
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Lewis Caroll-Through the Looking Glass.
Humpty Dumpty comes to mind when the Western political, bureaucratic and academic class talk so fluently and authoritatively about the “Rules Based International Order”. Indeed so commonly is the term used with the accompanying assumption that no explanation is needed as to what it means that us mere mortals just assume that what is meant is the system of international law as created by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. It can reasonably be assumed that is exactly the impression those using the term so glibly intend to create in the minds of the world’s population. But the inevitable question that arises is whose interests does the attempt to create this impression serve? As Humpty said “which is to be master—-That’s all”.
The powerful elites in the West have, over the last five hundred years of Western dominance of the world, decided that it is their interests that must be served. As Adam Smith so cogently pointed out ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. That related to his understanding that the Merchants and Manufacturers who ruled British society at the time would always act, and have laws put in place to favour their interests. Similarly at a geopolitical level the powerful states can develop and implement rules that benefit their own interests at the expense of weaker states. Thucydides observed as long ago as two and a half millennia that “the strong do what they will whilst the weak suffer what they must”. That has been the ruling principle of empires ever since and is apotheosised by the US today. The US has, since the very creation of the UN, and particularly in the Security Council whose rules gave the seven permanent members a veto power, has chafed at the limitation that imposed on its ability to dominate the world through the UN and the International law that has been developed by it.
Indeed, so much so that the US has deliberately excluded itself from major parts of that irritating international law. Much of that international law is put in place through conventions developed by the UN and entered into by countries committing to comply with that convention. The US has refused to commit itself to the Convention on the Law of the Sea. Nor is it a party to the Rome Statute which created the International Criminal Court. In fact the US response to that statute was to pass legislation authorising the President to go so far as to invade the Hague to free any US citizen who was committed to trial there. It is not a party to the Geneva Protocols which set out the laws of war nor the Convention on cluster munitions and on anti-personnel mines. There are quite a few other examples of the US exempting itself from international law on matters with which it disagrees, presumably on the basis that Madelaine Albright expressed that the US is the “indispensable “ nation that is utterly exempt from the rules that apply to every other country. With the US exempt from complying with vast swathes of international law it still reserves to itself the right to punish other nations for failing to comply with the very law it has exempted itself from.
It was George Kennan, a senior US State Department official who wrote in 1948 “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
That has been the basis of US foreign policy to this day. The biggest obstacle to the achievement and maintenance of that goal has often been the UN which by and large operates on the principle (enshrined in International Law) of the equality of states. Thus in pursuing Kennan’s advice to eliminate all principle in favour of the exercise of brute force, the US and its western vassals needed an alternative narrative to that which is expressed in the UN Charter and International Law. But at least the West wanted to preserve the impression that they were playing by a set of rules as they proceeded to act with indifference to International Law. The need arose to construct a narrative that would be obediently amplified by a Western mainstream media that are largely stenographers to power themselves, and that would create the misleading impression that their “rules based International order” was simply the application of International Law. This three-card trick has worked a treat in the West where the vast bulk of those populations have been only too ready to accept the inherent lies and distortions but is widely held in contempt by the vast bulk of humanity.
If this rules-based order is not international law, what is it? In the simplest terms, it is always changing, never written for fear of limiting the freedom of the West to develop modifications or amendments almost on a daily basis, to enable the continuation of exploitation of the rest of humanity with what passes in the West for a clear conscience. It is a figment of the imagination of US policy makers and has been adopted submissively and unquestioningly by the vassal states of the US including Australia. None of it has the authenticity of established international law. It is enforced as Thucydides suggested by the military force and threats of a globe spanning military-industrial complex of a size and cost that has never been seen on the planet. Around 800 military bases, billions spent on subverting democracies and creating military dictatorships, the weaponisation of the world currency and an economic sanctions war against large parts of the planet.
The problem for it is that it is a rule by a dying and increasingly incompetent western empire. Whilst ever the empire was able to threaten every country outside the West with credible military, economic, cultural and social violence it worked. But the times they are a changing as Peter, Paul and Mary sang. The vast financialisation and de-industrialisation of the West particularly the US and UK, along with the industrialisation of the two largest populated countries on the planet China and India is creating a new world where the US is rapidly losing its capacity to wage both military and economic war against the rest of the world. The current movement towards a new economic block BRICS, which easily exceeds the economic and population size of the G7, and their move away from the US dollar as the chosen reserve currency are leading the West into economic decline and senescence. That is rendering Kennan’s advice to the US about maintaining its hegemony superfluous. That is also rendering the “rules Based International Order” a relic of a past power struggling with its increased irrelevance to a future world.
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Obtuse China Policy and the “International Rules-Based Order” in a Trumpian world