“The World” Has Rejected the Rules-Based Order

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead laments that the world has rejected the “rules-base order”:

Liberal internationalists around the world believe that global institutions (like Wilson’s ill-fated League of Nations) can replace the anarchic, often deadly, power struggles between nations with a system of orderly management that brings the rule of law to a weary world. Institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, as well as agreements like the Paris climate accords, reflect efforts by diplomats and politicians in the U.S. and abroad to create the kind of world that Wilson sought.

For Wilson’s modern heirs, technocratic governance through rules-based international institutions represents humanity’s last, best hope to avoid cataclysmic disruptions ranging from world wars to climate change. From this perspective, Mr. Putin’s defiant international rule-breaking threatens the foundations of Wilsonian order. If a great power gets away with breaking the rules this egregiously, humanity falls back into a nuclear jungle.

Mr. Putin’s challenge to Wilsonian order is why so many liberals, especially in the U.S. and Europe, have become uber-interventionist on Ukraine. Many expected traditional national-security hawks would rally to oppose Mr. Putin’s assault on his neighbor. What was more surprising and, given the politics of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, more consequential for American foreign policy, was the response of Wilsonian liberals to the war. Normally dovish columnists and members of Congress now cry “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!” as they urge Western governments to step up shipments of advanced weaponry and supplies to Ukraine.

Within the Biden administration, the struggle is among three groups: liberal internationalists, who want America and the West to do what it takes to ensure that Russia loses the war; pragmatists who want to check Russia but fear Russian escalation and believe that the war will inevitably end in a compromise peace that falls short of Wilsonian hopes; and Asia-firsters who worry that U.S. support for Ukraine reduces America’s ability to face the more consequential and long-term threat from China. President Biden has tried to stay in the middle, giving Ukraine more support than the pragmatists and Asia hands prefer, but dribbling it out more slowly than the Wilsonians would like.

For Wilsonians, world politics today is less about great-power rivalries between the U.S. and rivals like China and Russia and more about the struggle between principles and selfishness, order and chaos, democracy and authoritarianism. Wilsonians hailed the recent wins of a pro-Western candidate in the Czech election and of Lula da Silva over Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil as victories in the global struggle for liberal order.

Last week German chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Lula to celebrate his victory over Mr. Bolsonaro—and to ask Brazil to send ammunition to Ukraine. Lula accepted the congratulations but turned down the request. Brazil, like India, South Africa and much of the rest of the world, wants nothing to do with Wilsonian crusades.

While I think it brave of Dr. Mead to acknowledge the obvious, that rather than the entire world rallying to oppose V. Putin’s attack on Ukraine, only a handful of American and European countries have done so but I think he’s wrong. It’s not the “rules-based order” that the world is rejecting but a “rules-based order” that does not bind the United States as well. I would put the major nails in the coffin of the rules-based order over the last 30 years as:

• U. S. invasion of Grenada
• China pegs the yuan to the dollar
• U. S. bombing of Serbia
• China granted most favored nation trading status and admitted to the WTO
• U. S. invasion of Iraq
• U. S. use of armed drones in multiple countries without Security Council authorization
• U. S. campaign against Qaddafi government in Libya
• U. S. support for the rebels in Syria
• China’s “One Belt, One Road” program
• U. S. withdrawal from Afghanistan
• Russian invasion of Ukraine

just to hit the high spots. There was never a global consensus in support of a rules-based order. Dr. Mead mistakes U. S. hegemony for a rules-based order and most countries in the world have chafed under that hegemony.

My list may seem like a hodge-podge but it’s actually coherent. U. S. military dominance is downstream from U. S. economic dominance and it is that dominance that made us the “policeman on the beat”. Whatever the illusions of some Americans, we cannot preserve economic dominance on the basis of banking, retail, and services, relying on other countries to manufacture what our retailers sell. Without economic dominance we cannot preserve military dominance and without U. S. military dominance there is no rules-based order.