Rearview Mirror

"

What was 'The Rules-Based International Order'?

What really do we deplore about President Trump's abduction of Venezuela's dictator Nicholas Maduro? That he violated the so-called rules-based international order allegedly prevailing since 1945? The rules and the institutions embodying them -- the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights and the convention against genocide, the IMF and World Bank -- were shaped at a moment of exceptional American power after we had defeated really repressive and aggressive state actors: the Third Reich and a militarized and brutal Japanese regime. The rules and institutions seemed a worthy alternative to international power politics even at moments the US went on to administer a world order that often shielded new authoritarian dictators. The rules-based international order was the product of a very specific historical moment, which does not mean that it has been an unworthy aspiration. But its achievement has rested as much on the inequality of nations as on their equality.

Is the lament that Trump violated a nation's sovereignty? But Americans have long stressed the rights of individuals as well as states, at least white males but expanded to include finally African-Americans after 1865. For the past decade or more most American policy makers and foreign-policy observers believed that Maduro's rule grievously violated the sovereignty of Venezuela's citizens.

Or are we unhappy that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited the Monroe Doctrine -- at least the original doctrine of 1823 that warned the Restoration monarchies of Spain and France not to take advantage of the Latin American revolutions to attempt a reconquest of their New World empires. That early bit of U.S. bravado was feasible because America understood that the British would likely provide the sea power to enforce our unilateral declaration, indeed was motivated in part to avoid Foreign Minister George Canning's earlier suggestion for a joint statement. More disturbing about Trump's and Rubio's invocation of our right to intervention in our hemisphere, however, if we recall the early 20th-century U.S. legislation and treaties that overtly justified the continuing American intervention in Cuba and Central America, and then later in the Cold War, our interventions since the 1960s.

Do we object to the fact that Trump seems to prioritize American objectives as the recovery of our despoliated oil resources? (Contemporary oil concessions after a century of conflict have come to split the royalties between the host nation and the foreign developers.) Or do we share Congressman Seth Moulton's blurted-out comment that the intervention was "insane" in the sense that distant consequences are incalculable. Or do we really object that it was President Trump, our own would-be authoritarian, who took this step because we fear his domestic policies? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive on economic issues who, alas, defended deplorable racial policies, justified his intervention in the Mexican Revolution: "We will teach the Mexicans to elect good men." A lesson we might take to heart at home.

Face it, for those who really believe in a rules-based international order a dilemma arises if the intervention yields beneficent results, unlikely as that may currently seem. Of course, the timeline for tallying the outcome can be extended until some adverse consequences result. We critics have to be willing to maintain that even if Venezuela becomes an outpost of stable democracy and oil resources flow like milk and honey to the benefit of its own citizens as well as for our oil "majors", the intervention that brought it about was destructive for a world of global norms. (No one yet to my knowledge has focused on the impact on climate change.)

The point is that in a multinational world, the ideal of global norms will always be in tension with the values of national sovereignty, and the conflict cannot be wished away. On the one side the primacy of international law and the equal rights for very unequal state, on the other side, the world of Realpolitik and sacro egoismo, and of Carl Schmitt's cynical view that international law really arose as a compact to keep peace among the Europeans as they appropriated the lands beyond.

As a liberal I find it hard to get beyond an uneasy and often inconsistent set of compromises: a belief in constructing norms that powerful states, or at least my own state, must occasionally disregard. This is a lesson at least one can draw after watching decades of debate in the UN. Even if we try to construct a rules-based order, the rules, as all parents know, will invite testing. The search for doctrine will confront the agony of the specific case, and the outcome may well depend upon the balance of party politics at home. A British Liberal cabinet came to the defense of Belgium in 1914 "for a scrap of paper," but a Conservative government pressured Czechoslovakia not to force it to honor its pledges in 1938. How will NATO members interpret the Article 5 of the North Atlantic Pact if Russia muscles in on Estonia? How far will the U.S. go to defend Taiwan? More immediately, how robustly will Europeans and the United States continue to support Ukraine against Russian demands? We aspire to a rule-based order, or a "doctrine" that settles debate. But doctrine is constantly tested. Should we, therefore, abandon it altogether and revert to pure casuistry? I would argue that there is a case for soft or aspirational law. But one must also recognize at least that the U.S. cannot keep claiming exceptions to the rule and also expect hope that the rule-based "order," such as it is, will remain an "order." This rule binds the powerful as well as the weak.