What Killed the Rules-Based Liberal Order?

I think that Andrew Latham is whistling past a graveyard in his piece at 1945 proposing what I think is a futile plan to reinvigorate the liberal “rules-based order”:

But while the original project foundered on the shoals of Soviet-American rivalry, a rump liberal order did emerge after the second world war in the form of a set of norms, rules, and institutions that created a space within which the world’s democracies could flourish. It was far from perfect – and it certainly had its dark side – but it was worth preserving. And it remains worth preserving today.

Now, however, even that vestigial liberal order is under threat – as are the democratic nations at its core. Around the world, democracies are falling prey to illiberalism and populism while a powerful and newly assertive China, assisted by a declining but truculent Russia, seeks to challenge the legitimacy of the existing order and the liberal-democratic ideas and institutions that give form, substance and meaning to it.

The question then becomes: assuming that this world order – and the democratic space at its core – is worth preserving, what sort of institutional steering mechanism or watchdog will be required to both manage and uphold it?

IMO the rules-based order he laments was moribund almost as quickly as it was instituted. To have a credible rules-based order you’ve got to be willing to operate under the rules and we manifestly are not. We’ve been violating the rules we instituted following World War II quite regularly over the period of the last 70 years. You can point to exigent circumstances or that the president has the authority to do this or that under the Constitution but the fact reamins we haven’t been operating by the rules.

Even then a sort of “rump” rules-based system could be maintained as long as we were by far the most power economic and military power on the planet but we’ve been merrily undermining that over the period of the last 30 years. Now the rules-based liberal order is a Humpty-Dumpty neither we nor a consortium of democracies can put together again.