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The "rules-based international order" was a fiction popularized by US policy makers who wanted to quietly substitute it for international law, so they could violate said laws, while still vaguely gesturing at moral authority.

International law was and is also a fiction. We have various conventions and agreements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law

"In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and decolonisation across the world resulted in the establishment of scores of newly independent states.[67] As these former colonies became their own states, they adopted European views of international law.[68] A flurry of institutions, ranging from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) to the World Health Organization furthered the development of a multilateralist approach as states chose to compromise on sovereignty to benefit from international cooperation.[69] Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing focus on the phenomenon of globalisation and on protecting human rights on the global scale, particularly when minorities or indigenous communities are involved, as concerns are raised that globalisation may be increasing inequality in the international legal system.[70]"

Laws aren't fictitious just because people/countries break them. No one writes a law thinking "that settles that, no more embezzling." Laws simply tell you how that system works: you embezzle, FBI arrests you, you get tried, etc.

Also the US always made a big deal about not joining various treaties, with their reasoning explicitly being "we actually plan to do a lot of things that would violate that treaty." In that sense, that shows the US actually had respect for those institutions.

Also, the west benefited from this arrangement. Most western countries could benefit from the rules based order, and when they needed a little pump, the US broke some rules and brought home a treat for the home team. You might argue this undermines the whole enterprise, but my counterargument is this is the longest period of relative peace and prosperity humankind has ever experienced, so although it wasn't perfect, it was a huge improvement.

Ofcourse people break laws. But they are enforceable and the authorities have absolute power to enforce them. Putin can get away doing whatever the f he wants but nobody in Canada can get away with breaking any law they want whenever they feel like it, for example. That's the difference between the very real Canadian laws over Canadians and "international law" over nobody. Now Canada can pass a law that is in line with some international agreement, but it's still the law of Canada. Other laws don't apply in Canada. Canadian laws don't apply in other countries. And that's about it. If we had world elections, world government, world police, world courts and world laws, with all countries giving up their sovereignty to those institutions then we'd have "international law". Until then we don't.

International law is different, but everyone knows the scenario where like, the ICJ tries and imprisons Putin is remote. Almost as remote as Trump being tried for treason tho....

I'm not sure "everyone knows" applies here. This is one of these situations where the language is intentionally confusing. Because most people when they hear about laws have certain assumptions about what those are and how they work.

In this case this assumption is completely disconnected from reality. So yes, neither Trump, nor Putin, nor Starmer, nor Macron, nor any US citizen, and likely no citizen, or government of no country with any sort of power (India, China) or with a patron country with power isn't subject to any "international law". I.e. doesn't exist, it's just a word salad to manipulate the masses.

> Because most people when they hear about laws have certain assumptions about what those are and how they work.

I disagree; I would guess most people assume rich/powerful/etc people aren't subject to laws, no matter the jurisdiction.

> In this case this assumption is completely disconnected from reality.

How many people think the US is bound by international law? I looked for polling but I couldn't dig anything up

> ["international law"] just a word salad to manipulate the masses.

How are people manipulated by this?

Rich and powerful people go to jail all the time. SBF? Ghislaine Maxwell? Maybe that boundary is pushed but at least in theory in the "western/democratic" world you can't get away with breaking the law simply by having power (and yeah Trump and such - but in general). So sure, there is some erosion of rule of the law in the western world, but it's still a thing.

But you are right that people assume that. They also assume the rich pay no taxes. So they "assume" a bunch of nonsense. Some once told me assume makes an ass of you and me.

I think people think the US is supposed to follow this thing called international law, or at least they'll express some outrage when it doesn't.

The manipulation is that people believe in this thing called international law as something that anyone has to follow where in practice no country would ever let international law supersede its laws if it went against their interest and there is no mechanism to force this. You keep seeing news about this and that being against international law (be it Israel or the US or Russia, would be the typical use case) and people actually think this is a real thing, like there's some law book somewhere that applies universally to every country. Very few people have the real and correct understanding that these are just norms or treaties or agreements that countries decide to follow or not on a case by case basis as per their interest, i.e. not a law in any real sense of the word.

Well but I think those instances are like, "wow this dude actually went to jail? how badly did he fuck up?" or whatever. Like, a counter example is like, one person went to jail for the financial collapse of 2008--to the surprise of no one (though, a fair amount of justified outrage). Rich people also frequently pay no taxes, like famously Amazon.

But, I don't think people have a detailed understanding of these things. I do agree they're at best fuzzy about what international law is (I am also fuzzy on it). I just don't understand what's manipulative about it. Like, what are people induced into doing based on the premise that the US follows international law? I think anyone operating in that sphere (international shipping, piracy outfits, aid organizations, criminal syndicates) is probably savvy enough to know the US will just blow you up and lie about it for thirty years.

> In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc

There was no dissolution of Soviet bloc during that time.

All law was and is a fiction. Nothing can stop a murderer murdering you.

Well, try. I'm joking- don't.

Laws are enforced by sovereign countries that have police and courts etc. "International law" has "laws" (well very few if any) with no sovereignty. That's what makes it fiction. It's just newspeak to make people think that there are laws that exist outside the system of countries, and there aren't, at least no binding ones that countries can't and don't override. That's not a law.

Ofcourse laws, like any other human constructs, are invented by us and don't have independent existence.

When I drive to work here in Canada the "international police" stopping me for violating the "international traffic laws" is really not a concern.

I acknowledge that the 20th century was marked by much bloodshed, but this wasn't limited to the world wars and it continues violently into the 21st century.

If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?

Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?

> If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?

It's the other way around. Rules are tools of peace. No peace, no rules. But if you want peace then you have to be ready to wage war. It's called deterrence and the EU is learning this just now, again. That's also one reason why the USA has been called the world police... because it was true.*

If nobody enforces the rules any more, things break down and we close in on violence. It is plain to see on the global scale, e.g. Russia's war against Ukraine, and also the domestic scale, e.g. ICE's violence against their own citizens in the USA.

> Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?

The US military budget is about three times that of the EU or China's, or about a third of all military spending on the globe. Obviously, this is much higher than any single entity, but not all other countries combined.

* Frankly, being the world police has had a lot of benefits for the USA. Why they are abdicating this position to run a protection racket instead is for wiser people than me to answer.

You're confusing rules with treaties, agreements, and balance of power.

Yes- When there is one super power in the world and it says if you don't behave a certain way we're gonna bomb the heck out of you, or boycott you, you get a certain behavior. Even then you might get some actors (like North Korea, or Iran, Yemen, Russia, China and more) that have no problem openly defying and challenging the super power to some extent.

When the balance shifts and you have other blocks with more power that feel comfortable in defying that super power (like China or Russia today) then you see that changing.

There are no "absolute" rules. There are power dynamics, countries, interests, politics. Rules can exist only within a structure that can enforce them, like a country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order

"The nature of the LIO, as well as its very existence, has been debated by scholars."

Nobody is throwing anything away and that thing you think they're throwing away didn't really exist.

Whether or not a 'LIO' exists is not that interesting to me. What is interesting is what actually exists and what has happened in history. What actually exists is an enormous shock after, for instance, world war one where the question arose how it is possible that basically an entire generation of young men was slaughtered. E.g., every small village in France has a memorial of the fallen soldiers during world war one. For many decades after the war commemoration were/are still being held. It used to be that competing for territory was just the normal thing countries did. Then, it became clear that this has a potentially enormous cost in human lives. The obvious conclusion for people who are not sleepwalking through life and through history, is that any political leader who advocates for a change in country borders and does so much as hint to violent means of doing so is totally deranged and immoral. A similar shock has gone through the world after world war two, which, for instance, lead to the creation of the declaration of universal human rights. Among the decent public, it is also concluded that a violation of human rights is deranged in immoral.

I'm not sure how this relates to the discussion.

I agree most countries, certainly western countries, have realized that waging the kind of wars like WW-I and WW-II is not a good idea. But there have been a lot of war and killing anyways since the world wars and there have been a lot of new borders redrawn and countries formed. In more recent times we have Putin invading Ukraine and the general instability of the post cold war Eastern Europe.

So the calculus has changed for many reasons. But "new order" is not one of them. The so called new order was a result of the calculus changing, not the other way around. Countries fight for power in other ways and other societal changes also influence their decisions. I.e. you are confusing cause and effect. Now we have different dynamics, not a collapse of world order, things have shifted very slightly. "The end of the world as we know it" gets a lot of clicks on social media but it's not like we're suddenly having WW-I all over again and it's not like that order you thought was absolute really was. It's just that's how the alignment of interests landed.