Pearls and Irritations

US and Australian politicians frequently refer to the rules based international order when attacking the actions of “official enemies”. Most Australians think that they are referring to the UN Charter and the basis of international law that it personifies. For those in the know international law also incorporates the binding resolutions of the UN Security Council, decisions of the International Court of Justice as well as Treaties entered into between nation members of the UN.

Academics and practitioners within the international relations system understand that there is literally no relationship between the rules-based order and international law. That stems from a history of frequent conflicts between actions which the West undertakes against other countries, often in the global South, that are illegal at international law. The West, particularly the US, in the early days of the UN, exercised a very effective control over the UN, in manipulating it to meet US control of the planet.

That began to change as many countries grew tired of the US using the UN to override their national economic, political and cultural sovereignty. International law began to develop in ways that required all member nations of the UN to comply with that law. These developments were highly inconvenient for the US in its Imperialist desires to control the planet in its own interests. A way had to be found to overcome these inconvenient impositions on the ability to dominate the world.

Thus a “rules based international order” began to be developed and promulgated by the US in competition with international law. As the Charter of the UN is part of the “supreme law of the land” in the US according to the Constitution, the development of a conflicting set of rules appears unconstitutional but that seems to have bothered every US President since 1945 not at all. Treaties entered into by the US, and the ratification by the Congress of the UN charter is a treaty, all of which are binding upon the US.

The rules in this new rules-based order are deliberately obscure as they tended to be developed by the US on an ad-hoc basis to justify whatever actions the US chose to impose on other countries. In the vast majority of instances, they have turned out to be in fundamental conflict with international law as they are drawn very specifically to favour the interests of the US.

In international law for instance, the use of force in international affairs is prohibited except in very specific and limited circumstances. In the rules based international order by contrast violent overthrows of democratic governments, interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, assassinating leaders of governments whether democracies or dictatorships, imposing financial and trade sanctions on governments, are all part of the rules so long as it is the US or one of its western acolytes that are taking these actions. Overwhelmingly they are addressed to achieving compliance with the orders of the US Mafia Capo. Of course, “the rules” prohibit others from taking such actions, as that would be allowing some sense of equality of rights between nations, a concept completely foreign to “the rules”.

The extent to which the US “rules based international order” departs from international law can be seen by the failure of the US to ratify so many of the Treaties developed at the UN and which form parts of International Law. It has refused to join the International Criminal Court and has done much to undermine it. They have pressured countries that have joined the Court to sign agreements with the US never to turn a US citizen over to the court and have passed legislation to allow the President to take whatever actions it deems necessary, including the invasion of the Hague to secure the release of any US citizen detained by the Court.

The US has also opposed the Convention on Cluster Weapons and has refused to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention as well as the biological weapons convention. Similarly is has refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention to protect people from Forced Disappearances, the Anti-Personnel Mine Convention and that of the rights of Persons with Disabilities. (The Myth of American Idealism. How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World By Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson)

Even with the Genocide Convention the US failed to ratify it for forty years and when it did so, only with the express reservation that the US was exempt from being accused of genocide. It turns out that was a prescient exemption given the US support for and participation in the present genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West bank.

Other instances of the US failing even to comply with the provisions of the US Constitution are legion. In short, the experience of the world with US hegemony since 1945 have clearly indicated to the vast bulk of humanity that the US makes up its own rules to benefit itself and its own interests. Wherever that is in conflict with international law it makes up on the spot a new rule that everyone else is to comply with but from which it is itself exempt. The “rules based international order” is a Mafia style construct that fits perfectly with the statement of Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War:- “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

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