RIP the ‘rules-based international order’

“Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry,” Carney said, lamenting the demise of what’s known as the “rules-based international order” — a system of rules and norms that Canada and many other smaller powers have prospered under since the end of World War II.

“The rupture in the world order,” Carney said, is “the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.”

Carney never mentioned President Donald Trump or the United States specifically, but the message was clear — Canada could no longer, and would no longer, depend on its once-close friendship with America.

“Stop invoking the ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised,” Carney said. “Call the system what it is: a period of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”

Carney received a standing ovation for his remarks, and transcripts of Carney’s call-to-arms quickly circulated among the 3,000 Davos attendees, which included more than 60 world leaders.

When Trump arrived the next day, he was not pleased that Carney’s speech was the talk of Davos.

“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us,” Trump grumbled during his lengthy remarks, in which he boasted about how he bullied France and Switzerland with tariffs to get his way and slipped in a not-so-veiled threat to Carney by name.

“Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements,” Trump said menacingly.

Later at a reception for 100 CEOs, Trump insisted his 90-minute performance, which was laced with insults to Europe, won rave reviews, and bragged about his ability to impose his will on weaker allies, including raising tariffs on Rolex watches because some female Swiss leader — he could not remember who — “rubbed him the wrong way.”

Noting that usually his critics accuse him of being a “horrible dictator type person,” Trump quipped, “Sometimes you need a dictator. “

So, what exactly is this “rules-based international order?”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College whose daily postings on Substack have upwards of 2.7 million readers, defines it as a system of “norms and values developed after World War II,” under which “international organizations such as the United Nations provide places to resolve international disputes, prevent territorial wars, and end no-holds-barred slaughter through a series of agreements — including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war.”

The U.S. has been a champion of the rules-based international order for 80 years, a set of bedrock principles governing how nations of the world should respect one another.

Until now, the war in Ukraine has been the biggest test of one of its core tenets, that bigger, stronger countries cannot consume smaller, weaker countries just because they can.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is intent on dismantling the rules-based international order,” Richardson wrote. “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, deliberate targeting of civilian populations, and war crimes are his way of thumbing his nose at the established order and demanding a different one, in which men like him dominate the globe.”

But with Trump eyeing the acquisition of Greenland, possibly reclaiming the Panama Canal, and annexing Canada as a 51st state, the National Security Strategy, released by the White House in November, and the National Defense Strategy released by the Pentagon in January, the rules-based order appears headed for the dustbin of history.

In a memo introducing the Pentagon strategy document, War Secretary Pete Hesgeth dismissed the old rules-based order as a “cloud-castle abstraction,” a mistake that “squandered our military advantages and the lives, goodwill, and resources of our people in grandiose nation-building projects.”

The new Pentagon strategy, a dramatic break from all the versions that came before it, is a throwback to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a time of conquest when European countries were taking over huge swaths of territory, subjugating indigenous people, and dividing the world into spheres of influence.

The world was a different place 200 years ago when President James Monroe, in an annual message to Congress, declared, “American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

But the young U.S. was not a global power, and Monroe did not see his “doctrine” as justification for dominating America’s neighbors.

It is “the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course,” he wrote.

The Pentagon strategy asserts, “This is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine — a commonsense and potent restoration of American power and prerogatives in this hemisphere, consistent with Americans’ interests.”

“The United States will no longer cede access to or influence over key terrain in the Western Hemisphere,” it continues. “[The Department of War] will therefore provide the president with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America, especially Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal. We will ensure that the Monroe Doctrine is upheld in our time.”

The Pentagon outlines four lines of effort, with the top priority being defending the homeland, followed by deterring China, getting allies to contribute more, and “supercharging” America’s defense industry.

It’s a sharp turn away from Europe, which the document suggests is “strongly positioned to take primary responsibility” for its own defense, albeit with “critical, but more limited U.S. support.”

“This approach is based on a flexible, practical realism that looks at the world in a clear-eyed way, which is essential for serving Americans’ interests,” Hegseth wrote, no longer making up for “allied security shortfalls from their leaders’ own irresponsible choices.”

It’s an “America First” policy, in which, as Thucydides so aptly put it, “The strong do what they can.”

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, laid out in an appearance on CNN.

While Trump has since backed off his threat to seize Greenland by force, Miller insisted that the U.S. could do it anytime it wants.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he said.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the 32-member NATO alliance needs fundamental change to become less reliant on the U.S.

“NATO needs to be reimagined as well in terms of the obligations,” Rubio said. “And this is not new to this president. Multiple presidents have complained about it. I think this president just complains about it louder than other presidents.”

“Without the U.S., there is no NATO,” Rubio continued, faulting European countries for taking U.S. support for granted while spending their revenues on social programs instead of defense.

“One of the things we’ve explained to our allies in NATO is the United States is not simply focused on Europe. We also have defense needs in the Western Hemisphere. We have defense needs in the Indo-Pacific,” he said. “We may be the richest country in the world, but we don’t have unlimited resources.”

The U.S strategy was a clarion wake-up call for Europe, but it is also driving U.S. allies into the arms of China, the only other world superpower and the European Union’s second-biggest trading partner behind the U.S. 

Just four days before his Davos address, Carney became the first Canadian prime minister in eight years to visit Beijing, striking a deal with President Xi Jinping to lower tariffs on Canadian farm products in return for cutting Canada’s 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was next to visit, calling engagement with China “vital for the British people in a time of growing global instability.”

Germany is next in the queue, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz set to meet Xi in February.

Forcing Europe to step up is one thing, but what alarmed Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, is the part of the strategy in which the Pentagon confirms it will provide Trump with “credible options” to guarantee America’s access to Greenland, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Panama Canal.

BESSENT SAYS CARNEY NOT ‘DOING THE BEST JOB’ FOR CANADA AMID CHINA TRADE TALKS

“As I’ve repeatedly said, continuing down this path is bad for America and bad for our allies—helping adversaries like Putin and Xi who want to see NATO divided,” Shaheen said in a statement.

Richardson wrote last year, “Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.”

Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.