US actions have ended the post-World War II order, analysts say, but how much that ‘order’ applied to the Global South is unclear.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the quiet part out loud at the World Economic Forum: what many call the global rules-based order was either collapsing or had collapsed already.
In the last few weeks, the United States, whose military and financial heft underpinned much of that order, has invaded Venezuela, has threatened to invade the European territory of Greenland, and has promised to levy tariffs on any of its Western allies that might oppose it.
Moreover, in place of the United Nations, the organisation intended to embody the modern world order, US President Donald Trump is pushing what he has hinted may be its successor, the “Board of Peace“.
Speaking in the Swiss town of Davos on Tuesday, Carney accepted that, in light of the behaviour of the US – most recently in its push to take Greenland – the rules-based order was essentially over.
In its place, he said, was the coming era of great power rivalry, where the comfortable “fiction” of the past withered in the unforgiving light of day.
“The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source,” he told world leaders. “When even one person stops performing … the illusion begins to crack.”
“We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney added. “This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Hypocritical order
Longstanding criticisms of the so-called rules-based order have grown increasingly marked over the last few decades.
Perhaps most notable for many was continued Western support for Israel despite its genocidal war on Gaza, in which it has killed more than 71,550 Palestinians in the last two years. Western leaders have largely ignored the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, raising questions about whether international law matters for some, but not for others.
“The idea of holding to a singular — and often deeply hypocritical — rules-based order is finished, to the extent it ever truly existed,” said HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London.
“It’s telling that the supposed breaking point for the rules-based order is really the threat to Greenland, not the devastation of Gaza, or other examples before now,” Hellyer added. “The cases are not identical, and I’m not equating them — but it’s difficult to argue that talk of annexation is more offensive to international norms than the destruction of an entire people and territory. But in the case of Israel, the main underwriter of the rules-based order – i.e., the US – did not only work to ensure no accountability for the violation of international law, but actively emboldened and empowered those violations.”
There is nothing new about Western commentators claiming that events on their own doorstep define the state of the world, regardless of conditions elsewhere, said Karim Emile Bitar, a professor of international relations at the Saint Joseph University of Beirut.
“This is why we see such a stark contrast between Western attitudes toward Gaza as opposed to Western attitudes when a blue-eyed, blonde Ukrainian lady arrives as a refugee,” he said.
“When a territory that is part of the ‘European Union’ is under threat, they completely shift course and no longer try to use the usual mendacious justifications that were used for decades and decades.”
For smaller countries that have been forced to rely upon alliances rather than rules for decades, or much of the Global South, the collapse of the rules-based order will mean little. For those in the Global North and their representatives at Davos, it represents a seismic shift.
