Rules-Based International Order: Dos and Don’ts of “Liberal” Manners

Idea mongers both in the U.S. and Europe seek to obscure the dark pages of the liberal world order advancement by emphasizing a dichotomy between “rules” and “power”, the “right” and “wrong” development models

Attempts to justify U.S. domination as a public good for the global community, an “empire with good manners,” a “benevolent hegemon” who organizes the international system by means of clear rules (free trade, protection of human rights, multilateral cooperation, etc.) rather than by force, were at the same time an effort to overcome the historic tide, to change the nature and essence of interstate relations, which virtually comes down to the struggle for power, competition for resources, and defense of national interests.

The more the U.S. and its allies encountered objective obstacles and resistance on this path, the more “illiberal” and militaristic their foreign policy activities became, the more willful the West was in its interpretation and treatment of formally enshrined principles of the international law. It was at that juncture that a new concept of the rules-based order was so much needed.

The “rules-based international order” as a political construct came into vernacular usage relatively a short time ago, in the 2000s. A surge in leveraging this phrase as part of political rhetoric can be chronologically linked to the U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 without the UN sanction. In this respect, it can be assumed that the Western political establishment was desperate to develop a new lexical and semantic apparatus for information and communication support of its actions which were contrary to the formal stipulations of the international law.

Notably, the new term began to supplant the familiar notion of “liberal international order,” and this was in no way accidental. Firstly, the cases of NATO’s military intervention and bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, its 2003 intervention in Iraq and 2011 intervention in Libya, as well as instigating “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space have caused growing distrust and criticism of the Western liberal project of remodeling the world.

In the Western understanding, “rules” is a much broader concept that includes both the existing set of formal statutory and legal arrangements and the established behavioral practices necessary to achieve the goals, which may later become part of the body of law. Furthermore, Americans are quite dismissive of international agreements, when the latter no longer correspond to their national interests, their existence constraining the American “free hand”.

At present, amidst strategic competition between the great powers and the emerging polycentric world, the West is increasingly focused on protecting and maintaining its vision of the world order. In essence, this means using the entire arsenal of means to preserve its “rules” through cooperation with partner states having a similar vision. After all, it is no coincidence that along with a rules-based order, Euro-Atlantic allies mention consolidation with like-minded countries almost as often. American and European ideologues once again seek to obscure the dark pages of promoting the liberal world order by devising a dichotomy between rules and power, “right” and “wrong” development models. However, these same processes of global political fragmentation and structural transformation trigger disintegration, revealing the nature of the Western world order, demonstrating its purely Western-centered limited character coupled with American dominance. What began as a liberal, idealistic project of restructuring the international system under American leadership first mired in contradictions and abuses that exposed its real thrust, and then began to weaken and gradually fade, forcing Western allies to fortify their defenses and entrench themselves in a besieged fortress.  

In the political vocabulary of U.S. and European politicians, the term “rules-based international order” is perhaps becoming the most frequent rhetorical phrase, given that not a single significant international summit or policy document can dispense with it. Western allies declare their uncompromised commitment to a “rules-based international order” that they are willing to defend and uphold, without publicly proclaiming the notional and ideological aspects of this phenomenon. What is this notorious “rule-based order” actually about? What “rules” do American and European politicians have in mind? How do they relate to international law and to the concept of a liberal world order?

These questions have been asked time and again by Russia and China, to which the U.S. incriminates the gross violation of the so-called “rules”. This is normally followed by strict “reprimands” and quite material sanctions designed to punish the negligent culprits for their destructive behavior. As if the great powers with a thousand-year history of development, with a legitimate right to preserve and protect their cultural, civilizational and political legacy, upheld at the cost of strenuous effort, were just compulsive nihilistic maximalists, who dared to question the proposed “rules” and set out to destroy the established world order. Yet, Western allies, having embraced this term and actively replicating it, are not inclined to enter into discussions about the ideological, political and legal foundations of their vision of the international order, so much touted and promoted. Probably, because a thorough and scrupulous analysis of the U.S.-European principles of organizing the international system would reveal countless contradictions and double standards, hypocrisy and ambiguity, which can seriously discredit the constructed idealistic image of the “right” world order.

International order and rules: defining the concepts

Ivan Timofeev:
Ending Western Domination Is Key to the Emerging World Order. Here’s What Needs to Be Done to Achieve It

A sound moderator always begins their good scientific and expert discussion with harmonization of all terms and concepts used, so that the participants might speak the same language and stay within the same semantic framework. Such reconciliation checks and verification of discursive and conceptual aspects are as important in interstate diplomatic relations. In this context, Russian and Chinese participants of political interactions have explicitly underlined the opaqueness of the “rule-based order” phrase used by the United States and its European allies.

Speaking at the Valdai International Forum in 2022, Russian President V. Putin pointed out: “In general, it is unclear who invented these rules, what these rules are based on, and what is inside these rules.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in his article dated May 5, 2023 and published in Russia in Global Affairs, had the following to say about the crisis of the UN system: “...the root cause was the desire of some UN member states to replace international law and the UN Charter with some kind of a ‘rules-based order’. No one has seen these rules, and they have never been the subject of transparent international negotiations.” In his earlier article dated October 30, 2019, Mr. Lavrov noted that the purpose of this concept is “to replace universally accepted international legal instruments and mechanisms with narrow formats, where alternative, non-consensual methods of resolving certain international problems are worked out, in circumvention of legitimate multilateral frameworks. In other words, the calculus is usurping the decision-making process in key areas.” In his turn, Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu, speaking at the annual Asian security summit Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 4, 2023, said that the so-called rules-based international order does not clarify what these rules are and who made them up. Thus, this order presupposes exclusivity and double standards, serving the interests of the few who concocted them. Obviously, the more persistently Western states seek to assert their international order, the more questions and bewilderment this raises in the minds of other members of the international community and the more evident is the need for a common space for constructive dialogue.

Studying the phenomenon of the world order has a long background in national and overseas science of international relations. Let’s consider two definitions of the “world order,” which will allow us to understand its essential meaning and characteristics as well as its distinctive features. In the Russian theory of international relations, the Americanist Eduard Batalov offered such a definition: “It is the structure of correlative ties between the actors of the world political process, aimed at ensuring the smooth operation and development of the world political system in accordance with the goals and values [1] dominant in the world (at a given stage of historical evolution).” In this case, statutes, rules, principles and institutions are understood as “forms in which the world order manifests itself”, and which uphold its very existence. The suggested definition is characterized by axiological neutrality in understanding the world order as a system of interstate relations that take shape in a particular era.

The researcher of international relations Hedley Bull also focused on the world order. In The Anarchical Society: a Study of Order in World Politics, he lays special emphasis on the rules. This scholar defines the international order as a pattern of activity, aimed at maintaining the elementary or primary goals of the community of nation states or international society, by which he understands such an environment, where a group of states is bound by some common interests, values and rules of interaction. The international order therefore rests on three pillars: shared interests in achieving the set goals; rules that prescribe certain conduct for achieving those goals; and institutions that formalize and enshrine the supposed rules. Mr. Bull mentions separately that rules may have the status of international law, moral standards, customs or established practices, or these can be operational rules or “rules of the game” at work without formal agreement or even without verbal communication. [3] It appears that it is in this sense that the word “rule” is used in the phrase “rules-based order.”

There are three groups of rules that are designed to maintain international order: fundamental or standard constitutional principles of world politics in a given historical period; rules of coexistence; rules of cooperation between states. These listed rules of conduct are general regulations, which are constructed and filled in by different nation states in accordance with the philosophical and ideological views they share. That being said, Mr. Bull emphasizes that the nations representing a unified cultural and civilizational community, which contributed to the emergence of a common interpretive framework instrumental in understanding the existing reality, have always been most successful in shaping the international community.

In general, it can be said that the Russian political tradition is dominated by a structural-functional understanding of the world order as the established stable links and relations in the international system, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon tradition notable for rather explicit statutory connotations. In this sense, the Western, or liberal, international order can be presented as a certain pattern of behavior based on common interests, values and institutions developed on Anglo-Saxon and European cultural and historical grounds. However, in the process of the West transformation into an influential center of power and gravity in a globalizing world, the states that belong to this community have taken steps to internationalize it in order to preserve what is essentially an expressly regional order.

At the same time, as the American neorealist Stephen Walt justly points out, it is important to understand that any international order presupposes some rules and regulators of relations between states, whereas the ability to enforce it depends, among other things, on the existing balance of power. Thus, the main question is who establishes these rules (the subject), what their content is, and what sanctions may follow for any disagreement or dissent.

Liberal world order: a political oxymoron?

Andrey Kortunov:
Seven Debates over the Fourteen Points

In the American intellectual tradition, the phrase “rule-based order” is, strictly speaking, synonymous of “liberal world order.” Liberalism as the basis of the ideological and political vision shared by Americans goes back to the first European colonists migrating to America. These were the bearers of bourgeois ideology, the ideas of human freedom, equality, the right to private property and individualism. In this regard, the Russian researcher of American political thought Mr. Eduard Batalov pointed to the fact that “liberal ideas have always been the cornerstone of the American ideo-sphere.” [4] As a statutory basis for the organization of American national affairs, liberal ideas could not but influence the international and political identification of the United States and its foreign policy strategy. And at the initial stage of historical evolution the Americans, according to the precepts of their founding fathers, had for a long time refrained from getting involved in “entangling alliances” with Europeans, which could “infect” the liberal American society with the virus of great power confrontations, crude power politics and devastating rivalry.

As its economic power and political importance kept growing, the U.S. could no longer remain aloof from global political processes. The “14 Points” put forward by U.S. President W. Wilson on January 8, 1918, were the first conceptual project to break with the idea of non-involvement. It was a highly idealistic project of rearranging the international relations on the basis of the liberal world view, which Americans tried to spread across the globe. In fact, the whole subsequent history of the conceptual and statutory justification of the international order by the West was confronted by gradual refutation of the very possibility of implementing the idealistic project of the world order on the applied political level. And while there may still be a chance of liberal indoctrination on an individual nation state scale, in global affairs the odds for this outcome are very slim. First, the system of interstate relations is a matrix of sovereign states which have the right to legitimate violence and which are proponents of certain values; second, interstate relations are characterized by anarchy, the absence of centrally established power. In addition, returning to Bull’s concept, a functional international order requires an international community that comprises a group of states with common goals, values, institutions and rules of conduct. More often than not, as history suggests, these are the states that make up one cultural and social community, united by similar worldviews and sharing the same vision.

This is why the Western model of the liberal world order has never been and could never be global. Its genealogy is based on the initial U.S. attempt after World War I to make liberal principles the basis of relations between the states globally, which was not only an idealistic impulse, but also a very pragmatic choice. The ideas of free market relations, open peace treaties and the removal of economic barriers opened up new opportunities for the expansion of American capital. After the Second World War, the US was already a full-scale stakeholder of the future world order, having proceeded with institutionalizing and affirmation of its vision of the world order. Politically, the U.S. established the UN in 1945 and the NATO in 1949, forming a network of alliances bent on permanent expansion. Economically, the creation in the 1940s of the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO) were important steps towards the structuring of global space based on the vision of Western nations, which was presented as an attempt to overcome the brute force factor in global affairs through intensive economic cooperation and embracing the common goals of peace, freedom and prosperity. In fact, this was nothing else than a paradigm of deploying and expanding Western political and economic domination on “liberal” foundations to the entire world—yet, its implementation met with resistance from other states.

In this regard, the Indian-born Canadian scholar and author Amitav Acharya challenges the two myths of the liberal world order: the first has to do with the attempt of presenting the Western international order as a global initiative, that is, something more than “a pack of Western states or transatlantic club that includes the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan”; the second refers to the idea that the liberal order was established by the voluntary acceptance by willing states of its values and institutions. Unauthorized military interventions, inspired coups d’état to establish loyal political regimes, and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states have been glossed over by Western political elites as by-products of the pursuit of peace, freedom and prosperity. This “dark side” of the liberal world order, paradoxically implying completely illiberal methods of promoting it, ultimately discredited the Western project. The American neo-realist scholar Patrick Porter, in The False Promise of a Liberal World Order, sagaciously remarks that although the architects of the liberal international order probably did not envision such a development, in the end “liberal expansion is a messianic project that seeks to eliminate competing alternatives.” [5] If a superpower with global ambitions leads in this endeavor, the establishment of a world order is virtually tantamount to the entrenchment of hegemony, whereas its maintenance entails the struggle against dissenters, including by force.

Attempts to justify U.S. domination as a public good for the global community, an “empire with good manners,” a “benevolent hegemon” who organizes the international system by means of clear rules (free trade, protection of human rights, multilateral cooperation, etc.) rather than by force, were at the same time an effort to overcome the historic tide, [6] to change the nature and essence of interstate relations, which virtually comes down to the struggle for power, competition for resources, and defense of national interests. The more the U.S. and its allies encountered objective obstacles and resistance on this path, the more “illiberal” and militaristic their foreign policy activities became, the more willful the West was in its interpretation and treatment of formally enshrined principles of the international law. It was at that juncture that a new concept of the rules-based order was so much needed.

The rules-based order: a sweet-sounding euphemism?

Andrey Kortunov:
A New Western Cohesion and World Order

The “rules-based international order” as a political construct came into vernacular usage relatively a short time ago, in the 2000s. The usage frequency graph for the “rules-based international order” phrase in the array of publications, according to Google Books Ngram, demonstrates that since 2000 there has been a steady increase in its use. American researcher Paul Poast believes, that a surge in leveraging this phrase as part of political rhetoric can be chronologically linked to the U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 without the UN sanction. In this respect, it can be assumed that the Western political establishment was desperate to develop a new lexical and semantic apparatus for information and communication support of its actions which were contrary to the formal stipulations of the international law.

It is noteworthy that the new term began to supplant the familiar notion of “liberal international order,” and this was in no way accidental. Firstly, the cases of NATO’s military intervention and bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, its 2003 intervention in Iraq and 2011 intervention in Libya, as well as instigating “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space have caused growing distrust and criticism of the Western liberal project of remodeling the world. In this situation, its ideologues sought to offer a more neutral semantic construct. Second, there was an imperative of groping for an ideological and political justification for the use of force under compulsion by the U.S. and its allies as sanctions against those who did not comply with the “rules of the international community.” As has often been the case in American history, “liberation” went hand in hand with domination.

This interpretation appeared in The Princeton Project on National Security, which was launched in 2004 for this particular purpose and came out under the curious slogan of “forging a world of liberty under law.” The well-known American political scientists John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter were the key contributors. Interestingly enough, the report authors admit that international institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO are now in crisis, so they suggest that new institutions should be created by “a concert of democracies”; these should “serve as a possible alternative to the UN” for the purpose of subsequent reform of this organization. In addition, the authors pointed out that it is impossible to have freedom or the rule of law without using force, but argued that the preventive use of military force needs to be authorized by the UN or at least by NATO. This project is a conventional starting point for active introduction of the “rules” concept into the narratives and vocabulary of Western politicians. The project authors pointed out during the presentation that one has to make sure that the rules are good and that you can promote your interests by using these rules as leverage.

When Mr. Ikenberry was recently asked in an interview about his take on a rules-based order, he defined that order as the commitment of states to act in accordance with the principles, rules and statutes ensuring good governance, and yet not being imposed by the most powerful nation. According to the scholar, this order can be looked upon at several levels: first, as the system of sovereign states acting in accordance with the basic agreements and regulations of the UN, as well as the more practice-oriented regulations developed within the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO; second, as a superstructure in the form of Western liberal democracies, which identify themselves as guarantors of this system.

Thus, the concept of “rule-based order,” like also the notion of “liberal world order”, encapsulates insurmountable dualism. As a philosophical concept, it was supposed to serve as a conceptual and meaningful basis for broad international cooperation, a platform for uniting the world’s nations, but as a foreign policy strategy of the United States and its allies it was a way of ideological justification of the Western initiative to arrange the international order. These two irreconcilable ways of thinking are communicated, perhaps even unconsciously, in the rhetoric of political leaders. U.S. State Secretary Blinken, commenting on the American approach to engagement with China, said that the United States must defend and reform the rules-based order – the system of rules, agreements, principles and statutes that were formed after two world wars to govern relations between states, prevent conflicts, and protect the rights of all people. The founding documents of this order are the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which encapsulate such concepts as self-determination, sovereignty, peaceful resolution of conflicts. These are not Western constructs; they reflect the common aspirations of the world. However, when these principles are embraced by the most economically and politically powerful nation, they are subject to substantial interpretation and reworking in the crucible of that nation’s historical experience. “We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression. Between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force,” declared US President Joe Biden in March 2022, emphasizing the exceptional role of the United States and its allies in establishing the order in question.

Getting back to Mr. Bull’s ideas, the activities involved in building an international order presupposes creating a community of states united by common goals and values, with rules, statutes and institutions needed to reach those objectives. An international community of states cannot possibly exist without elementary rules, which include the above-mentioned statutory legal principles of global affairs, rules of coexistence and rules of cooperation/conflict resolution. In the process of building the said order, these rules are filled with a certain content, depending on the goals and values of the actors involved in the given activity.

Ivan Timofeev:
Russia-West: Rising Stakes

In the Western understanding, “rules” is a much broader concept that includes both the existing set of formal statutory and legal arrangements and the established behavioral practices necessary to achieve the goals, which may later become part of the body of law. This is how an attempt was made to legitimize the practice of humanitarian interventions through the Responsibility to Protect construct, adopted by the UN in 2005. Moreover, the US is not a party to the most important international legal arrangements such as the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In this case, the US reserves the right to opportunistic rule-making and the establishment of its own rules of international activities.

Furthermore, Americans are quite dismissive of international agreements, when the latter no longer correspond to their national interests, their existence constraining the American “free hand”. Let us recall at least the unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2002, the termination of participation in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program in 2018, the withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) in 2019, etc. In the trade and economic domain, the U.S. often resorts to the aggressive use of extraterritorial secondary sanctions as a means of political pressure, the introduction of protectionist barriers, and to non-market ways of struggling with potential competitors. Among the most vivid case studies is the implementation of the “massive pressure” approach against Iran following the withdrawal from the JCPOA, the ousting of Chinese hi-tech companies from the national and European markets, providing exclusive preferences to “green sector” companies making their products in the US under the Inflation Reduction Act, which does not correlate well with liberal principles and rules.

In turn, American ideas about the rules of coexistence and cooperation were quite accurately expressed in the theory of “democratic peace”, which, if not to go into detail, postulated the idea that “democracies do not fight each other.” According to this concept, the world would be far more stable and prosperous if the states established a republican form of government or a democratic political regime. Later on, as we know too well, this concept has repeatedly been used as the ideological justification for interference by the U.S. and its allies in the internal affairs of other states.

At present, amidst strategic competition between the great powers and the emerging polycentric world, the West is increasingly focused on protecting and maintaining its vision of the world order. In essence, this means using the entire arsenal of means to preserve its “rules” through cooperation with partner states having a similar vision. After all, it is no coincidence that along with a rules-based order, Euro-Atlantic allies mention consolidation with like-minded countries almost as often. American and European ideologues once again seek to obscure the dark pages of promoting the liberal world order by devising a dichotomy between rules and power, “right” and “wrong” development models. However, these same processes of global political fragmentation and structural transformation trigger disintegration, revealing the nature of the Western world order, demonstrating its purely Western-centered limited character coupled with American dominance. What began as a liberal, idealistic project of restructuring the international system under American leadership first mired in contradictions and abuses that exposed its real thrust, and then began to weaken and gradually fade, forcing Western allies to fortify their defenses and entrench themselves in a besieged fortress.

1. Batalov E.Y. Global Development and World Order – ROSSPEN, 2005. p. 100

2.Bull H. The anarchical society: a study of order in world politics. – Bloomsbury Publishing, 1977. p. 8-19.

3. Ibid. p. 64.

4.Batalov E. Y. American Political Thought in XX Century. – Progress-Tradition, 2014. p. 71.

5.Porter P. The false promise of liberal order: Nostalgia, delusion and the rise of Trump. – John Wiley & Sons, 2020. p. 128.

6. Ibid. p. 22.