Rules-based international order is a poor substitute for the vision of the UN’s founders

The “rules-based international order” frames many western states’ preferred model of global multilateral order over the past 15 years. A political rather than an analytic formula, it can rally support but is open to charges of selectivity, hypocrisy and double standards in the values it champions, notably on Ukraine and Gaza.
That incoherence matters when the liberal international order proclaimed under United States leadership in the 1990s has given way to a more contested and now conflicted multipolar world. Large states from the Global South demand greater access to centres of power and decision-making for greater equality. China and Russia, which oppose the rules-based model, bid for their support with alternative accounts of a more inclusive multilateralism.
Intended to evoke the rule of law, human rights, democracy and market economics, the “rules-based order” is ambiguous, lawyers say, about whether and how it recognises public international law and treaties. International relations researchers show its state adherents have varying commitments to the United Nations Charter and associated organisations – the established framework of multilateralism. European analysts ask whether it can provide a sufficiently coherent political and normative basis for a convincing foreign policy in the European Union.
Such problems are built into the order’s political origins under US leadership during the Obama presidency from 2008-16. Barack Obama led moves towards a “pivot to Asia” as competition with China became the principal focus of US foreign policy. His Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adapted ideas about a rules-based system from ostensibly impartial trade negotiations alongside the development of an Indo-Pacific security doctrine. The model was then taken up by allied states and organisations in this new geopolitical setting, applied as a notionally technocratic tool without explicit ideological baggage.
Obama insisted on US leadership of its emerging order. “America should write the rules. America should call the shots,” he said, in pursuit of a new American 21st century. His successor Donald Trump did not agree this required a new multilateralism, but rather an assertion of US unilateral and transactional power to make it great again.
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During Trump’s time in power the rules-based formula found supporters among EU, Nato and Asian states including Japan, South Korea and India, all anxious to maintain a non-geographic western position. The Biden administration revived the formula, saying clearly in its 2022 National Security Strategy: “America must lead. Strong, sustained American leadership is essential to a rules-based international order.”
That frankness about US leadership helps us understand how contentious the rules-based model is and the varying politics behind it. This is quite explicit in China’s alternative model, the Global Security Initiative, endorsed by the summit it held with 53 African leaders last month. China, with Russia, dismisses the “rules-based international order” as “fake multilateralism, fake rules, fake human rights and fake democracy”. The Chinese model is based on principles of security, sovereignty, indivisibility, peaceful diplomatic dialogue and inclusivity. It explicitly endorses the UN Charter (unlike the US, but as do the EU, Asean, India and Ireland among those endorsing the rules-based model).
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Who makes the rules matters here, so that state power lies behind principles of order and vaguer commitments to well or ill-defined norms, standards and values. These disagreements at global level are between state leaders and elites. According to President Michael D Higgins in his radical speech to the UN Summit of the Future this week, they have a common shortcoming for that reason.
As he put it: “We are living through a pervasive and deepening inequality that scars our world. Never have so many had so little and so few accumulated so much without responsibility. What we are wrestling with are the consequences of a globalisation from above, led by the powerful, without transparency, without consideration as to social justice or ecological consequences. As a response, it is my strong belief that a new, inclusive globalisation from below can achieve a new invigorated United Nations, one that will include food sufficiency, led by those on the ground, accompanied by, and delivering, universal basic services which will enhance democracy, improve participation and give the leadership we need.”
Debt strangulation of the poorest states and peoples, especially in Africa, is preventing realisation of the UN’s sustainable development goals, he said, only 17 per cent of which are on target for their 2030 deadline.
The summit made some limited progress on global governance and development finance. The existing UN needs a radical overhaul and is marginalised in the competition between these leading states, their emergent blocs and those like Ireland who retain a hope it can be reformed.
The “rules-based international order” is a poor substitute for the universalist visions of the UN’s founders, even if those visions continue to inspire hopes for a more equal and secure world.