The ‘rules-based international order’ is a crisis of the word and the world

What does Mark Carney make of the Israeli-American killing of the late Iranian head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? The Canadian Prime Minister proclaimed at Davos on January 20, 2026 that the existing rules-based international order had been killed by the great powers, particularly the US, who had weaponized interdependence, using it as leverage to coerce less powerful states and undermine their sovereignty.

He has supported the war on Iran but with “regret”, claiming the “conflict is another example of the failure of international order.” In the Davos speech, Carney asked the middle powers to build a new rules-based international order. But less than two months later, he has supported actions that run contrary to the new order he hopes will come into existence.

And what about India? As we had written in 2024, India’s policy of supporting the rules-based international order was marked by inconsistency. That feature continues to hold. While India has not condemned the killing, it did send the country’s Foreign Secretary to condole Khamenei’s death. India has, in the past, added its weight to American support for a rules-based international order. Does it think that a head of state’s killing had dealt the rules-based international order its biggest blow yet?

Neither the Canadian prime minister nor New Delhi is likely to become candid on the question, but the bind in which they find themselves illustrates the challenges before the rules-based international order as an idea and the reality of international order that it seeks to describe. The rules-based international order is a difficult idea to live with, and that is a good reason to attempt a status update on how it is poised in these times of great flux.

Liberal or rules-based?

First, what is the rules-based international order?

In 2022, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the rules-based international order as “the system of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” However, for decades, that international order was not called rules-based international order.

Although the postwar order was indeed based on rules, the term “rules-based international order” itself began featuring in foreign policy discourse in the 2000s, initially in the Anglosphere. It was likely first invoked in 2008 by then-Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was likely the first American official to use the term in 2010.

However, rules-based international order rose to prominence during the administration of US President Joe Biden, whose officials used it often to warn against what they held to be threats to the international system from Russian and Chinese geopolitical revisionism. Indeed, the Blinken speech, where he defined the phrase, was about the Biden Administration’s approach to China.

The choice of rules-based international order to describe the postwar order was deliberate. The objective likely was to get non-Western states to look at Russian and Chinese foreign policies from an American and, more broadly, Western point of view.

If America said that Moscow and Beijing posed a threat to liberal democracy or to a democratic world order, it was unlikely to find sympathy in the non-West because of the controversial and bloody history of Western “democracy promotion,” particularly in West Asia and Afghanistan, and non-western countries’ unease with Western liberalism. “Rules” was a neutral term. European leaders, extensively familiar with rules as part of the EU project, too, began using the term to describe the postwar order.

The rules-based international order is sometimes conflated with the controversial term “liberal international order”. Many commentators on Western foreign policy – both critics and agnostics – do not make a distinction between the rules-based international order and the liberal international order. One analyst implies that Carney had announced the death of liberal international order whereas Carney had not used the phrase. The international historian Marc Trachtenberg uses them interchangeably and writes, when discussing G John Ikenberry’s scholarship on international order, that the “exact terminology does not matter.” But it does; why else did the West switch to rules-based international order?

Furthermore, the distinction is a substantive one, for the rules-based international order does not entail promotion of liberal democracy and human rights, the key characteristics of the liberal international order, which accurately describes the American approach to international order from the early 1990s through the administration of US President George W Bush. One way to settle the debate is to say that rules-based international order does capture the essence of the postwar international order provided one avoids the myth that it was an exclusively Western creation.

Rejections and limited endorsement

Beyond the scholarly controversy lie policy questions that reveal contemporary geopolitical fractures. As Western targets, Russia and China have expectedly rejected the concept. For instance, in 2020, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “term was recently coined” by the West “to camouflage a striving to invent rules depending on changes in the political situation so as to be able to put pressure on disagreeable States and even on allies”.

As for India, as we had noted in a 2023 paper, it had endorsed and used the term in a restricted fashion. While it agreed with the West that the rules-based international order was indeed threatened, it considered that threat limited to China and the Indo-Pacific.

This became evident when Delhi refused to echo the Western argument that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constituted a threat to the rules-based international order. Not only did India not use the term, its criticism of Russian actions was indirect, and it thought that Ukraine’s war was Europe’s war and not really a threat to the international order, rules-based or otherwise.

The tacticality of India’s commitment to rules-based international order becomes clear from the fact that while it featured regularly in India’s official discourse during the Biden years, it has hardly been used since Donald Trump’s re-election, given that the latter’s administration does not like it at all.

Russian and Chinese rejection, as well as its limited endorsement by India, exposed two of the concept’s central problems: that it did not have universal appeal and that it was viewed with considerable scepticism within the non-West.

The rules-based international order was further weakened when observers in the so-called Global South juxtaposed Western framings and responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In their assessment, Israel’s military behaviour in Gaza was marked by the same excesses that the West had charged Russia with: disregard for international law, deliberate targeting of civilians, crimes against humanity, indeed genocide, which not a few in the West thought Russia was committing in Ukarine. If Russia had violated the rules-based international order, then Israel had done much worse. To take just one category of facts, civilian deaths and the scale of suffering from Russian violence were nowhere near those caused by Israel’s campaign, and yet, argued critics, the West had given Israel a “free pass”.

This criticism nearly hit home; it landed in Europe when it should have landed in the US. At the 2025 Shangri-La conference in Singapore, the French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the problem, saying that the perception that the West had double standards for Ukraine and Gaza could “kill [the West’s] credibility in the rest of the world.” He asked the West to “reject double standards” and warned that inconsistency in applying “our own principles, our rules” had put the global order at risk: “What is at stake is our credibility to protect this global order”.

Macron’s exhortation has had no takers in the US. It is no exaggeration to say that the Trump Administration holds the idea of rules-based international conduct in utter contempt.

Less than a month after Carney’s Davos speech at the Munich Security Conference, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio associated what he called a “rules-based global order” (notice that he used “global” and not “international,” implying that the rules-based international order is a “globalist” project) with the West’s “dangerous delusion” that liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism had permanently won their contest with national interest after the Cold War.

Vice President JD Vance has said that he does not “give a shit” if America’s killing of civilian alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea amounted to a war crime. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has called “rules of engagement” in war “stupid.” The Trump administration views rules-based behavior as a sign of weakness and inconsistent with the laws of nature.

Defending America’s abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Trump aide Stephen Miller spoke of the “iron laws of the world” governed by strength, force, and power, adding that “Under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” And at Munich, Rubio claimed that the optimism underlying the rules-based international order “ignored both human nature and … the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.”

These sentiments have been matched by action, including abduction and killing of heads of state, withdrawing America from over five-dozen multilateral organisations, treaties, and conventions, as well as sanctioning the International Criminal Court.

‘Mortal blows’

The irony here is that, for years, American leaders claimed that China and Russia were the key threats to the rules-based international order. But as it turns out, America – in collaboration with Israel – is dealing it what look like mortal blows.

The crisis of contemporary international order is both a crisis of the word and the world. The reputation of the phrase “rules-based international order” as an American or western artifice – or a “fiction,” to quote Carney – is now firmly secured. At the same time, the notion that international affairs must be regulated by rules, norms, and international law is struggling against the appeal of the idea that force, strength, and power are – or ought to be – the only sound bases for relations amongst nations.

We are thus faced with two different models of international order. The first entails a division of the world into spheres of influence of the great powers. Within days of the inauguration of the second Trump Administration, Rubio claimed that the world had become multipolar and America shared the world with China and “to some extent” Russia as the other great powers. In fact, Rubio used an imagery that is a necessary condition for spheres of influence: “multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.”

This model is already partly a reality. Hegseth has delineated a new sphere of influence for the US, which he calls “Greater North America.” In blaming NATO’s eastward expansion for Russia's invasion, as well as asking Ukraine to cede territory to Moscow, the US has effectively endorsed the Russian claim of a sphere of influence along the vast frontier regions of eastern Europe straddling Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. And finally, it has shown no enthusiasm for Quad and the wider Indo-Pacific, thus ceding strategic space in the Asia-Pacific, which China could claim as its own sphere. Note that this model does not consider India as a “great power,” regardless of the Indian establishment’s domestic messaging.

The model is not as neat as the Cold War arrangement between the US and the Soviet Union, or those of European imperial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The US is the most powerful of the three players and would like to maintain its overall primacy. But note that it has officially declared that “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over” (recall Rubio’s imagery). When these ideas and American actions – or inaction – are brought together, what we get is something like a graded model where the US is fine with other great powers having their own spheres of influence but still sees its own interests as paramount regardless of what it has agreed to for other great powers.

This model may produce stability in relations amongst great powers, but whether it would produce global strategic stability is unclear. It could make certain regions of the world more unstable and crisis-stricken as great powers and/or their regional allies go unchecked, as is currently the case in West Asia.

The second model is of a radically new rules-based international order, perhaps an approach that New Delhi would prefer. It must retain and reform key global institutions, especially the extended UN system. It must address the representation deficit by giving non-Western states their fair share in global governance, and it must have a buy-in of the great powers.

The absence of this last element is one reason why Carney’s proposal of a new rules-based international order led by the middle powers is unlikely to succeed. And to speak of a new order along these lines when we may not have seen the end of the destruction of the old order is premature. The rubble, after all, is still falling.

Atul Mishra is an Associate Professor and Head at the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.

This article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.