don’t see it overall. The world makes sense at these times. There is a certain order to things, there are certain “rules” that seem to govern how society works, and you can understand when a small part changes, why it did so and what takes it away. Think of it like an ice cube almost - it’s well-ordered, and if you move one part of the ice cube, the rest of the cube, being frozen together, follows it. You know it can melt, you know when it does so, and you know how to make a cube again.

In many ways, I think the world has been behaving like this for a while. At least since the end of the world wars, there’s been some overall “grammar” to how the world works. Of course, it has changed still, but the idea of an American-led world - sometimes with a counterpole, sometimes without - that works on increasing economic integration and increasing social interconnectivity, and every other aspect that derives from this, is how I broadly understand the world to have been working. The past tense is intentional here. I think this world is changing now, and potentially other worlds that have lasted for even longer too.

Regardless of the specifics of this view - another story for later, this creates a very different story in how we understand the world. The usual stories play out in the day-to-day of our lives. We live in all the ways that we can live in the moment, but the longer arc of our lives looks somewhat different and critically, uncertain and unexplainable. Things don’t work the way they do anymore. The ice cube that we analogized the world to, has fully melted - and we don’t know how water works. We are living through history, in other words, but unlike most people who only see it well past, we might actually be starting to see it in the present as well.

The new year looks like it will keep most of the changes of the old year going through. Of course, if the way the world works is changing, then perhaps even this isn’t certain and the changes themselves can change. I am reminded of the moment of ludicriousness when Korean chicken stocks rose after Jensen Huang ate at a chicken restaurant. That is not a sign of a “rational” world functioning according to “rational” principles. More accurately, that is not the way the world is “supposed” to work. But nevertheless, it did behave that way. That kind of change, and changing change, looks increasingly like what 2026 will have to be about.

From one perspective, that can sound incredibly dystopian and pessimistic. The world is breaking and we might have to face all the pain it brings. Yet I don’t mean it in that sense. I mean it rather from the perspective, that thinking about whether change is possible and knowing that it could be, prepares us to engage with that better. Our abilities to engage with both ourselves, those around us, and the wider world would probably be better honed once we’re open to the world not functioning under the same rules as before. If big change, especially of the systemic global sense is likely, it isn’t “business as usual”. Yes, sometimes the very worst of humanity can come about during such times. But it is also at times of change, that we also get to see the very best of what it means to be human - a pocket of wonder that insists upon itself.