Europe and America are Wrong
The rules-based order isn’t gone. But its future now depends on what European and other Middle Powers do next.
When US and European leaders met in Munich last weekend, they didn’t agree on much. Except that the rules-based order is gone. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated.
The American-led rules-based order—the Pax Americana—is gone. Instead of leading the Free World, Donald Trump’s America is determined to take the world back to a time of great power imperialism in a quixotic quest to defend a Western civilization they define primarily as White, Christian, and Nationalist. Few will follow in its footsteps
Instead, I argue in my latest From Across the Pond column, it is up to the middle powers to preserve, reform, and advance the rules-based order:
These days, Europe and America don’t agree on much.
But when it comes to the rules-based order, European and American leaders are in agreement: That order is gone.
But is it really gone? The American-led order — Pax Americana — died with the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024. It was clear that Trump 2.0 would continue and accelerate America’s abdication of the global leadership role Washington had first assumed in the early 1940s.
That, however, is not the same as declaring the end of the rules-based order. And, yet, that is what a succession of leaders, starting with Mark Carney’s much-heralded address in Davos last month, have now proclaimed. “The old order is not coming back,” Carney admonished his audience. “Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.”
Carney is hardly alone in declaring the end of the rules-based order. In his speech to the Munich Security Conference, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz similarly declared “that the international order, which is based on rights and rules, is on the verge of being destroyed. I fear we need to put it even more bluntly: this order — imperfect even at its best — no longer exists.”
America’s erstwhile allies weren’t the only ones to bemoan the end of the rules-based order. America’s chief diplomat in Munich this past weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also picked up a shovel to bury it.
“The postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us,” Rubio asserted. “We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations.”
The meetings in Davos and Munich of world leaders have no doubt underscored the reality of a United States vacating its traditional role as the leader of the free world, the main provider of public goods, and the principal champion of a world based on strong security alliances, open trade and the defense of democracy and human rights.
Read the entire article on Politico Europe.