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The United States President Donald J Trump is hammering the third nail in the coffin of civilised discourse, defined by what is known as the rules-based international order. As a part of his ‘America-first’ grand strategy, Trump’s actions are not limited to the US alone.
By threatening the sovereignty of the Panama Canal or Denmark’s Greenland, for instance, Trump is effectively granting the legitimacy of international lawlessness to the second nail—the Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as part of his grand strategy.
Similarly, by breaching the World Trade Organization (WTO) norms on tariffs, he is also validating the actions of China’s President Xi Jinping’s grand strategy of world domination through the weaponisation of trade as much as of diplomacy, technology, and even citizens.
Effectively, Trump is articulating what the rest of the world has known for long: the power of the US to enforce an international rules-based order has been enfeebled. His aggressive withdrawal from it is an admission of failure. As a result, short-term national interests will overrule long-term global engagements. Ahead, each country stands alone.
By breaching the World Trade Organization (WTO) norms on tariffs, he is also validating the actions of China’s President Xi Jinping’s grand strategy of world domination through the weaponisation of trade as much as of diplomacy, technology, and even citizens.
Together, the three great powers in 2025 have been hyphenated by their common goal of exterminating the security-peace-prosperity troika that the 80-year-old rules-based international order of 1945 created, something which 193 nations had signed up for. This decagonal structure of international order has 10 arms:
- It is led by the United Nations Charter.
- It is controlled by self-imposed guardians of peace through the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), three of whose five members are engaged in this disruption of the order.
- It platforms the broader but weaker institution of the UN General Assembly—a farce that lends a façade of credibility to the UNSC.
- It poetically articulates but is practically impotent to reduce barbarity in conflicts through the Geneva Conventions. The death of innocent people has been normalised; on the other side, civilians have been weaponised.
- It oversees the much-needed but equally-debased institution of human rights protection, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another idea that has been commoditised beyond repair— is framed as a human rights issue, and it becomes clear that the institution has been debased.
- It platforms specific treaties such as the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that have been violated by China and Russia to create rogue nations such as Pakistan and North Korea, respectively. It also prevents other nations from building nuclear capabilities.
- It manages the International Court of Justice, to which neither the US, China, and Russia are signatories nor accept the court’s verdicts. These rules do not apply to rule makers.
- It created the Bretton Woods institutions in 1944 to oversee global finance, which has been institutionally captured by Europe (the International Monetary Fund) and the US (World Bank Group).
- It reimagined global trade through the WTO in 1995 to manage flows of goods and services through tariffs, which China has openly violated and the US exited from.
- It created organisations such as the World Health Organization, which China manipulated and captured, and which the US has exited from. Other organisations include the World Food Programme, the UN Development Programme, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the International Labour Organization.
Crawling between these is the creation of a highly-paid global elite that feeds off and therefore continues to abuse exchequers of the world, whose leaders ironically remain financers of these excesses and inefficiencies. This system needs a rethink and Trump is possibly the force that will teeter it over.
This complex system of what is seen to be the international rules-based order has deteriorated. Today, the rift between the entitlement of making rules and the obligation of following them has widened. As a result, the world has been cleaved into two—rule makers and rule takers.
With Japan and Germany too busy with commercials and welfare to focus on security, and France and the United Kingdom, both members of UNSC, imploding from within, the emerging 21st century power structures are shifting.
Step back, wade through the confluence of naivete and scepticism, and it becomes clear: what the world seems to have signed up for, even in hindsight, is a farce. The vocabulary of this mockery is called the rules-based international order. Its language is the so-called rules-based order; its structure, a power-driven subjugation of the many by the few. Until the rise of China from the 1980s and Russian aggression in the 2010s and onwards (Crimea in 2014, Ukraine in 2022), it was the West versus the rest. Today, with China being the largest trading partner of more than 120 countries and Russia being the largest exporter of LNG to the European Union, with China, Japan, and South Korea following closely (as of January 2025), this circus has been somewhat democratised.
The irony of the West moralising to India while simultaneously financing Russia’s gas and Putin’s war is not lost. With Japan and Germany too busy with commercials and welfare to focus on security, and France and the United Kingdom, both members of UNSC, imploding from within, the emerging 21st century power structures are shifting.
As conflicts heat up on brown and green geographies of land borders—Russia versus Ukraine may expand to Russia versus Europe; Israel versus Palestine via Hamas and Hezbollah; Iran versus Israel and the US; North Korea versus South Korea—power games of the future will be played equally on blue geographies of rivers, seas and oceans. Informally, the preludes have begun in the South China Sea, with China versus Philippines and China versus Taiwan.
The fact that the self-appointed guardians of the international rules-based order, notably the US, China, and Russia, are now indulging in its breach foreshadows the state of the century ahead. This does not even account for the multiple wars across Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.
The underlying reality of power balances has shifted towards countries such as India, and groupings that are fairer, broader, and more democratic such as G20. This swing in power balance is as much a sovereign issue as it is towards a much vaster multilateral guardianship of a US$33 trillion strong blue economy that runs on seas and oceans. Even the greatest of great powers cannot manage this landscape in solo mode.
The imperative for a true United Nations has never been more crucial for world peace than today.
Cooperation on security is key to growth. From piracy to outright breach of exclusive economic zones, the ship of prosperity needs the hull of teamwork. That hull contains new realities. The imperative for a true United Nations has never been more crucial for world peace than today. Nonetheless, this imperative needs to accommodate underlying realities.
The biggest reality is economic. In 1960, the Gross Domestic Product share of P5 (the five countries that comprise the UNSC—the US, China, the UK, France and Russia) in the world GDP was 73.1 percent; in 2023, it has fallen to 50.4 percent; marking a fall of 22.7 percentage points. In 1960, the combined GDP share of the two largest economic blocks (the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union) stood at 58.9 percent; in 2023, the two largest economic blocks (the US and the EU) comprised 43.2 percent; with a fall of 15.7 percentage points.
The GDP share of the US alone was 39.6 percent in 1960; in 2023, it dropped to 25.7 percent; a fall of 13.9 percentage points. In the same periods, China’s GDP share rose from 4.4 percent to 16.8 percent; India’s rose from 2.7 percent to 4.0 percent; the EU’s fell from 20.7 percent to 17.5 percent. Further, among trillion-dollar scale economies, the global drivers of growth have shifted eastward to India, China, and Indonesia. For any new rules-based order to come up, it must make spaces for this change.
None of that will happen in the short term though. On the contrary, there will be an accentuation of the US, China, and Russia continuing with the rule of whims. Until 20 January 2025, when Trump took charge as US President, there was some semblance of morality—China and Russia were seen to be using power to push their agendas, while the US and the EU had held the mantle of values that protected democracies.
With Trump becoming the new driver of world affairs and morphing into the ones he himself condemns, the new order is getting power-based rather than rules-based. For Trump, Xi, and Putin to find a renewed balance, all three will have to make space for the remaining two. Trump will embrace authoritarianism, Putin will have to pull the plug on expansionism, and Xi will have to give up on revisionism. The three grand strategies may be in hibernation but will be on a collision course soon enough. The not-so-grand tactics will then formally take charge.
Until 20 January 2025, when Trump took charge as US President, there was some semblance of morality—China and Russia were seen to be using power to push their agendas, while the US and the EU had held the mantle of values that protected democracies.
With the globe shifting towards each country for itself, the rest of the world will squirm silently. Continents like Europe and South America will rethink security, and tie up assurances. Countries like India, Japan, and Australia will harden their defences. Companies that sell defence equipment, physical as well as digital, will be the new stock market darlings.
A fog of mutual suspicion will descend on sovereigns. Grabbing and magnifying power will be the sole goal for despots. The democratic discourse will give way to an authoritarian grasp. The power of grand strategy will contract to use military force for economic extractions. Concepts such as ‘values’ or ‘trust’ will fall by the wayside.
As a result, the world will become far more inward-looking, trade will get restricted, and markets will turn local. This will harm every nation, the powerful and the powerless alike. The world will return to 1939, hopefully without affecting the loss of 60 million lives. In that vacuum of leaders without leadership, people drifting without a rudder and moral bankruptcy being the unifying force, there will be a rethink around building a new international rules-based world order, with new players, new power hubs, and new derivations.
The failure of the current order is neither new nor the last. The first was the Concert of Europe between 1815 and 1914; the second was the League of Nations between 1919 and 1946; and the third was the United Nations, the failure of which is staring us in the face today.
Perhaps the breakdown of the current rules-based order was written into its skewed creation. Perhaps the world didn’t evolve as it ought to have. Perhaps, power itself resents the constraints of rules. Whatever the case, the only thing left to discuss in the broader sweep of history is whether the 1945 international rules-based order was a convenience of time, a mirage of expectations, an entrapment of the weak—or simply the recycling of power.
Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at the Observer Research Foundation.
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