The liberal world order, the whole post-war, rules-based thing that we treasured. That’s obviously over. It’s not just what’s happening now, and not just in theatres of war: the symptoms of the end of the progressive or liberal period are everywhere – and we learn that it was really all bullshit anyway.
I argue about this stuff with my family. I feel like the last few years (or maybe it’s the last 25 years, essentially the lifetime of my children) have turned me into a terrible, unreformable cynic. A miserable pragmatist with no belief at all in the reformability of states and institutions.
In a way I hope they’re right and I’m not. I hope the old truths about the arc of the moral universe reassert themselves. But I find that the case that the whole thing was always essentially fake anyway – a kind of consensual fiction – is persuasive. In the 80 years since the end of WW2 even the most enthusiastic advocates of the institutions and protocols of global cooperation have actually continued to behave roughly as they did before they existed, even while claiming absolute adherence to the rules. One of them – the big one, the hegemon, the USA – never fully joined up anyway.
The list of international bodies that one or other branch of the American state has objected to or withdrawn from (or actually destroyed) would be a long one. It would include the League of Nations, the ICC, Kyoto and Paris, various arms control treaties (including, remarkably, landmines and cluster munitions). And, perhaps more to the point, the USA has a track record – going back decades before MAGA, as far as the 19th Century, in fact – of withdrawing from or deprecating bodies and treaties having once agreed to them. Hegemons gonna hegemon.
And, obviously, a list of actual offences by governments – hegemonic and otherwise – against the rules-based order, even since the establishment of the UN, would be an even longer one and would include: the secret bombing of Cambodia, the coup in Guatemala, Russian slaughter in Chechnya, Afghanistan over and over again, the Iraq war, genocide in Rwanda, expulsions and mass imprisonments in Western China, the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen, Ukraine, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, French attrocities in North Africa and Indochina (and a million other, smaller, unremembered offences).
You can test the thesis that there has never been much of a rules-based order by going further back – to the previous wave of international treaty-making and institution building that followed the coalescence of the modern, bourgeois states in the nineteenth century. Treaties, conventions, international bodies, the first of the NGOs. They did not – could not – stop or even impede the great and terrible conflicts of the 20th Century – including holocausts summing, plausibly, to 150 million deaths; expulsions and repressions, every category of violence and destruction. None sanctioned by international law, all allowed to happen anyway.
But there’s something about our moment that’s obviously hugely clarifying. Nations – their governments, security agencies and armies, mainly, of course – are raiding, annexing, slaughtering and expelling at an extraordinary, undiminished rate. It’s the norm, now, and there’s no need to conceal or dissemble any more. Entire populations are being imprisoned, expelled and killed – by states of every complexion, including those we still think of as liberal, democratic nations.
![A worker removes the rubble to prepare for restoration on the site of a collapsed UNESCO-listed building following heavy rains, in the Old City of Sanaa, on August 12, 2020. Drainage infrastructure has also suffered from neglect, making Old City buildings vulnerable to collapse during flash floods. [Mohammed Huwais/AFP]](https://bowblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Sanaa-ruins-1200.jpg)
Cities and towns are levelled; ethnic groups enslaved, ejected or killed; civilians everywhere are legitimate targets. In fact civilians are killed and injured at a rate that is almost always higher than that amongst combatants. They’re more than legitimate; they are preferred. For soldiers war is becoming less lethal: stand-off weapons and drones reduce injuries; better medical care improves survival rates. Not for civilians, though. In fact, for non-combatants, wars are getting more lethal. More are deliberately targeted; the withholding of evacuation and treatment are weapons in themselves. It’s almost as if in sophisticated, modern warfare, as it gets harder to kill opposing forces, the emphasis is switching to killing more vulnerable civilians. It’s quite possible to imagine future wars in which the only deaths and injuries that occur are amongst civilians. And it is the rules-based order that has brought us this demonic reversal of the logic of warfare.
So are there any states not presently involved – either as direct combatants or as second-degree actors, supplying arms and training and money – in dark, hyper-realist, Schmittian state violence? I don’t know. Maybe some small ones – Ireland? Peru? To return to my original point, this is clarifying because it confirms that this was actually the case all along; that only mugs believed at any point that world governance or norms might constrain the pragmatic, self-interested state. Only mugs believed that somehow the various talking shops, annual conferences, standing committees and conventions could have anything beyond a superficial influence on the shape of the global polity.
