The “Rules-Based Order” Is (and always was) a Fairy Tale

People keep talking about “returning to the rules-based international order” like it’s some lost golden age we can reboot if we just say the right words in Brussels or Washington.

I'm sorry, but that’s an absolute joke.

Because the first question we need to ask is the only honest one:

Rules for who?

If you’re going to call something a “rules-based order,” you have to be willing to say out loud what those rules actually were—and who they were designed to protect.

The post-1945 myth: “order” for the winners, chaos for everyone else

When people cite the “post-World War II order,” they often mean: Western dominance with paperwork.

They mean institutions that look universal—UN, Bretton Woods, “international law”—but were structured around winner’s privilege from the beginning. The UN Security Council veto is the cleanest symbol: a global governance system where a few permanent members can block outcomes regardless of what most of the world wants. That isn’t “rules.” That’s hierarchy with a legal aesthetic.

And yes, there was decolonization. But a huge amount of what followed was neo-imperial reconfiguration, not liberation: coups, interventions, debt regimes, structural adjustment, extraction—just updated techniques, updated vocabulary, updated PR.

A “rules-based order” where the U.S. doesn’t follow the rules

If the “rules-based order” is real, the rules have to bind the strong as well as the weak. But look at the International Criminal Court: the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, and U.S. policy has repeatedly treated the court as something to pressure or punish rather than submit to (background here). And this isn’t abstract. In early 2026, reporting detailed how ICC officials were living under U.S. sanctions—credit cards canceled, accounts disrupted— sanctions imposed in retaliation for ICC investigations, despite the U.S. not being a member (The Guardian). Reuters reported the same general coercive posture around sanctions threats and ICC pressure: (Reuters)

That’s not “rules-based order.”

That’s rules are for other people.

“Polite Europe” and coercion with a smile

Europe’s modern style is often polite power: the claim that it is helping, modernizing, guiding, developing—while the underlying relationship is still extractive.

You can see the rhetorical shift clearly when European leaders talk about “partnership” and “cooperation,” but the substance often remains: access to resources, migration management, geopolitical influence—on European terms. Of all people, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni has enunciated this very clearly as she has broken from the standard European talking points, by taking clear stances on more equal 'development' regimes with Africa; using language that reveals the core truths of recent European stances: cooperation only exists between equals— not between a “helper” and a “helped.” (Italian government speech)

But this is not the normal position in Europe, and if the whole block could see the Global South as “equal partners”, then “cooperation” would require real sacrifices: fair prices, real technology transfer, real policy space, and the end of monetary and financial architecture that locks former colonies into dependency.

On the monetary side, the CFA franc system sits right in the middle of this debate—contested, defended by France as voluntary, rightly criticized by others as a structural constraint built to perpetuate neo-colonial logics/relationships. Whether you call it “cooperation” or “control,” the point is that this is what the old order looks like in practice. (France’s framing)

Rubio’s nostalgia is not subtle—he’s just saying the quiet part out loud

The reason this “rules-based order” debate is heating up right now is that some Western figures are openly nostalgic for a time when domination didn’t even need legitimacy language.

At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, Rubio framed the “rules-based order” as illusion—paired with a civilizational, inheritance-based story about “the West.” (video; see also the Washington Post commentary)

And here’s the core: that nostalgia only feels “reasonable” if you’re speaking from inside 500 years of Euro-American supremacy. If you’re speaking from outside it, it’s not “order.” It’s just the world-system returning to the explicit brutality of the colonial era.

What a real “rules-based order” would actually mean (and why the West can’t deliver it)

If the West wanted legitimacy, it would have to support rules that constrain Western power as much as anyone else’s:

• no special veto club deciding global outcomes
• international law that applies to major powers in practice, not rhetoric
• trade and resource pricing that doesn’t assume the Global South exists to subsidize Northern lifestyles
• financial institutions that stop disciplining countries for choosing non-Western development paths
• non-intervention as a principle, not a slogan

In other words: a genuinely post-colonial world order.

That is exactly what the West has never been willing to build—because it would require giving up the structural advantages that made it rich.

The legitimacy vacuum: why China doesn’t even need to “win” the argument

Here’s the part that matters geopolitically:

Even people who are uncomfortable with China’s internal politics can still see that the West has lost ethical standing—because the West keeps demanding obedience to rules it doesn’t obey, while narrating its dominance as “values.” 

That legitimacy collapse didn’t happen overnight. It’s been accumulating for decades, and it’s increasingly visible in how global publics and many states interpret Western actions. The result is a vacuum. And in a vacuum, China doesn’t need to be morally pure. It only needs to treat others with more consistent dignity than the West. Thus becoming a plausible alternative—an option in a world where “there is no alternative” was the West’s favorite weapon.

The simplest conclusion

The “rules-based order” wasn’t a neutral set of rules.

It was power that could still pretend it wasn’t power.

And now that the pretense is collapsing, Western elites want to “return” to it—not because it was just, but because it was useful. It let them dominate while telling themselves a story about benevolence.

The future isn’t “going back.”

The future is: either the West learns how to live in a world of equals—or it keeps accelerating its own isolation, as more and more countries decide they’re done swallowing fairy tales.