With his recent speech describing the rules-based international order as a “fiction,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made a mainstay of debates across the Global South fashionable in the West. Developing and emerging economies have long criticised the inconsistent implementation of international rules and double standards at the heart of the international order. Now, a Western leader has acknowledged the hypocrisy, too.
Until recently, the Carneys of the world had invested considerable political capital in defending the rules-based order against such accusations. At the Munich Security Conference in February, the Saudi minister of foreign affairs remarked, with relief, that “finally, we are, all of us, being honest with each other” about the broken nature of the old system.
But should we really be rejoicing at this move toward greater honesty? What will come of Western leaders acknowledging how “imperfect” the old order was, even at the best of times,” as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently put it?
I ask as someone who has called for a more honest conversation about that order’s inconsistencies and the legitimate concerns they raised. I hoped that acknowledging the double standards would help reduce them, leading to a more constructive debate about how to strengthen international rules and norms. Yet now I worry that the honesty on display today is not serving either objective.
Instead of ensuring greater consistency or inspiring reforms to make the prevailing system more just and emancipatory, this newfound frankness often seems aimed at opposite ends. It is being used to justify blatant discrepancies and to depict any work toward more consistent global rules as futile.
Most of those who highlight the old order’s shortcomings are not promising to alter their own behaviour. They may acknowledge the hypocrisies enshrined in that order, but their reactions to the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela and the US-Israeli strikes against Iran confirm that nothing much has changed. They remain willing to condone or look past their allies’ rule violations.
Aside from Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, few Western leaders have called out the illegality of the US/Israeli attack on Iran. Not even the European Union – a longtime champion of international law – has issued an official condemnation. In fact, judging by recent official statements, some in the West seem to regard dishonesty about the old order’s double standards and moralising by Europeans and others as two sides of the same problematic coin. For them, being more honest about the old order means no longer chiding other governments for their violations of international rules.
Thus, Merz recently made clear that Germany would not be “lecturing our partners on their military strikes against Iran.” But in that case, nothing has changed: the partners Germany is sparing from moralising lectures are the same partners that Germany has almost always spared from moralising lectures.
Few who have finally acknowledged the old order’s deficits are taking the next step of trying to build something better. Instead, the more common argument is that the old order is basically dead and not to be mourned.
The implication is that Western countries should now focus on the far more limited goal of defending their own strategic interests in a world where power politics dominate, and where international rules no longer command respect.
This was the subtext of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent speech at the EU Ambassadors Conference, where she argued that “Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order, for a world that has gone and will not return.” Likewise, Merz believes that the rules-based order “no longer exists.” Even Carney, who suggested that “something bigger, better, stronger, more just” could be built on the ruins of the old order, has provided little detail on what this could look like. (He also initially endorsed the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, albeit “with regret.”)
Those declaring the old order dead – which is conveniently happening just as its double standards have come to haunt the West – might want to be seen as refreshingly honest brokers. But one can just as easily interpret their statements as abandoning all ambition to shape global rules and principles for the better.
Western leaders now speak in the same “transactional” terms that they once criticised the Global South for using. They, too, have settled on a foreign-policy approach based on national interests, rather than on principles that serve the interests of all. Their goal is not to advance a more just global order, but rather to promote a “realist” stance that frees them from any commitment to defending or strengthening international rules.
Of course, it is reasonable to ask whether “middle powers” can uphold international rules, let alone establish new ones, without the buy-in of a hegemon. But if they completely drop the ambition to do so, the very notion of a rules-based order will indeed be dead. The honesty we have been waiting for will be used to justify inconsistencies or an abdication of leadership. If that is our future, we may miss the “fictional” world we have lost.
The writer is Head of Research and Publications at the Munich Security Conference
