that's all, folks!
carney and rubio, zhou dynasty hegemony, the genesis of law
RIP to the International Rules-Based Order. 1945-2026, we had a good run.
Well, not really. Predicting the end of the International System1 is very much in vogue following Mark Carney’s speech at Davos on the topic, and especially after Marco Rubio’s at Munich which in some ways concurs. I think it remains premature.
We live in the Spring and Autumn. The world is governed not by a true sovereign wielding controlling authority, nor by the rule of the jungle where every state fights for base survival. The global sovereign is much like the weakened Zhou kingdom: an abstraction. A complex set of rules, rituals, etiquette, and implicit understandings broadly defined as the post-WWII settlement. Unlike the Zhou king, there’s no particular human to point to who represents the system, but the Zhou king was himself a symbol, and the effect is the same.
States obey a symbolic order out of inertia, benefit, spiritual deference, and fear of collective punishment. And, much like the Spring and Autumn, the final guarantor of the system is the hegemon: most powerful of the several states, granted a certain freedom of action and a certain deference in exchange for enforcing and mostly adhering to the rules. The hegemon could plausibly overthrow the system and seize power itself, but rebellion is risky and dangerous, and the other states recognize a hegemon as primus inter pares to give it more to gain than anyone from keeping the system alive. Several of the Five Hegemons in Zhou times became the order’s most stalwart defenders, putting on airs as champions of the moral order and protectors of civilization against barbarism. Our hegemon is the United States.
The UN was created to be a true overlord with its own military authority subject only to veto, but the Great Powers could never agree on specifics before the Cold War split the Security Council. The collapse of the USSR rekindled the dream of a united world, and the smooth authorization and successful prosecution of the Gulf War made it seem real. But the dramatic failures of UN military operations in Bosnia and Rwanda quashed it again, leading to Kosovo as a unilateral NATO mission.
The USA under Bush I and Clinton came closest to proper hegemony, maintaining the appearance of impartial referee while only taking moderate liberties to exploit the country’s privileged position. Under Bush II, the hegemon used its power more wantonly than was considered proper, though the regime did go through the ritual obeisances.2 Since then, the situation has been a muddle. The administrations have had different public images and different objectives, but each has continued to push the precedent that multilateral engagement is a politeness, and the hegemon may do as it pleases. And now under Second Trump, with a freer hand for the executive and more ambitious ministers under him, the USA is talking about giving up the pretense entirely.
But the imponderable force of events in human history takes some time to work out. The biggest recent events that point in this direction are mostly just people talking about it.3 But compared to a few years ago, when such a thing was difficult to fathom, now it’s on everyone’s mind.
Decline is never a straight path down. There are always periods of retrenchment, even if it’s just to set lower highs. I’m always cheered and chastened that, even during the Bronze Age Collapse, they built a palace out of the ruins of the palace economy at least once.4 A lot hinges on 2028, or even 2032 if a DNC win means another caretaker administration rather than a new, liberal trajectory for the future that competes with the leftist and rightist visions.
That is to say, most of it hinges on the USA. Institutional inertia is high, the USA remains very militarily potent, and if it stays the course then the existing order can lumber onward for decades. A belligerent China could plausibly take it out, but that isn’t going to happen under Xi.5 If the International System comes down, it will be because the USA wants it to.
Aside from people predicting the end, many are even eager for it. I understand the desire, although I would say they speak evil of those things which they know not.6
The International System is a pile of abstractions. The abstractions are dense and intertwined, and there is no coherent catechism for what they are, why they are, or why they ought to be. It has no central actor, so its outputs appear incoherent, ineffectual, or pathological, and there’s no one obvious person to blame when things go wrong. Being driven by consensus, its strongest bias is to preserve the status quo, a status quo that seems increasingly untenable or undesirable. In short, the whole thing feels fake and gay.
But it’s also what lets us all be fake and gay together and I think people will miss it when it’s gone. In 2024 I drafted, but never published, an essay arguing that everyone is too credulous of the abstractions, that ideas like human rights and international law were meant to manage reality, but we have gone so long without a major conflict that people see them as reality unto itself. I was bothered by the American regime’s insufficient willingness to win in Ukraine, and by the several other wars that followed the Russian invasion. Each seemed like another attempt to test whether the “rules” were still in play, and each like a domino proving that no, they really weren’t. The rules are not self-enforcing, and distanced from a willingness to enforce them, reality will reassert itself, good and hard. The point then was that good people need to be more clear-eyed about how the abstractions that define the International System are a pre-negotiated alternative to military action rather than some special magic that obsoletes it.
Now that Sleepy Joe is out and Crazy Don is back in, I feel like the conversation is coming from the other direction. A year of profaning the altars of soil and grain has made it quite clear that it’s all fake, nothing matters, quote Thucydides and do whatever you feel like. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue, President Trump pardons his lackeys, Chairman Newsom fires them into the sun. This feeling, while fun, is also unwise.
It’s true the abstractions have grown unwieldy and hoary, but it’s also true the abstractions underlie the remarkable placidity of contemporary life. We need to be aware of what’s underneath them, where they come from, and the value they provide. Whether we, as a global society, can restate our governing principles, or arrive at entirely new ones, in a form that inspires faith and adherence is the difference between the next phase of human development and a long period of disaster.
Political power is fundamentally grounded in violence. Power is based on the physical ability to kill other human beings, or the ability, by whatever means, to compel others to kill on your behalf. Human rights, popular sovereignty, equality under the law. Rules of engagement, due process, bodily autonomy, freedom of conscience. Everything else is an abstraction.
Law began one layer removed from this reality.7 Prior to any deeply felt notions of justice or order, law was a mechanism to resolve interpersonal disputes that otherwise would be resolved physically. And before the free individual and the common weal, there was only the clan.
When the clan held paramount importance, retribution in response to attack or offense was a survival necessity. But the logic of revenge works both ways, and even trivial disputes could escalate into endless blood feud, a dramatically negative-sum outcome for all involved. Honor attempts to short-circuit this process by promising disproportionate retaliation for any offense, to prevent attacks on one’s person, one’s charges, and one’s good name before they occur. Its efficacy is decidedly mixed.
Law, while also deterring action before the fact, also tries to cut the cycle short as soon as it begins. Early Frankish law regarded nearly any offense as a debt to be settled between the accused and aggrieved. And that debt was paid in silver. Under Salian law, killing a man wasn’t qualitatively different from breaking a fence or accusing a woman of harlotry. They all created an obligation. The question was just the cost.
Law, then as always, was imperfectly obeyed by those who thought they could get away with defecting from it. It secured obedience by imbuing itself with religious splendor, by marshaling collective resources from the various clans to enforce equilibrium, and eventually by gathering retributive capacity into itself to punish defection directly.
But internalizing enforcement created a new problem, which is that law itself can act as a weapon. When a king was merely a warleader, chosen by acclaim from among his equals, his reach into civil affairs was short and his position could easily be revoked. But with a potent tool to eliminate challengers none of the others had access to, tyranny was much more practicable.
Ethical systems developed to constrain the ruler, codes of behavior again enforced by violence: a leader could be deemed illegitimate if he went beyond what was acceptable, a very different charge than cowardice or incapacity. While the king commanded more military potential than any of his subjects, he did not hold more than all of them. So by pre-committing to a ruleset, subjects could coordinate collective action, expecting the threat to deter transgression in the first place. At times when religious heads escaped from military-civil dominance, this coordination mechanism could be especially potent.
The greatest innovation however was to internalize enforcement into each person himself. Fear of one’s vassals’ ability to rebel, or fear of one’s ruler and his ability to punish, are calculations based on circumstance. But fear of God seeps into the heart and produces good outcomes most expeditiously. Over the generations, this fear of divine punishment, and equivalently hope for reward, grows increasingly abstract. From fear of getting struck by lightning, to fear of going to hell, eventually to a vaguer fear of doing something “wrong” untethered from direct consequence.8
The special role of the ruler changed further with the post-Enlightenment shift from monarchy to republicanism.9 Traditional kings may have been constrained by the demands of their vassals, or may have had enough military potential to call themselves answerable only to God. But ultimately all kings based their power on the legitimacy of their blood and the military potential they personally controlled. And the first was always negotiable with enough of the second.
The republic, by contrast, is a construct of Law itself. The ideal is that government serve the popular will, subject to restrictions based on inalienable rights, which is not that different from a king serving his vassals yet subject to divine oversight. But “the people,” due to their sheer scale, cannot coordinate like a coherent community of powerful lords. So the architects of republican government designed a system to be paramount. The people within it serve the system, the system enforces itself by arraying its components against each other, and no man exists above or outside it.
The Framers of the American constitution were great men of letters and keenly aware of their historical place and duty to posterity but were in another way not all that different from the Frankish warlords. They personally experienced the direct, physical reality they sought to contain in their abstractions, having successfully prosecuted a violent revolution against an order they considered illegitimate. Traditionally, a king’s power was checked by the combined strength of his vassals, but advances in communications and social technologies allowed power to centralize and thus leverage itself to gather yet more. The Several States functioned as the vassals, semi-sovereign, with the legal and military strength to resist a central authority grown tyrannical. But also the center was set against itself from within, via the three Branches, which hold distinct authority and enjoy a variety of tools to confound the goals and punish the transgressions of the others.
From the time of the Founding through to the Civil War, direct contact with this reality was never lost. Debates about judicial review vs nullification and union vs secession always remembered these to be designed mechanisms, agreed upon by common consent, and that abandoning that agreement would demand a military solution.
The International System was not so deliberately designed, but it evolved along similar lines, drawing from similar sources. The principles we now ascribe to Westphalia were first articulated as a normative system by Emer de Vattel in the mid-18th century, in a work that was also dear to the Founders themselves. Balance of power emerged out of strategic thinking in the Italian Wars and later British foreign policy before evolving into an organizing principle to preserve the post-Napoleonic peace. The International System was not purely a product of the postwar, but assembled itself piecemeal through a century of diplomacy built on centuries more of natural philosophy. Before the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions came the Vienna system, the Berlin Conference, the Hague Conventions, Versailles, and Montevideo.
The great secular turn of the 17th emerged not from victory, but from utter exhaustion and devastation after the century-long Wars of Religion. The Concert of Europe was a concession and corrective after the seven brutal Coalition Wars. And the postwar settlement was merely another attempt to prevent the mistakes of the past after the unprecedented horror of the World Wars, or the Second Thirty Years’.
And the same thing will happen again, after the International System is gone. We build, then we forget, and then all of a sudden, we remember.
The past century and a half have been remarkably pacific for the USA. We’ve had political scandals, economic crises, and overseas wars, but nothing that has threatened the republic itself. The greatest 20th century legitimacy crisis was Watergate, and the system functioned exactly as hoped, freezing the president out from power once criminal wrongdoing became clear and then letting him fall on his sword.
Over the same period, the USA transitioned from regional power, to global power, to overseeing most of the world. The postwar settlement flipped the traditional right by conquest to the spoils of victory to a ban on wars of conquest, punishable by death. Now, the standard justification for military action is to punish transgressions of international law, or to protect human rights and self-determination of peoples, or to safeguard the global peace.
At their height, the European Great Powers directly administered half the globe, and they ruled their African and Asian colonies for their own enrichment with unapologetic brutality. The International System, by contrast, is defined by a multitude of states with full legal sovereignty, the practical extent of which may vary or be up for debate. And the USA rules only indirectly, through multilateral agreements, non-government organizations, cultural assimilation, diplomatic pressure, financial leverage, regime change, and limited military intervention.10 Perhaps the most notable aspect, and what makes it most similar to a Zhou-era hegemon, is the willingness of the USA to punish states which act against other states, in defense of the system as a whole, rather than allowing a free-for-all as long as the USA itself is unmolested.
Occasionally, the stated morality of the International System is upheld authentically. Sometimes, it is adhered to by letter, although the choice to act or not act also serves ulterior motives to strengthen positioning or bolster influence. Often, it serves as a cloak for self-serving action, but it also constrains the space of action to what can be justified within it. But even if it was never fully altruistic and never perfectly adhered to, the world where the USA acts as the steward of the International System is very different from one in which it openly discards the pretense.
The Carney and Rubio speeches describe two different visions of what such a world might look like.
During the Spring and Autumn, several of the strongest states at their respective heights were granted the title hegemon and charged with protecting the integrity of the Zhou state system. By the Warring States, seven states remained, fighting not for prestige but for their very survival. It was a terrifying and violent age, but it was also a golden age for itinerant scholars, who invented new ideologies and traveled state to state, offering their services to rulers desperate for edge over their rivals. This profusion of philosophies, worldviews, governance techniques, and ruling ideologies is traditionally called the Hundred Schools of Thought.
One such school was the School of Diplomacy, or the School of the Vertical and Horizontal Alliances. The two camps fixated on whether the remaining six states should form a grand coalition to oppose the dominant Qin State together, or whether states should align with Qin to protect their own interests in light of its manifest superiority. Diplomats from this school roved state to state, persuading and dealmaking, to advance their preferred side of the debate.
Calling it a school isn’t quite accurate, as the two sides were inherently opposed, and maybe it was more a milieu or a vibe. Calling it a school of alliances isn’t exactly right either. Maybe a better name would be the School of Work Together or Kill Yourself.
The anti-Qin Vertical was a survival strategy for Qin’s single-minded pursuit of universal rule, but every attempt at an alliance was doomed by fractious infighting, misaligned incentives, and Qin interference. The pro-Qin Horizontal was explicitly a Qin tactic to interfere with the formation of a vertical alliance so that Qin could extinguish each state in isolation.
It took a long time to go from the Spring and Autumn’s chariot gallantry and stunting on foes by deliberately sparing them, to Qin burying 400,000 Zhao soldiers alive to prevent future trouble. But Carney’s speech at Davos, while premature, makes him today’s foremost disciple of the Vertical Alliance.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works.
Carney opens with a striking analogy, comparing adherence to the International System to Havel’s greengrocer, who praises Soviet Communism to save his own hide, and thus contributes to its continued brutality through the inertia of unchallenged consensus. Carney envisions a future where the Great Powers, namely USA and China, function semi-autarkically and prioritize naked self-interest. Retreating from globalized markets and global supply chains, they would internalize as many of the essentials—food, fuel, raw materials, finished goods, and capital—into their own borders as possible. Whatever they still need from other countries would be secured through coercion, and they would wield the International System purely as a cudgel to advance their own goals as they compete with each other.
Following the principle of studied ambiguity, Carney is unsparing in his criticism of the USA without naming it directly. He blames the Great Powers in abstract for using “tariffs as leverage,” “financial infrastructure as coercion,” and “supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”11 His biggest applause line is that Canada “[stands] firmly with Greenland and Denmark [and their] right to determine Greenland’s future,” and he notes that Canada’s “geography and [alliances]” no longer guarantee “prosperity and security.”
He concedes Great Powers may well be able to “go it alone,” having “the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms.” But he warns the lesser powers do not. If they follow the same path, and erect a “world of fortresses,” they will only impoverish themselves while losing all ability to resist domination. To this end, Carney presents, not exactly a plan, but the concept of a plan:
When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favor or to combine to create a third path with impact.
He isn’t entirely imagining a continuance of an International System sans the Great Powers; when he talks specifics, he mentions ad hoc coalitions focused on particular issues, and seems to suggest the web of those coalitions in aggregate may offer leverage for the lesser powers to engage in collective bargaining. Carney’s concept is not so different from the original intent of the Non-Aligned Movement, though articulated not from the position of the once-colonized, but the perhaps-to-be instead. The Vertical Alliance analogy may again be apt in that without a clear leader or clear strategy, there is little to prevent defection from the bloc and eventual subordination. But Carney does make clear his view of the shape of things: the USA is going their own way.
Since the GWOT, the USA has begun to apply a Monroe Doctrine-style privilege of unilateral military intervention across the entire globe. The Covid supply shocks and the USA-China trade war shattered confidence in unfettered global free trade, and financial sanctions have expanded from a means of punishing criminality to a more conventional tool of economic warfare. Chip controls and rare earth restrictions are just another step on this path, from an open world with a common ruleset, to a gated one where the Great Powers use their might to extract compliance from those without the ability to say no.
Aside from aspirational hopes of an International System after the USA, Carney’s speech has a more pragmatic thrust: justifying a closer relationship with China. Sino-Canadian relations have been more or less on ice since the 2018 arrest of Huawei’s CFO at the USA’s behest. In 2024, Canada imposed similar tariffs to the USA on Chinese EVs, plausibly to improve their position in the 2026 USMCA renegotiation, and at one point floated mirroring USA vehicle software controls that ban Chinese cars entirely.
A week before Davos, Carney visited Beijing to reverse course. In his view, China and the USA are now driven by fundamentally the same ethos—that is, advantage-seeking—and for this reason, functioning as a de facto American satellite has flipped from a unique boon to an existential threat. As Carney says, “This is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price.”
The issue is particularly salient for Carney, given the stance the present US administration has taken, albeit with varying levels of jocularity, toward the annexation of Canada. Things need not go that far: his fear is that lesser powers will be forced into discrete spheres of influence, dominated by their respective sovereigns. And what he hopes for—perhaps like the Vertical Alliance, naively—is for them to coordinate to present a united front and preserve their independence.
Replacing the International System with distinct spheres of influence, with the USA at the center of a united Western world, is the opposite hope laid out in Munich by Rubio:
Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past. And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.
Rubio, like Carney, never explicitly states exactly what it is he’s after. But his meaning is clear in the structure of his argument, the framing he chooses, and what he leaves out.12 It becomes especially clear when compared to the ultimate source of his specific points.
While Carney presents the International System as a polite fiction benefiting the Great Powers while accommodating the lesser, now abused to the point of breaking, Rubio considers it “a foolish idea that ignored both human nature [and] the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.” In his telling, the System is not a tool of US policy, but an independent entity which the various states ceded power to out of naivete and altruism, and the one true sovereign of the globe. Free trade, international cooperation, and global peace let the USA be robbed, allowed Europe to become decadent, and served as a cloak for the enemies of the West to prepare to cast it into the abyss.
Much of his speech is a fluffy ode to the shared culture, history, religion, and blood of the European nations with the founding stock of the Americas, along with an insistence that Europe absolve itself of past sins to move forward into the future. He asserts the distinctiveness and superiority of Western culture and says this cultural bond means, regardless of economic interests or geostrategic concerns, Europe must stand with the USA. To this end, he states the USA and Europe “can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations,” though he hedges that instead of abolishing it, the International System may just be “reformed.” But it means the same thing: what he wants is a unified Western sphere standing against the rest of the world.
Rubio also pays all due homage to Trump, and presents Trump’s tariffs and threats of war as tough love in light of this deep historic bond. But I suspect one implied message of Rubio’s speech is this is how Rubio would do foreign relations so please try and hold out until he’s in charge.
Rubio consistently refers to the US-Europe relationship as an alliance of equals. But this dresses up something altogether different.
As he says:
We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.
What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. [The] alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear. [...] Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.
But Rubio’s overall message, burnished with skillful prose, in fact follows directly from language in the 2025 National Security Strategy section “Promoting European Greatness.”
The NSS, like Rubio, finds itself “sentimentally attached to the European continent.” But it is also quite candid in stating Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” due to its own, domestic, policies. To this end, the NSS suggests “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and “[encouraging America’s] political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit.” “The growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”
State sovereignty over internal affairs is one of the hallmarks of the International System, caveated in the postwar to permit intervention to prevent genocide, safeguard human rights, and ensure self-determination of peoples. It was usually under these auspices that the USA meddled in elections and conducted influence operations, among other things, to produce friendly democracies and compliant dictatorships to man the walls against Soviet Communism. What the NSS proposes, and what Rubio reframes as hopeful aspiration, is for the USA to do likewise in Europe.
Rubio’s speech cites military spending, climate policy, immigration, trade partners, and participation in international organizations—aside from guidelines on how Europeans ought to feel about themselves and their history—as the many points on which Europe falls short. The NSS presents most of the same, but calls them national security objectives vital to the USA’s strategic interests.
The bulk of Rubio’s speech is a romantic history of the shared heritage of the USA and Europe, to buttress the argument that this common heritage, rather than any momentary strategic concern, is the basis of the transatlantic partnership. The NSS states quite clearly that in a few decades “certain NATO members [may] become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” “Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable.”
The language on Europe contrasts markedly with the Middle East section of the same document, which proposes “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without.”
This is not a reaffirmation of the universalist International System, and it is not a proposal of sovereign independent alliance. The fundamental logic of the sphere of influence is that internal affairs of junior partners are within the purview of the overlord, while outsiders are left to do as they please, to free up goodwill for disinterested dealmaking. It is Rubio’s hope, and validation of Carney’s fear, that internationalism is now over, and the USA intends to helm a Western sphere, whether the West likes it or not.
But what is the USA anyway. A bunch of people making decisions, and who knows who those people will be in a few years. These are the views of Mark Carney and Marco Rubio, but there are several men with more power than them, and countless who may have it instead of them in the future. And there are vast systems underneath and around them which have different stances and different interests, and complex systems take a long time to unwind. Moreover, these are their hopes, and their pitches, not their master plans, disinterested prognostications, or heaven-sent prophecies.
They’re mostly talking their book. But if you’re not talking your book, what are you even talking about?
No administration ever thinks in lockstep, and Second Trump is more factionalized than most. After a year of seeing it operate, it seems clear we are in an interregnum, not a rupture. Trump is a brilliant rhetorician, though more in the mold of Barnum than Burke, and can be a cunning tactician, but he does not have a strategy. I doubt he will anoint one of his ministers as designated successor and inheritor to his ideological project, because he doesn’t have one. He likes that his subordinates fight because it makes them easier to manage, and because it amuses him. Trump makes a lot of sense, and is hard not to empathize with, when seen as a man responding to things as they come up and just having a good time.
No one knows what America First means in the 21st century. It will be determined after Trump is gone by those who understand the power vacuum he leaves behind and seek to fill it. It could mean coopting the International System to preserve global hegemony, secure advantage, and put the screws to those who would resist. It could mean a cultural empire, building a coherent bloc of Western nations, with tighter American control, but genuine, albeit paternalistic, affection for its junior partners. Or it could mean partial retreat from global affairs, rebuilding the homeland and bolstering ownership of the hemisphere, a perennial American reaction to the frustrations of dealing with all that’s Over There.13 There are figures in the regime who represent each of these trajectories.
The International System is here to stay, at least for now. It’s too useful, too baroque, and too lindy to vanish based on a couple speeches, a whiff of tariffs, and a few invasions. When it goes, it will go by the will of a hegemon who seeks single-mindedly to destroy it, or by a cascading series of crises that leave it functioning in theory long after it has ceased to in practice. The Zhou king yet lives. Wan sui.
But he won’t live forever. I put so much focus on Carney’s and Rubio’s speeches in part because they both present positive visions of what a successful transition out of the International System could look like. But both of these visions are from the past. Carney wants to make liberal internationalism work in defiance of the hegemon, and Rubio desires to scale romantic nationalism to the level of the civilization. Another turn of the wheel, if it pushes back the end of our Spring and Autumn, should not necessarily be disparaged. Far better than to tear down the rotting timbers of the house we’ve built while we’re still inside it.
But the essential problems run down into the states themselves. The International System is at the very earliest, possibly abortive, stage of the same process that produced unitary states out of loose confederations, hierarchical kingdoms out of local potentates, and cohesive tribes out of adjacent clans. Its scope may be wider, its makeup more heterogeneous, and its power far less, being suborned as it is to its constituents, but its basic constitution is of the same kind.
The postwar settlement did not alter the bedrock of the post-Enlightenment order in response to the horrors and excesses that made such a settlement necessary. After the fire and zeal of the Long 19th, the UN and the various Western governments alike sought merely to rule more soberly, more rationally, more organized. Sensible liberalism and bureaucratic managerialism would provide safety and security, create and reallocate wealth, increase standards of living, and otherwise keep everything running as it should. The scale and reach of government increased tremendously to fulfill this mission, even as it pulled back from providing transcendent mission and shared struggle, as it once had via romantic nationalism and mass ideology. But, after centuries of state power systematically eradicating competing centers of power—which provided their own goods, and their own meaning, to secure separate loyalty—there was little left.
Triumphalism over the death of the International System is just another symptom of this problem. The feeling that, even as circumstances improve broadly across quantifiable metrics, without the qualitative, none of it is really worth anything. That loss of faith matters for more than just the emotional life because governing systems, while constructs of Law, are made of men. Clarity of mission, the shine of prestige, ability to attract talent, quotidian effectiveness, and mass obedience: all of these reinforce or erode each other reflexively.
This erosion has been ongoing for some time. The problem is so commonly recognized that pointing it out has become a cliche; even Rubio, speaking at a national security conference, takes it as fact and makes it the cornerstone of his speech. This, in itself, gives hope for the future, because the sooner we can agree the old models cannot be salvaged, the sooner we can stop trying to repair the damage and instead look for new solutions. And they need not come from the halls of power.
The dream of the internet as a vehicle for connection and thought did not fail, although it did fail the masses. But in every important city on Earth, there are people steeped in online culture, experimenting with new ideas about community, spirituality, and meaning, and they are taking those ideas offline. This is a preview of our Hundred Schools of Thought, which will grow and proliferate over the decades, and whose ideas will spread to every part of society.
Society is the human collective we are embedded in from which we draw succor, which does not necessarily correspond to government or to the nation. Whether the answer comes from new turns in political philosophy which remake the states and eventually a new international state-system, or from entirely different forms that resemble the corporation, the guild, the fraternal organization or hermetic order, or something yet to be imagined, there is always a way forward, and people are trying.
As Alasdair MacIntyre writes:
A crucial turning point in [Late Antiquity] occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.
Let’s hope it happens before the Warring States.
For more on the geneology of the nation-state, the global order, and potential directions for international society:
I think this is a more pleasant and ideologically neutral term for The Thing than the various others. Is it liberal? Is it rules-based? Is it orderly? I dunno, that’s like, your opinion man. But it’s definitely international, and it’s very arguably a system. I also find it kind of funny how it sounds like the Continental System.
A lot of people’s memory of Iraq is colored by liberal anti-war arguments prior to the invasion followed by the dramatic failure of the occupation vindicating those arguments in spirit. It is however true that Bush II attempted to fit the war within the framework of international institutions. In the cold light of history, the WMD angle was extremely complicated, not easy to blame on any particular person or organization, and much more likely mistaken than malevolent. Mostly it was confirmation bias, intra-regime infighting, real evidence found in the Gulf War, and ambiguity cultivated by Saddam himself to keep the fear factor alive despite dismantling everything after that war. But they presented at the UN and got one resolution voted up unanimously. When France indicated they’d veto the second, the American side argued they proceeded under the authority of the first, and made a big to-do of the “coalition of the willing.” There were many individuals within the regime who had personal reasons to pursue war, and many who profited from it after the fact. But Bush II did try to justify the war under accepted protocols, which is very different from flagrantly spurning them: the first acknowledges legitimacy, the second repudiates it.
This post was substantially finished before the start of the present Iran war. I’m reminded of Brigadier Pudding’s Things that Can Happen in European Politics.
See Maran “Against the Currents of History” (2016) on the reconstruction of Tiryns in the 12th century BC. I love this one because it wasn’t just “they built on and inhabited the same site” it was “they systematically replicated important aspects of the previous palace’s layout and excavated artifacts from the ruins to display as symbols of prestige and continuity.” The resurgence, of course, was brief.
This is unrelated to the question of whether China will or will not invade Taiwan. One China is partly a philosophical/cultural statement, and partly a way to preserve advantage and prevent salami slicing. But part of it is so if they do make a move, they can try and argue it’s a domestic affair and fully within the bounds of the postwar consensus so let’s all carry on as before. The international order is good for China because it lets them trade freely and they don’t need to defend shipping lanes. A more territorially ambitious or avowedly militaristic ruler may feel differently, but Xi is farming economy and research points and extremely averse to anything disrupting the status quo.
In 2019 I wrote, “dynamism is exciting but dangerous, order is comfortable yet sterile. show me a period beginning with ‘pax’ and I will show you stagnation!” Despite my tut-tutting, I still feel this too. But “if one forgets the Way for the sake of one’s desires, then one will be confused and unhappy” (20.138). One of the things I get from Xunzi is a corrective to my own natural chaos. And I’ve always had a predilection for advocating for vigorous order that would be good for the people but unsuitable for me. Whether I call it Hamilton and Jefferson, or superego and id, or what have you, I think I’ll always have these dueling impulses.
Maybe the order of events could be different in different societies, but I’m narrating my understanding of the Salian Franks, who I consider to be the basis of Western civilization. Aside from personal affection, I think they’re the best case study we have on the stages of social and moral development, because they enter history as illiterate barbarians practicing tribal politics and customary law, and they pick up writing long before internalizing Christian values. I’m intensely more skeptical of the stories of sages and paragons told by the great literate civilizations because they had millennia to project advanced moral perspectives back into their own prehistories.
Astute readers will note the typical historical ruler has not exactly been an exemplar of moral virtue. I mean, we’re all human. Saints are rare, but also rare is the ruler who is completely unconstrained by moral reasoning, and all modern examples arise either in hellish societies reduced to base survival, or from alternative totalizing frameworks which provide moralistic justifications for actions that conventional morality deems evil. And many more rulers are concerned about the opinions of those around them, or their legacy and the judgment of history, all of which are determined by other people who internalized moral reasoning. This is a very, very different reality from early Frankish Gaul, or the Bronze Age Levant, or other such societies where “he invaded their territory, burned their cities, defiled their women, and slaughtered their population to the last” was unalloyed praise.
Specifically the form of republicanism envisioned by the immediate predecessors to the American and French Revolutions. Earlier republics had similar concepts, defined differently; the state was responsible to the governed and obliged to adhere to rights, but “the governed” may have been, say, members of certain guilds, and “rights” were customary rights rather than endowed by a Creator. And this in itself is not that different from the “governed” and the “rights” of the English and French nobility. All of these ideas evolved gradually through theology and politics, and the big leap of the Enlightenment was to universalize them and to reground them for a secular context.
I’d make the same point on international law as I did about republics, that it didn’t emerge out of nowhere, but that you can draw a line where it was rationalized and universalized. The first Hague Convention of 1899 laid out many of the laws of war now taken for granted, such as the ban on certain weapons, treatment of prisoners and civilians, and so on. And many of these points came directly from Lincoln’s rules of engagement for Union troops in the Civil War. But these rules were for “civilized” wars and were never intended to apply in the colonies. Likewise, self-determination was a major justification for redrawing European borders in the interwar, but allowing it in Africa or Asia was considered ridiculous until the USA and USSR forced the issue in the postwar.
The supply chains point applies equally to both, though arguably rare earths are a less threatening point of leverage for Canada than the post-NAFTA integrated auto sector and the outsourcing of Albertan oil processing to Texas. But this isn’t to say China wouldn’t lean more heavily on tariffs and finance if it were a more crucial import market or if it had financial infrastructure the world actually depended on. The rare earths controls are particularly interesting in this regard because they deliberately copy the USA’s Foreign Direct Product Rule, the primary weapon deployed to cripple China’s nascent high-end semi industry. They also copy the BIS Affiliate Rule, under which the Dutch were forced to move against Nexperia, and to which the rare earth regime was a direct response. This all speaks to Carney’s point: not that the USA is uniquely hostile, but that the Great Powers are converging to be essentially the same, which requires “applying the same standards to allies and rivals” and to no longer “criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another.”
Actually I feel like I learned a lot from watching both talks through the Q&As that followed and comparing the substance with the lines everyone clipped on Twitter. Both speeches have a few hype moments specifically intended to be shared, but otherwise come off as vague and elusive. But knowing the context they speak in, their past remarks, and so on, it’s obvious that both have very clear messages delivered directly underneath this language. Then they go to questions and use the exact same elusive speech to say nothing at all when pushed to take explicit stances on specific current events. I came away very impressed by both for their skill in using the same register to two completely different ends one right after the other.
Or it could mean a Democrat wins in 2028 and sets up one of the Trump kids to run on brand halo and anti-incumbency. I don’t know if his adult sons have the juice but Ivanka could put up Reagan numbers if she decided she wanted it. Combined with Trump’s brazen and successful monetization of office for the benefit of his estate, this would be the most fitting outcome, very alien to American politics but not uncommon in Latin American and Southeast Asian semi-democracies.
beautiful alice! thank you
I think after the actions of the UK, Spain, and others in the past week, that NATO is going to have a very different look within the next five years. Thank you for putting your thoughts down for us to consider.