Is there such a thing as a rules-based international order? 

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Is there such a thing as a rules-based international order?’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about how the world is governed. Is power the only thing that matters, or are there rules and laws that control the way that states behave? That’s a question that’s come sharply into focus ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. My guest this week is Professor John Ikenberry of Princeton University, an influential scholar whose former pupils populate the American government.

So is the Ukraine war a brutal reminder that we’re living in a lawless world?

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I spent last weekend at Princeton University on the East Coast of the United States. For me, it was a trip down memory lane. I studied at the university in 1987-88, just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Probably the most famous Princeton alumni is Woodrow Wilson. He was the US president who, after the first world war, tried to create a new international system that would end war and encourage international co-operation. That Wilsonian tradition known as liberal internationalism is still strong in Princeton. I was there to attend a conference on promoting international co-operation, which pulled in delegates from India, China and Brazil as well as the US and Europe. The ideas of liberal internationalism are also very evident in the way that the Biden administration talks and thinks about the world. Here’s the US secretary of state, Tony Blinken, talking about the need for a rules-based international order.

Antony Blinken
We must defend and reform the rules-based international order, 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. Its founding documents include the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrine concepts like self-determination, sovereignty, the peaceful settlement of disputes. These are not western constructs. They are reflections of the world’s shared aspirations.

Gideon Rachman
In Russia and China, American talk of a rules-based international order is usually dismissed as pure hypocrisy. And even in the US, there are many people who argue that the crucial thing in international affairs is not law but raw power. John Ikenberry, by contrast, is one of the leading theorists of a world based on rules of law. So when I sat down with him, I started by asking him to define that phrase that the American government keeps using: the rules-based international order.

John Ikenberry
It’s a great question. I think the rules-based order has a history that predates the US and even predates 1945 and the great order-building efforts after world war two. But if you were to try to identify what open rule-based order is, it’s a set of commitments by states to operate according to principles, rules and institutions that provide governance that is not simply dictated by who is most powerful. So it’s a set of environmental conditions for doing business — contracts, multilateral institutions — and it comes in many layers. At the deepest level it’s really the system of sovereignty. It’s the belief that the world has a kind of foundation built around self-determined states that respect each other.

On top of that, you have these layers of treaties and institutions culminating really in the United Nations system, building rules and principles around aspirations for the inclusion of all peoples and societies. Everybody gets a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood. And then on top of that, even more work-oriented rules and institutions that came out of world war two that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO. And then finally, yes, the rule-based order does have a kind of western liberal democracy component on top of those more basic fundamental institutions, sovereignty and global multilateralism. You have the old democratic stakeholders who have placed themselves in a kind of organising position as the kind of patrons and curators of a system where we have gone beyond what existed in earlier eras.

Gideon Rachman
So well beyond power politics, I suppose, beyond pure power politics. But I guess that is what the Russians and some in western societies would challenge, that that actually exists. So Putin I think, has actually said on occasions, yeah, but you’ve agreed to these rules. Who made these rules? And I think behind that is the thought, well, this is actually just an expression of power politics, of American hegemony and so on, and that America itself is not always bound by these rules. It hasn’t, for example, joined the International Criminal Court. It’s a bit iffy at the moment about the World Trade Organization.

John Ikenberry
Right.

Gideon Rachman
And then, of course, the Iraq war. So to those who say, well, this is just a fancy way of disguising American power, what do you say?

John Ikenberry
I would say it’s not just that. Although Putin is a student of power politics and he can see it and he certainly could practice it, I would say it’s a hybrid system. It’s a mixture of hierarchy and multilateralism. Not all states are equal, and they call it the US-led open liberal order. There are privileges that the powerful have, certainly in the Security Council and China and Russia understand that the rule-based order tied to the UN is one where there are privileges and hierarchy.

But the underlying argument is that to get from a world of pure power politics, of empire, spheres of influence and anarchy dynamics, the powerful states give up ideally some of that ability to engage in arbitrary and indiscriminate power, in exchange for placing themselves in these institutions and subjecting them to global rules and institutions. Again, they won’t always abide by them. They’ll look for escape clauses and ways to plead for great power privileges.

But the kind of compromise is that some of the power differentials are muted in favour of a more predictable, rule-based system where various actors in various configurations can have voice and can have access to decision-making and can engage the most powerful. So it’s not entirely wrong to say that American hegemony is in play, but one has to ask the question, is some of that with limits attached to it, a worthwhile trade-off to make to get as much of the rule-based system as you can get? And I think that’s the bargain that most states have made. In some ways, you know, Russia, at various moments when it was the Soviet Union, was making similar bargains. The Soviets were at Bretton Woods.

Gideon Rachman
Back when the IMF and the World Bank were produced.

John Ikenberry
That’s correct. And in the end, they said no, they walked away. But Keynes and White and the other architects of Bretton Woods were eager to make this as inclusive as possible because it would be much better to have a Soviet Union in the tent than outside the tent, but was impossible.

Gideon Rachman
And how much of a blow to the rules-based order then, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Because if you look at statements by leading American officials, Tony Blinken and others, they quite often invoke the rules-based order as what they’re defending, as a principle alongside the actual physical defence of Ukraine. Why is this such a big blow? Because I guess the Russians and others would say or some of the global south would say it’s another war. America’s waged wars in Vietnam and Iraq. This isn’t unique. But if one wanted to make the case that this is a big blow to the rules-based order, what’s the case?

John Ikenberry
Yeah. Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a blow in the sense that it is the most overt violent assault on postwar UN and post-cold war rules about the conditions for stable peace in Europe and globally. Thou dost not use force to annex your neighbour’s territory. So this is a big deal. It looks like a violation beyond all those that, of course, have occurred, including the US intervention in Iraq, which is often mentioned as well, great powers do that. But this is different.

We’ve seen really three types of hardcore principles of order that have been violated. One is that you don’t use force to change territorial borders. Secondly, you don’t use violence against civilians as an instrument of war. And thirdly, you don’t threaten to use nuclear weapons. And Putin has done the first two and has threatened the third. So this is a true crisis for rule-based order.

But it’s double-edged in the sense that it has triggered, I think, two things. One, it’s a belief in Europe and America and in Japan and many other countries that there is a rule-based order that we need to protect. It’s elevated the importance of redoubling our efforts to make sure that there are those conditions — UN charter and all that has come out of it — in place. So it’s kind of triggered the opposite of what Putin might have wanted. But beyond that, and this is the more lasting, perhaps the more profound impact of the Ukraine war, there is a kind of moment of global debate about order. And I think of the global south considers countries that know that Putin has done something first order violation-wise, but they are not quite ready to sign on to the American narrative of what this war is about. But they do want something beyond simply Putin-oriented world politics to prevail. And so we are at a kind of world-order moment. It’s not quite the end of the cold war, certainly not necessarily in 1945 or 1919, but it is a kind of semi-constitutional moment, I think. But ideas are on the table, coalitions are being formed, alignments are being put together. The US feels a certain urgency for making the case that it and its allies and partners are still capable of putting themselves at the centre of the global order. So this is a big moment.

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. And how do you think the US effort is going? Because you wrote a very interesting piece where you said actually, the American-led response to the crisis, the ostracism of Russia in many circles showed the residual power of America, continuing power of the United States. But you know, this conference we’ve both been attending here in Princeton, there were others, particularly from India, saying, you know what, there are a lot of people in the world who are as concerned by America’s response to the war — for example, the seizure of Russian assets, the freezing of Russian assets — as by the actual violation itself. And they see America as overreacting and perhaps threatening the world order and itself.

John Ikenberry
Yeah, I think that is a real issue. I do think that the response to the war in Europe, in the United States, has been, on balance, new information about the way the world order operates. Europe has found a new calling, in many ways. The EU has charisma. Who could have imagined that? Germany has embarked on a rethinking of its position.

Gideon Rachman
The EU has charisma in the sense that it’s Ukraine gone to join the EU.

John Ikenberry
It shows that there’s a real pull effect, that Ukraine in the end wants to be part of this what we thought was kind of a stagnant centre of gravity of world politics. But there’s more there. Look what Poland was able to accomplish by being an EU member and Ukraine left outside of the EU. The differentials between those two countries in terms of per capita GNP is just extraordinary. So being in has its advantages in and that more narrow sense of the EU, but more broadly in the liberal democratic world, which doesn’t really have boundaries. So we’ve learned that there’s still energy and attraction there. Nato has a purpose again. The Atlantic alliance, I think, has reaffirmed its fundamental importance. The US has found its voice again, and I think it’s a kind of more diffused lesson from the war, and it’s embodied in the spirit of the Ukrainian people themselves that there is a kind of hunger for freedom. People are willing to put their lives on the line seeking a kind of political system, a way of life. We kind of hadn’t seen that since the Helsinki period and the tearing down of the Berlin walls. We did see it in the young people in Hong Kong, but it kind of reaffirms that not everything is moving in the direction of authoritarianism and reconstruction of empire. So those are some of the things, I think, that have come out of it.

There’s a lot of scepticism that that is not enough, that simply promoting and protecting democracy is not in itself an excuse for running roughshod over peoples with your extraterritoriality of your sanctions and the kind of hard diplomacy of coalition building, expecting others to be on your side. So I think getting the narrative right, building the coalition as wide as possible, not making it simply about democracy versus Putin, but world order versus Putin.

By the way, as we were suggesting earlier, a rule-based order is not a western value or simply a western value. And my argument is that the American-led order is imperfect, flawed. In many ways it’s eroded in its legitimacy, but it still remains the framework for building the next world order, which is to say, at the end of the day, it is still the United States, Europe and other partners who put a open, rule-based multilateral order at the centre of their grand strategies. They want this. Unlike other great powers of yore and certainly China and Russia today, they see their own national interests tied to the building of a large system where countries can trade and engage in these kind of liberal projects for human betterment. And there’s an underlying hunger for that everywhere. And if you leave aside who’s leading it, it’s a type of order that we need more of, not less of. And that gives me a little bit of hope for the future.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. But again, just to play the advocate of those who say something else is going on, I guess you look just this past week, the leader of Brazil in Beijing saying, you know, we really got to get away from using the dollar. And why are they saying that? I think because there’s a sense that America has weaponised the use of the dollar, that it’s not a neutral thing that it’s giving to the world. Again, it’s an instrument of power politics. Is it possible to strike the balance between the provision of global public goods, to use the jargon, and the use of that power? Is America in danger of getting the balance wrong in its response to the Ukraine war?

John Ikenberry
I do think the US is in danger of getting it wrong. I think that is a balance. It’s a trade-off. It’s a bargain with the world. We are more powerful than you, but we will try to use that power responsibly. We aren’t the policeman of the world, but we do have unusual capacity to push and pull the world, ideally in a way that generates a better world outcome on the other end. So if it looks like it’s more weaponised economic sanctions for more narrow interests, that’s a problem. If it isn’t done in a coalition of states, it can’t be America running the world. Even in the heyday of Pax Americana, it was always a consortium of powers. That’s the secret, really, of the success over the last eight years of this system. It’s been a joint project. There have been partners and allies, and they’re still there cheering us on in many ways.

But the legitimacy of American power exercise has to be tied to as wide a circle as possible of states that see the underlying goals of the exercise of this — we’ll call it hegemonic power — as more broadly beneficial. And you skate that line. Think back on Bush and the Iraq war. Bush Jr, it was really we have more power than anybody else. The second inaugural address, I mean, there was, you have to say, a very arrogant American statement that we have more power than anybody else, but we’re gonna use it for the global good. Well, that’s probably not enough. You’ve got to build it and weave it through a community of countries that share those principal views about where this order should go.

Gideon Rachman
And how much do you think America’s efforts to build and support a rule-based order are still undermined by the Iraq war? I mean, it’s come up a couple of times, and I think in a funny way, the Ukraine war has increased its salience again.

John Ikenberry
Yes.

Gideon Rachman
You know, people had begun to forget about it, but now it’s such a sort of glaring problem for America in arguing against wars of aggression.

John Ikenberry
It’s the 20th anniversary. Looking back, I think it was — and I argued at the time — a real mistake, a grand mistake on par with the Vietnam war, that it really is destroying or undermining the kind of bargain the US has had with the world, as we’ve been discussing. Again, I don’t think there’s a moral equivalence here with Putin. I think what Putin is doing is a very different kettle of fish.

Gideon Rachman
Because it’s a war of territorial aggrandisement, essentially.

John Ikenberry
Exactly. And the nature of the violence that’s being inflicted, the war crimes, really, that are being experienced by the society itself.

Gideon Rachman
And again . . . 

John Ikenberry
The pummeling of a society as opposed to a war.

Gideon Rachman
I suppose people would say, yeah, a lot of civilians died in Iraq.

John Ikenberry
That’s true. And again, I think the Iraq war was a mistake. And it exposes the US to a kind of judgment of the sort you’re making. But I think a fair person would say that the way in which violence was used there was of a different sort.

Gideon Rachman
As in the attack on civilians is central to it rather than . . . 

John Ikenberry
That’s the objective as opposed to a kind of collateral damage. Civilian casualties are of the magnitude that you saw in the firebombings of world war two in Europe and Japan. This is a different kind of violence that is deeply disturbing. Even though I was then and now of the view that the Iraq war was a huge mistake and built on hubris and miscalculation and failures of judgment that are still echoing today.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. You’ve also written more broadly about this issue of hypocrisy and the charge of hypocrisy that’s frequently levelled at the United States and at the west in general. And you had a striking sentence where you wrote, I think, that hypocrisy is actually a feature of the liberal world order, but it needn’t be an impediment to making the world a better place.

John Ikenberry
Right.

Gideon Rachman
Why is that? Because some people think it ends the argument.

John Ikenberry
Right. It really initiates a process that in some sense liberal societies are inviting. And this is what I would say: liberal societies, not just the United States, but particularly the United States at its founding, was built on a set of principles that it even then and in the decades and centuries following, has never fully lived up to. The basic kind of normative principles of liberal society — and I’m gonna extend this to the international system in a second — are always kind of aspirational principles of the kind of society we want to live in. But it’s still a work in progress in two senses. It’s a work in progress and we aren’t there yet, but it’s a work in progress trying to make our society better. To close the gap, if I may say so, between the aspirations and the reality. We are putting ourselves in an uncomfortable position by deciding to live in liberal societies because we are living in societies we know don’t quite perform as they should or we want them to.

Gideon Rachman
What, in terms of equality . . . 

John Ikenberry
Equality, justice. And it’s always an invitation to debate because the principles themselves are in tension. Liberty and equality, individualism and community — all these principles are ones that put us liberal societies in a constant conversation about how you balance them, how you achieve as much as you can of them.

And so this gets us to hypocrisy, a sense that we are telling ourselves and the world that we are still working on things, that we can do better and that the countries around the world see us and know that we can do better, too. And let me just say, one of the best statements of this was Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman, where he said each generation in America, but liberal society more generally, is given a condition that is in some sense still an imperfect union. And we are taking what we got and doing what we can and then passing it to the next generation like a baton. And so we have a kind of sense that we are in a process, we’re in a building mode. We always are.

And Sam Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, said America is not a lie. It’s a disappointment. And because it’s a disappointment, it is also a hope. And so you fall short, but the world is not ready to write you off, at least ideally, because they know that they can work with you to hold you to account. So there’s a politics that hypocrisy sets up. The gap creates conditions that lead third parties to say, well, we’re going to push and pull to see if the United States can, in fact, be less hypocritical.

Gideon Rachman
And you think that’s a contrast with, say, Russia or China?

John Ikenberry
I don’t think anybody looks at China and sees an ideology of how to create a more perfect union. I don’t think Putin can even enter this conversation, really. But I do think it’s different. And I think it means that countries expect more of you. When Trump contested the election or even when the world held its breath. Would Trump get re-elected? Would January 6th lead to a failure of American democracy? The world held its breath at similar moments in China when we were all looking to see whether Xi and the PRC would change the rules that would allow him to be leader or, if you will, dictator for life. The world kind of shrugged. We didn’t expect them to have an Obama moment. We didn’t expect them to . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Live up to a higher standard.

John Ikenberry
Yeah, live up to a higher standard. So that’s what I have in mind by the creative capacity of hypocrisy. And the build-in is a characteristic, it’s not a bug, of liberal societies. And I think it has world politics implications.

Gideon Rachman
So to kind of round off, the implications of some of what you’re saying about the impact of the Ukraine war on world order could be optimistic because there’s been this big violation, but there’s also been a strong reaction, an attempt to draw a line. But equally, again, referring to this conference that we’ve just been at, there is this concern that international order’s breaking down in other respects, partly because of the deterioration in relations not just between Russia and the United States but between China and the US.

John Ikenberry
Yeah.

Gideon Rachman
These two great powers increasingly see each other as dangerous rivals. It’s very, very hard to have an international system that works.

John Ikenberry
Absolutely. And I think we’re gonna have to be able to live with a certain amount of complexity in our relationship. We have to find a space for us to co-operate on global issues that are of existential importance to humanity, not least, of course, global warming. Can we find a space where we put aside our competition, our rivalry?

To do that I think we’ll have to get there if we’re only forced to do it by the exigencies of planetary crisis and/or the pressure of what we’ve been talking about earlier: the non-aligned, the fence sitters, the countries that China and the US want to woo. So part of that wooing means showing that you’re not preventing progress on global issues simply to gain a little competitive advantage on the bilateral and indeed perhaps bipolar rivalry.

Nonetheless, I do think we are entering a period where it’s not just a great power rivalry. It is a contest over how the world will be organised in the decades ahead. And I think China has a different vision of order, one where the US and the hegemonic system, even the security system that has done so much for creating a stable order in the last decades, will be either non-existent or certainly less important. It will be a multipolar world. China wants to see the US shrink in its role in the world. And I think the United States and I hope those who care about liberal open order think that we need to make sure that China’s disappointed, that they don’t win that struggle, that they find a way to accommodate themselves into a world where the US and its democratic allies can have alliances and can be at the centre of the system. They, after all, have the bragging rights of having done this before and created these foundational institutions that the world wants more of.

So I think it’s gonna be competition and I think there’s gonna be ideally room for collaboration, so it won’t be one or the other. I think we’re gonna have to find a way to reconcile the two great dynamics that are in front of us. One is this 21st century problems of modernity that are problems that the world cannot ignore because they are planetary problems. And the other issues is what kind of political system do we wanna live in? At the end of the 21st century do we want to have at least a part of the world still defined by what we might call innocently open societies, where rule of law, where free speech, where a civil society outside of the reach of a predatory state? Those are things that I think are worth defending, and I think it behooves us to give it a go.

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Gideon Rachman
That was John Ikenberry in Princeton ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening. Please join me again next week.

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