Mourning a Rules-Based Order that Never Existed

The United States never accepted the rules of the system it helped to create.

Photo Credit: W. M. Schmidli

The ugly transactionalism of Donald Trump’s kleptocratic presidency has elicited a chorus of predictions that we are witnessing the demise of the “rules-based international order.” Propelled by Trump’s tariff policy, unabashed admiration for authoritarians, and growing appetite for foreign policy adventurism, such handwringing by pundits and politicians over a supposed return to Great Power competition and geopolitical spheres of influence has become a mainstay of the mainstream media.

The problem with this formulation is that the American-led order that emerged after the Second World War was never entirely rules-based. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Washington was always ready to exempt itself from agreements that might constrain U.S. sovereignty, to ignore multilateral forums, and to run roughshod over the sovereignty of smaller states. The United States, in other words, has never played by the rules that it itself helped to create.

Thucydides is Having a Moment

There’s no question that Trump and his acolytes pose a clear and present danger to global security. The administration’s use of tariffs, for instance, has been less a concerted effort to jump-start domestic manufacturing than a capricious display of Trump’s personal power to force foreign exporters to grovel in the Oval Office. When the president threatened to impose a 39 percent tariff on imports from Switzerland, for example, a contingent of Swiss business leaders hustled to Washington with a gold Rolex and an engraved bar of gold. Appeased, Trump dropped the tariff to 15 percent.

More worrying is Trump’s military interventionism abroad. Coming on the heels of dozens of U.S. strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in January 2026 was a brazen display of unilateral power that left dozens dead and wounded. The administration’s justification for the attack—that Maduro was helping drug-runners enroute to the U.S.—rang hollow in light of Trump’s almost simultaneous pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. Sentenced to 45 years in prison by a U.S. court in 2024, Hernández is thought to have facilitated the shipment of over 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

The images of Maduro on trial in New York were still making their way through the news cycle when Trump upped the ante on his periodic threat to acquire Greenland. “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way,” the president declared. If Trump sounded more like a mafia boss than the leader of the free world, the influential White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller lifted a page from Machiavelli. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Miller told a journalist. “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” According to Miller, “these are the iron laws of the world.”

In Europe, Trump’s designs on Greenland have been taken as an actionable threat; contemplating the possibility of a U.S. military annexation, Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands and Finland quickly dispatched small contingents of soldiers to the arctic island, which has been part of the Kingdom of Denmark for three hundred years. The result has been an extraordinary rift in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) collective security agreement. Like the U.S. forces stationed in West Germany during the Cold War, whose almost-certain obliteration in the event of an attack by the Soviet Union would trigger American military retaliation, the European soldiers in Greenland are a tripwire—albeit one that would be activated by American boots on the ground.

Although Trump appeared to back away from the possibility of taking Greenland by force at the World Economic Forum in Davos, his threat was widely perceived as part of a fundamental shift taking place in international relations. Over the past year, a cottage industry—let’s call it the Thucydides Club—has sprouted around the idea that we are witnessing the demise of the rules-based international order. Indeed, the Athenian general’s famous dictum, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” has been trotted out so many times in recent months that it now sounds positively hackneyed.

Multilateralism, the logic goes, has been replaced by Trumpian self-interest: Where once there was free trade, now we have economic nationalism; where once there was international cooperation, now we have great power rivalry. “What the world once took for granted in the U.S.—checks and balances, respect for the courts, reverence for democratic values and practices—is now in question,” wrote historian Margaret MacMillan in a representative piece, titled “This Is the Way a World Order Ends.” “And because America was the crucial player in the international order,” she concluded, “the tremors of its earthquake are felt everywhere.” Some of these hot takes take the form of paeans to a lost American civility. “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will,” gushed New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker as the Greenland crisis unfolded. Others foresee a grim future. “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II,” predicted neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan, “one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise.”

The American Century was Rigged

Europeans leaders’ shock at Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign affairs is understandable. After all, since the Second World War, Western Europe has held a privileged place in what Life magazine publisher Henry Luce called the “American Century.” To be sure, for a generation of European leaders, taking a backseat to the upstart Americans was no easy thing. But by the end of the 1940s, with Marshall Plan aid fueling Western European postwar reconstruction and U.S. troops participating in NATO exercises, the benefits clearly outweighed the costs. In the words of historian Geir Lundestad, in Western Europe, the U.S. was an “empire by invitation.”

Today, as they confront Trump’s tariff hikes, threats against NATO members, and open admiration for Russian authoritarian Vladimir Putin, European leaders are forced to contemplate rescinding the invite. Amid the Greenland brouhaha, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever captured the sense of betrayal after decades of privilege within the U.S.-led system. “Being a happy vassal is one thing,” De Wever griped, “being a miserable slave is something else.”

But here’s the rub: Europeans are beginning to experience what the so-called developing world has known all along, namely that in the U.S.-led system, everyone is supposed to follow the rules; everyone, that is, except the Americans. Take free trade, a pillar of U.S. internationalism ever since Woodrow Wilson drew up his Fourteen Points. Over the twelve months, Trump’s tariff policy has grabbed headlines, but fifty years ago, critics like the Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano understood that the trade game was rigged to keep developing nations in a permanent state of under-development. “Latin America is the region of open veins,” Galeano wrote in 1973. “Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European—or later United States—capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. … To each area has been assigned a function, always for the benefit of the foreign metropolis of the moment, and the endless chain of dependency has been endlessly extended.”

In the 1970s, with the U.S. economy mired in stagflation and the newly-created Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) flexing its muscles, the global economic system seemed ripe for change. Echoing Galeano, Algerian president Houari Boumédiène’s 1974 declaration of a New International Economic Order denounced the divide between rich and poor nations and the unequal terms of exchange that hindered development. With support in the UN General Assembly, Boumédiène called for state expropriation of natural resources and the creation of new international mechanisms to level the playing field.

Instead, the U.S. changed the rules of the game. In what was dubbed the “Volcker shock,” at the outset of the 1980s the U.S. hiked interest rates. Since developing nations’ debt and currency reserves were held in U.S. dollars, the combination of the rate increase and the appreciation of the dollar created a spiraling debt crisis, and developing world leaders had little alternative than to request U.S. help with debt restructuring. American policymakers readily agreed, but the terms of the deal were deadly: in what became known as the Washington Consensus, indebted nations were forced to accept a neoliberal agenda of structural adjustment policies aimed at fiscal austerity, privatization, and market liberalization. The result was an explosion of financial speculation, rising inflation, deepening unemployment, and cutbacks to social services. A handful benefited while millions suffered—in Latin America, for example, in 1990 an incredible 48.4 percent of the population was impoverished. Surveying the hemisphere, a weary Galeano wrote, “For us capitalism is not a dream to be pursued, but a nightmare come true.”

Three decades later, the developing world is still trying to crawl out of the hole created by the unfair rules of the neoliberal game. In this sense, Trump’s frequent attacks on legacy trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) reveal how little the president knows about the real unfairness at the heart of the American free trade model. NAFTA didn’t actually level the playing field; American corn producers, for example, continued to receive federal subsidies, allowing a flood of cheap American corn to undercut small-scale Mexican producers. The result was a massive, forced migration, as millions of Mexican campesinos left the countryside for a precarious existence in the rough, impoverished edges of Mexico’s cities or slipped across the border in search of work in the United States.

Yankee Go Home

Denmark is not the only NATO member facing the possibility of a military confrontation with the United States. Canada has reportedly started contingency planning for an insurgency in the event of American invasion, based on the tactics used by the Afghan mujahdeen. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney signed up for the Thucydides Club by describing the “rupture in the world order” orchestrated by Trump. “For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order,” Carney declared. “We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.”

Carney was right: from the onset of the American Century, U.S. allies have benefited from American economic and security ties. But what about the rest of the world?

Ask Iranians about American power. The 1953 CIA-backed coup ousted the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. For the next quarter-century, the U.S. bankrolled the repressive regime of authoritarian Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, until he was finally ousted in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The current regime’s toxic blend of religious fundamentalism and anti-Americanism cannot be understood outside of the history of U.S. interventionism.

Or ask Guatemalans about American power. In 1954, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz, then backed a series of increasingly brutal military governments, culminating in the Guatemalan military’s genocidal campaign against the indigenous Maya in the early 1980s. The legacy of American interventionism continues to shape the region, with instability fueling an exodus of impoverished migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle.

The list of U.S. Cold War interventions is long. What international rules-based order did the U.S.-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba adhere to? Or the hundreds of U.S. attempts to kill the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro? Was the rules-based order in effect when the United States turned Laos into the most heavily bombed nation per capita in the world? Or when the Reagan administration secretly funded a terrorist army of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, whose modus operandi was torture, rape, and murder?

Perhaps for some, the West’s victory in the Cold War consigns such tragedies to, as Reagan put it in a very different context, the “ash-heap of history.” But not even post-Cold War triumphalism can justify the death, destruction, and regional destabilization caused by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Ignoring opposition from the United Nations Security Council and close U.S. allies, including France and Germany, the George W. Bush administration sent American forces rolling into Bagdad, a decision historians rank as the worst foreign policy move in U.S. history. “No one should be able to accord himself the right to use [force] unilaterally and preventatively,” French president Jacques Chirac argued. “In an open world, no one can isolate themselves, no one can act alone in the name of all and no one can accept the anarchy of a society without rules.”

The lesson is clear: Trump’s interventionism reflects continuity, not change. The only difference is that America’s NATO allies now find themselves in the crosshairs. In other words, to believe that an international rules-based system ever existed is a fallacy. “Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power,” Omar El Akkad writes, in his elegant study of the West’s failure to halt the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. “Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.”

To his credit, in his speech at Davos, Mark Carney added an element of nuance missing from most accounts of Trumpian might-over-right. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” the prime minister asserted. “That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

It was a good point—a reminder that the old system was never as stable as its defenders often suggest. Yes, Trump is a destructive megalomaniac. But before we all join the Thucydides Club and cast the supposedly good old days in halcyon, let’s not forget that the United States never accepted the rules of the order it helped to create.