China, explained.
There is a need to ask whose interests are being served by competing narratives about the international order (Getty Images)
Competing narratives about the international order are being weaponised in an age of renewed territorial ambitions.
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Abandoning the rules-based order is no solutionAbandoning the rules-based order is no solution
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in his recent Senate confirmation hearing that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”. Those words appear to herald a repudiation by the incoming Trump administration of what Washington and its allies have termed the “rules-based international order”.
The presidency of Donald Trump will certainly eschew such language, which Samuel Moyn and Trita Parsi have welcomed in a recent opinion piece as an “opportunity” to revitalise international legal order. Yet, in so arguing, they embrace a narrative devised by Russia and China to portray the “rules-based” terminology as a Western gambit to replace “international law”. Not only is that narrative misleading, but repeating it cedes ground to these rivals in the contest to define global order.
Russia is a junior partner to China in geopolitical terms, but has led in turning the rules-based order narrative into a rhetorical weapon against Western hegemony. The origins appear to be in the 2017 Munich Security Conference, where Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov faced repeated accusations about his country’s threat to the related concept of the “liberal international order”. He responded that this was a power-based construct contrary to international law. By the time of his 2018 address to the UN General Assembly, he had unveiled the now familiar formulation that “Western colleagues seek to replace the rule of law in international affairs with some ‘rules-based order’.”
As late as 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping was happy to call for upholding the international order “as long as it is rule-based, aims to be equitable and pursues win-win outcomes as its goal”. A turning point came in March 2021, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken lectured senior Chinese officials for policies which he said “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability”.
China responded by declaring commitment to the UN system and international law and not the “so-called ‘rules-based’ international order”. By 2022, China-Russia joint statements had firmly settled on contrasting “international law” with “rules elaborated in private by certain nations or blocs of nations”. Thus, the narrative of Western hegemony via its “rules-based order” became orthodoxy.
The “rules-based order” is not a rigid concept but rather an evolving position on what a desirable global order might look like — with all the blind spots and hypocrisies that entails.
The Sino-Russian narrative misleadingly implies that there is a bright line between what states agree on as “international law” in contentious cases and their “political” interests. Yet we are already in an era when the concrete meanings of fundamental concepts such as “sovereignty” are so contested that all sides in major conflicts — including the Russo-Ukrainian and Gaza wars — invoke legal authority in service of their causes.
President Trump’s second inaugural address likewise asserted that, under his leadership, “our sovereignty will be reclaimed” — interpreted to include a right to take back the Panama Canal notwithstanding agreement on Panamanian control under the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. Appeals to a set of ideas and assumptions labelled the “rules-based order” are a response to, rather than the cause of, these genuine disagreements about what values and power structures international law should enshrine.
Parsi oversaw a Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft report which concluded that the rules-based terminology “is meant to imply something other than mere adherence to international law — otherwise, it would not need to exist”. That phrasing obscures the reality that merely declaring fidelity to “international law” is increasingly indeterminate. Western advocates of a “rules-based order” now compete with Chinese and Russian invocations of a “multipolar international order”, with each ordering concept entailing distinct interpretations of “law”.
The “rules-based order” is not a rigid concept but rather an evolving (primarily) Western position on what a desirable global order might look like — with all the blind spots and hypocrisies that inevitably entails. Greater credibility not capitulation, however, is the correct response to the narrative being promoted by Russia and China to mask their own selective use of law.
As with much of the new administration’s policies, it remains to be seen whether rejection of the “rules-based order” will be more substantive or rhetorical in nature. Notably, the first statement on the Indo-Pacific order under the administration restates commitment to all elements generally associated with the concept—including “the rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty, and territorial integrity” and “international law”. An ideal outcome would be that, as the balance of global power shifts, so too will understandings of how US power can best serve an order based on common rules. Abandonment by the Trump administration of that ideal is not something to be welcomed.
The weaponisation of the post-war order perceived by Rubio now extends to the adoption of Sino-Russian terms of debate within Western discourse. These well-intentioned critiques fail to recognise the strategic win this represents for an increasingly pervasive narrative about global order that is no less partisan than the one it contests. Moyn and Parsi’s optimism about the decline of “rules-based order” talk seems tailored to the zeitgeist of the Trump era. Yet Trump’s belligerent territorial ambitions to the north and south of the US landmass, combined with the regional ambitions of Russia and China, are a stark reminder of the need to ask whose interests are being served by competing narratives about the international order.
About the author
Malcolm Jorgensen
Dr Malcolm Jorgensen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg.
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