On the “rules based international order”
After the US operation in Venezuela
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.