A woman is seen on a sidewalk in Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California, United States, January 3. 2025. /CFP
Uniform rules replaced with tribunal of public opinion
Instead of resolving conflicts through diplomacy and uniform rules, there is an incentive to manipulate, moralize and propagandize as international disputes are decided by a tribunal of public opinion when there are competing principles.
Deceit and extreme language have thus become commonplace.
The rules-based international order fails to establish common unifying rules of how to govern international relations, which is the fundamental function of world order.
Both China and Russia have denounced the rules-based international order as a dual system to facilitate double standards.
Xie Feng, former Chinese Vice Foreign Minister and now China's ambassador to the United States, asserted that the rules-based international order introduces the "law of the jungle" insofar as universally recognized international law is replaced by unilateralism.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov similarly criticized the rules-based international order for creating a parallel legal framework to legitimize unilateralism, "The West has been coming up with multiple formats such as the French-German Alliance for Multilateralism, the International Partnership against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons, the Global Partnership to Protect Media Freedom, the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the Call for Action to Strengthen Respect for International Humanitarian Law – all these initiatives deal with subjects that are already on the agenda of the UN and its specialized agencies. These partnerships exist outside of the universally recognized structures so as to agree on what the West wants in a restricted circle without any opponents. After that they take their decisions to the UN and present them in a way that de facto amounts to an ultimatum. If the UN does not agree, since imposing anything on countries that do not share the same 'values' is never easy, they take unilateral action."
The rules-based international order does not consist of any specific rules, is not accepted internationally and does not deliver order.
The rules-based international order should be considered a failed experiment from the unipolar world order, which must be dismantled to restore international law as a requirement for stability and peace.
