Careful what you wish for: A world beyond the 'rule-based order'

Many disdained the so-called 'rule-based order'. They'll hate what comes next

Many in what is now called the Global South — a catchall term for the developing world, excluding the People’s Republic of China — have multiple complaints about the so-called rule-based order that came into being after the Second World War. This, they worry, institutionalised and rendered permanent a hierarchy of nations that emerged from the colonial era. They had other concerns about it that were frequently aired — that it covered a multitude of hypocrisies on behalf of the West, that it did not centre development and it minimised the needs of poorer countries. 

Some of these voices reacted to the intentions and instincts of United States (US) President Donald Trump with poorly concealed jubilation. If nothing else, he had exposed hypocrisies that were earlier kept hidden. At worst, he might destroy a global order which was biased against the developing world. In actual fact, some argued, he was hardly different from those who came before him: After all, the senior President Bush captured Manuel Noreiga of Panama, his son invaded Iraq, and both Democratic Presidents that followed the Bushes regularly sent bombing raids into countries they deemed untrustworthy, from Sudan to Pakistan. 

There is, no doubt, a grain of truth in all these views. But not much more than that. If anything, it reveals a worldview that is defined more by reflexive opposition to the West than by a considered understanding of what benefits the South. 

It is clear, now, that President Trump is capable of doing all these things that other Presidents did — except he will do in the same week, without apology or justification, without any chance of accountability by the rest of the American state or his people, and designed in such a way that cruelty and not effectiveness is the central point of the exercise. In just the last week, his administration extracted a Latin American leader from his presidential palace to submit him to a domestic US court of doubtful neutrality; renewed and refined threats of invasion against a long-standing democratic ally, Denmark, that has sacrificed more lives per capita in recent American wars than almost any other; and withdrawn unilaterally from dozens of organisations, some of them of vital importance, that serve to underpin multilateral cooperation on issues central to Global South concerns from climate to women’s health. 

This is not what went before, and those who have sought to minimise or downplay — or even welcome — the Trump era must own up to their misjudgements. The end of traditional multilateralism will not restore an era of sovereignty. It will not expand the room to manoeuvre possessed by developing-country capitals. Instead of an era of democratised power, Mr Trump will usher in an era of conflict, hierarchy, and naked aggression. The US has seized Nicolas Maduro and might seize Greenland simply and entirely because it wants to and it can. There is no way that any of us can know in advance what it might want to seize next. 

Those nations that have been accustomed to being treated as leaders of the developing world, as regional powers of note, or as critical future partners of the US — and India is one of those that qualifies under each of these heads — face a particularly harsh awakening in this new era. A US less interested in the long-term stability of their regions is one that will never intervene on their behalf — and also one that might make sudden and unpredictable moves in defence of its supposed interests that disrupt and destabilise these countries and their neighbourhood. Yes, the US might impose fewer of its offensive values like democracy, individual rights and what not on us. But this does not seem to outweigh its potential to harm our interests when it feels able to act completely unrestrained by such values. It is not a trade that has left us better off, regardless of what we hoped. 

This is what the end of the post-War order, for which so many have been clamouring for so long, will look like: Power unrestrained, with developing countries from India to Brazil reminded of exactly what their real influence and leverage in global affairs are — very little indeed, and scarcely enough to protect their own interests.