Brahma Chellaney
The “rules-based international order” was never a set of neutral rules. It was a story the U.S. told — about itself, its power and its right to bend norms when convenient. In January, that story finally collapsed when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called that order what many governments have long known it to be: a useful “fiction,” sustained less by universal law than by American power and selective enforcement.
For decades, when U.S. officials invoked a “rules-based international order,” they were not describing universal principles, but defending a flexible set of rules largely devised in Washington and adjusted whenever American interests required it. Now, as President Trump openly revives territorial expansion and economic coercion as tools of U.S. statecraft, that phrase no longer commands belief, even among America’s closest allies.
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