How to Break the International Rules-Based Order?

 A few days ago, at a RAS-NSA conference on the Strategic Implications of the 2024 US election, one of the questions was whether Russia defeating Ukraine would break the international rules-based order, or what I used to know as the liberal international order.  My answer focused not on Russia but Gaza.  Let me explain:

Aggression by revisionist great powers, such as Russia, has a lesser impact than the responses to it.  The League of Nations was not killed by Japan's aggression in the early 1930s, but by the lack of a response by the organization and its members.  Iraq's invasion of Kuwait actually strengthened the international rules-based order because most of the planet with a few key exceptions joined the effort to reverse this aggression.  These days, those who were most responsible for designing the post-World War II set of rules are responding pretty well to Russia's aggression.  Not perfectly, not consistently, but the sanctions have required extensive efforts and sacrifices to work around.  Rather than selling Ukraine out as UK/France did for Czechoslovakia in 1938, these countries and others are arming and assisting Ukraine.  Again, not as much as they should but far more.  So, the verdict here is either mixed or in favor of the rules--that the aggressor is paying a significant price.  

The point here is that rules get violated whenever they exist--the question is whether there are consequences.

It is also the cases where countries that were never really part of the rules violate them, it matters less. It matters far more when the countries that are supposed to be espousing and defending the rules don't.

And this is where Gaza comes in.  Just as the US invasion of Iraq (but not Afghanistan) challenged the international rules-based order, the US (and Western) support for Israel's continued war crimes in Gaza do more damage to the rules.  The continued arming of the more powerful actor in a very disproportionate, indiscriminate (unless the attacks on kids, aid workers, professors, medical personnel, etc are deliberate) war and the reaction to the various international humanitarian tribunals undermines the rules-based order.

Sure, the US has long violated some of the rules while promoting them, such as Nixon-Kissinger support for genocide when the Bengals seceded from Pakistan, but the juxtaposition of Ukraine and Gaza has been quite galling to those who see the US, the UK, and others as hypocrites.  The US did not sign onto the International Criminal Court because it did not want its troops under its jurisdiction [one of my last tasks in the Pentagon in 2002 was on memos and cables trying to get exceptions to ICC written into agreements with countries hosting US troops, like Bosnia at the time].  But the US did sign onto most of the post-World War II law-making against genocide and against war crimes.

Similarly, US steps to treat international laws on asylum as a loophole needing to be closed will ultimately hurt not just those seeking asylum but American efforts to buttress the rules based international order  [What unifies some of this, of course, is racism and Islamophobia].

So, it may suck that American hypocrisy has greater consequences than revisionist states violating norms, but this is not new.  The autocrats understand this and seek to impose hypocrisy costs on the liberal states as Kelly Greenhill persuasively argued.  It does behoove American leaders and their allies to think about the larger games.  I argued from my desk in the Pentagon that writing exceptions to ICC in the summer of 2002 would be harmful to any effort to get allies to help the US with the forthcoming invasion of Iraq, and I wasn't wrong about that.