An article by: Martin Sieff

What is the “international rules-based order” that the United States endlessly preaches, upholds and lectures other nations about defying? Where did it originate? Who supports it and where does it draw its alleged authority to approve or to destabilize and then topple governments all around the world that do not meet its allegedly high criteria for implementing democracy, upholding human rights and preventing aggression against other nations?

The United States is the only major country in the world whose leadership does not pay serious attention to the speeches of global leaders around the world.

US leaders from both parties, diplomats, generals and think tank intellectuals, as well as media pundits, all in mind-numbing unity proclaim America’s every aggression, bombings, invasions and destruction of nations around the world is “in defense of the rules-based international order.” Yet these same massed multitudes sneer at the United Nations and its General Assembly when the leaders of the rest of the world every year criticize the latest reckless, manic, wild indulgence in the exercise of unrestrained and unauthorized US military power!

Indeed, the United States is the only major country in the world whose leadership and state media do not seriously cover and respect the speeches of global leaders from all around the world at the annual convening of the UN General Assembly every September.

I worked briefly within the UN in 1985-86 and, based on that thin direct experience, I was often deputed to cover the proceedings of the UN General Assembly in the years that followed.

When I worked for US news organizations, this was easy work and always pro forma. None of them took the proceedings of the UNGA or the speeches given there by different leaders from around the world seriously. However, I soon discovered that from India through the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the proceedings of the UNGA were followed and covered with rapt attention. They still are. The leaders of superpowers of Russia and China still regularly attend the UNGA or send their most senior diplomats to do so. At the very least, the UNGA was seen as the lectern or preeminent public platform from which to address the community of nations and the entire human race.

Nor is it insignificant that the UN remains based in New York City. The decision to locate UN headquarters there was taken 78 years ago in 1946. For the true founding father of the United Nations was America’s greatest modern president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. And he indeed meant it to be a League of Nations without the old Geneva-based League’s flaws: from the very beginning, FDR was determined that the UN should be and remain the discussion center and gathering place to resolve in peace the myriad and inevitable arguments and conflicts of the human race. However, that was then: and this is now. For the UN and the US official and public attitudes to it have continually evolved and even transformed over the past nearly 80 years.

For its first couple of decades, the UN remained cozily dominated by the United States, Britain and their NATO allies, but then the Arab nations and the newly dependent former colonial states of Africa and Asia developed diplomatic experience and their own public confidence. Then came the twin global transformations triggered by the US humiliation in Vietnam in the late 1960s and by Israel’s transformation in global perception from tiny, persecuted underdog to still tiny but militarily invincible superpower in the 1967 Six Day War.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States was left without a rival, and Washington’s dominance at the United Nations gradually returned.

After those unanticipated developments, the Arab and former colonial blocs began to turn against not just the United States and Israel but against the West in general. The 1973/74 quadrupling of global energy prices triggered by the Saudi- and Iranian-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) completed this process. Through the 1970s, the UN became seen by vast swathes of the American public as biting the hand that had always fed it – and as the safe and sacred platform from which to spew America and the West with endless hatred and contempt.

This began to change again in the 1980s: a resurgent America emerged under President Ronald Reagan, and his take-no-prisoners Ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick led a ferocious counter charge against the UN and all its works and rhetoric good and bad.

Then the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 seemed to leave the United States as the only game in town. And US domination of the UN gradually returned. But the hatred and contempt from the decades of humiliation remained. As a result, US ambassadors to the UN now routinely prosper in domestic American politics by bullying and scapegoating the global forum and boasting of doing so.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Hailey exemplified the apotheosis of this process when she proclaimed herself “the new sheriff in town” who would therefore police the UN and make sure its members marched to the American beat when she was appointed to the job by then-President Donald Trump in 2017. So successful was Haley in this public persona over the next two years that she was able to use it as a springboard to launch a challenge to Trump himself for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020. This got nowhere. But it confirmed the wisdom for US politicians and diplomats to continue treating the UN with contempt.

Therefore, the United States has never sought any permission or approval from the UN in its 21st century self-appointed role to uphold the so-called “international rules-based order.” But do all the major and for that matter smaller nations around the world sign on to this order? They most assuredly do not.

China, Russia and Iran have always stood outside it. So does English-speaking India, a stable independent genuine democracy since its founding in 1947, which now has around 1.3 billion people. India is friendly with the United States, which always publicly acts as if it is an ally. But it is not. India’s prime treaty security relations are with Russia, with which it has had a security alliance since 1970 and a close security relationship going back to 1955. Now India is also a member, along with Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – the most populous and heavily armed security alliance in the history of the human race.

The U.S.-led “rules-based international order” enjoys no authority from either the United Nations, China or Russia.

Founded on June 15, 2001, the SCO has always defined itself as specifically directed to maintain the independence and diversity of a multipolar world. No US dictated and directed “international rules-based order” for it! And the SCO now contains close to one third of the population of the entire human race including the two most populous nations of all time – China and India, each with around 1.3 billion people.

So clearly the US-directed “international rules-based order” does not derive any legitimate or credible legal or moral authority from either the United Nations or from the most populous nations in the world as well as the largest in terms of area – Russia. Where then, do successive US governments derive the authority to tell the governments of the rest of the world how to order their domestic affairs?

The answer is simple and clear: there is no secret or dispute about it. That authority comes from the whim of the moment of the US government of the day: it decides when to declare China, not just the “pacing threat” to US global military and economic hegemony, but also a challenge to “the international rules-based order” itself. Yet the US government manifestly does not declare India to be such a challenge, even though India is now a far closer diplomatic military and strategic ally to both Russia and China through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization than it is to the United States.

Just pose this question to any State Department or Pentagon correspondent and watch the sparks fly from their ears and the foam and drool drip from their gaping mouths as their simply wired brains short-circuit in failing to resolve this conundrum.

In other words, “the international rules-based order” is whatever the US administration of the day decides it is and should be at any moment in time.

Thus, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, now more than a year old, has killed at least 40,000 people according to official figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health backed by UN estimates. However, my friend Professor Peter Kuznick of the American University in Washington DC and a scholar of impeccable international reputation has publicly assessed the death toll so far as more likely to be 200,000. Similarly, the US supply of scores of billions of dollars of munitions to the corrupt, repressive and proudly non-democratic government of Ukraine to stay in a war against Russia that has already cost well over 600,000 Ukrainian lives is now upheld as being in defense of the “international rules-based order.” But the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians from 2014 to 2022 by Ukraine-backed militias and terror groups in the secessionist provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk was in no way regarded as a threat to or breaking of this same “international rules-based order.” Yet the death toll in Donetsk and Lugansk over those years was in absolute terms and proportionately 14 times higher than the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian attacks during the second Intifada from 2001 to 2005.

Nor was the open US support for rebel forces seeking to topple the internationally recognized government of Syria after 2011 ever admitted as being in defiance of it.

“The international rules-based order” is therefore in reality a pure fantasy.

“The international rules-based order” is therefore in reality a pure fantasy. It cannot be defined. Its parameters shift and dissolve with every policymaking caprice. Yet it has a sinister accelerating momentum and mass of its own.

In the minds of the American public, media pundits, opinion shapers, think tank performing chimpanzees and members of successive US congresses, this “international rules-based order,” amorphous and shapeshifting as it is, remains their idol, their god and their ever more demanding master. In its service, they dutifully line up their beloved aircraft carriers to be targeted and threatened by Houthi missiles, Iranian forces and Chinese strike power from the Red Sea to the South China Sea – none of it for any discernible US strategic goal or material benefit whatsoever.

In the service of this phantom “international rules-based order” US governments, congresses and policymakers have happily sacrificed the lives of 40,000 to 200,000 civilians in Gaza and an entire generation of Ukrainian young men in a war that never had to be fought. Yet their idol is still never satisfied. Nor will it ever be – until the destruction of the world.

Writer, Journalist, Political Analyst

Martin Sieff