This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Two bad ideas about foreign affairs have been exposed and mocked by Donald Trump’s second presidency, barely a year and a half into that chaotic wind. The two ideas are antithetical, yet feed off one another. They are legalism and its opposite, nihilism.
Legalism in the realm of foreign affairs is the conceit that Western powers can — and once did — turn the world into a regulated, legally ordered place, a “rules-based order”, imposing a benign and lawful hierarchy onto a planet hitherto driven by power untamed. It is not just a regard for the importance of rules or laws or a belief that it is generally better to behave mildly and carefully. It is a vision of historical transformation that rarely questions itself and thinks of its world view as axiomatically obvious. How could you not believe in a “rules-based order”? How could you not realise that if rules don’t govern everything, we will go back to the law of the jungle?
Notice the structure of the argument: at some uncertain and shifting moment in recent time, the species walked away from the brutal caprice of power politics and entered an era where laws prevailed, an era that the Trumpians are now destroying. Of course, before Trump, it was George W. Bush and Tony Blair who were destroying it. And before them, it was Ronald Reagan mining the Nicaraguan harbours and repudiating the International Court of Justice. If we remember the rules-based order with longing, surely it existed? Hold that thought.
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Legalism is a high-status world view, a marker of one’s belonging in a polite society of international lawyers, diplomats, civil servants and liberal commentators. It is embodied by the jurist and activist Philippe Sands, the advocate of the Chagos deal and visionary of a lawful world. Legalism encourages a certain secular moral language about the world: its champions typically shy away from words they find unsettling or even embarrassing, like “evil” or “wrong”.
Those ancient concepts they replace with a technical and procedural vocabulary. Atrocities are “genocide” (a specific legal term and higher bar), and immoral wars are “illegal.” Legalists valorise lawyers and judges. They seem to look forward to a world where lawyers and judges replace the rough men and women who practice power politics.
The era of Trump accentuates what already should have been apparent, that the notion of a “rules-based order” is absurd as an historical proposition and as a description of any world we have ever lived in. The obvious objection is that states — especially the powerful ones — are always fair-weathered about rules. Not necessarily because they are wicked, but because they are pursuing survival and their interests in a world without a transcendent sovereign arbiter to enforce or even define the rules.
Appeals to international law with regard to the most intense issues of war and peace boil down to appeals to deference to the will of ruthless great powers. Whether the UN permanent Security Council members of Russia, China, France, Britain or the United States support a military action cannot be an exhaustive test of its rightness or prudence.
Even if a good-faith state genuinely wanted to enforce rules on others, it would need to acquire power and an upper hand, and that ambition encourages selectiveness about the rules they defer to. Power in international affairs is marked not by rules-adherence, but by the privilege of exempting oneself from them, wisely or not. Recall those earnest Ivy League internationalists insisting the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was “legitimate” even if it lacked UN Security Council sanction.
Note also the about-face by Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese. In September 2025 he declared the supremacy of international statute: “If we allow any nation to imagine itself outside the rules … then the sovereignty of every nation is eroded.” In February 2026, his government supported air strikes on Iran, an action lacking any UN Security Council mandate and lying well outside the narrow bounds of self-defence as permitted under the UN Charter. Things change — except the fair-weatheredness of most states. As Robert Kagan rightly noted in his work Paradise and Power, a world where powerful nations pick and choose which laws to obey is the only world we have ever lived in.
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Visionaries of a rules-based order under Washington’s aegis like to think there was a moment somewhere in time when such a thing existed. To get there, they must avert their eyes from the coups and the unilateral nuclear tests, the torture and rendition, the opting out of courts and statutes, the wars unauthorised by the UN Permanent Security Council.
Ah, goes the objection, by and large the US obeys most rules. By and large, so do most hardened criminals. Ah, goes the objection, we don’t mean “rules” reigned supreme after all, despite the ambitious label, we just mean that there was a “sense” of rules and that this was a benign idea. So on first contact with scrutiny, “order” shrinks into “general attitude” or “vibes”.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s celebrated speech at Davos was the highest moment of the idea’s incoherence. Carney turned himself into knots to mourn the passing of an order that he acknowledged never really existed, but it was good that everyone pretended that it did, because it somehow kept us all in line. That’s the sound of laughter from peoples who, in that very same historical period, still felt the blade of large states doing what they liked.
In Guatemala, Iraq, Chile, Hong Kong, Kashmir, East Timor, Sudan, Tibet or beyond, the suggestion that the “RBO” served as a useful myth by reliably punishing or deterring aggressors might draw a wintry smile. It was not a noble lie that encouraged good behaviour, given the extent of oppressive behaviour. It was an anaesthetic that made liberal internationalists feel better, and a rhetorical test that the democracies (who set it) repeatedly flunked. Setting the bar of legitimacy around consistent rules-adherence invites scorn when, inevitably, the bar-setting regime fails to live up to it, and the cause suffers.
Not only did large states exempt themselves from rules when it suited them: in the pre-Trump era, for instance, China occupied the disputed territories it had stolen in the South China Sea, defying a ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Most states also operated not primarily out of fidelity to rules, but in pursuit of their narrower material interests. No states cut off relations or trade with China over its illegal aggrandisement.
Likewise, many states, especially outside the West’s orbit, hedged with Russia after it invaded, occupied and looted Ukraine. India, Brazil, South Africa and a host of “Global South” states traded and bargained with Moscow, discovering that their grievances about colonialism were flexible. Russia preyed on Ukraine and threatened the West but cultivated the powers beyond.
A similar story applied regarding Israel and its razing of Gaza. A similar story too when EU officials went out of their way not to denounce the attack on Venezuela too strongly. These patterns held long before January 2025. To say that the second Trump administration somehow marks the intrusion of time into a period of rule-bound global governance is wildly off the mark.
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The mythology of a rules-based order has its equal and opposite fallacy. This is nihilism, the perverse instinct that if rules do not govern the world, then a great power can do what it likes without consequence.
Those of this mind are fond of quoting the Athenians’ harsh words in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”. They invoke this line as though it ventriloquises Thucydides’ world view exactly. Now, the line in itself is basically true, if it is read properly. “Can” does not mean the strong “can” just do anything with impunity or that their power is limitless. Reckless behaviour can be self-defeating. After all, look at what happens to an overreaching, hubristic Athens in Thucydides’ history. This is not because the world is primarily a moral place. It is because the world is a pitilessly power-political place. Athens came undone not when it attacked civilians or razed cities, but when it exceeded its power and wasted its strength. Only then did its bad behaviour turn self-defeating, inviting punishment by Sparta and Persia, two remorseless competitors who committed atrocities of their own.
If Philippe Sands embodies legalism, Donald Trump’s guru Stephen Miller embodies nihilism and a regime’s intoxication with its exaggerated sense of strength. Miller had this to say in the wake of Trump’s raid on Venezuela and whilst the President was demanding that Denmark hand over Greenland: “The real world is governed by strength, force, power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Miller is wrong, not about the centrality of power to international politics in an anarchic world. Rather, he is wrong because he expects the primacy of power only to flow in one direction.
Yet a predatory hegemon, to use Stephen Walt’s description of the Trump-era superpower, now finds that its power will be gradually checked and degraded as it promiscuously picks fights, humiliates allies and extravagantly wastes scarce resources. Strength, force and power are not and have never been any one state’s monopoly. The world is wide and full of friction, and, except in the most lopsided conditions, power when it overreaches tends to generate counter-power.
Thus we have the dark spectacle of America and Israel failing, thus far, to dislodge a resilient Iranian regime despite their intensive barrage. That barrage has wasted precious and hard-won munitions, offensive and defensive, that will take time to replace, thus weakening America’s strategic flexibility in other theatres that it ranks higher than the Gulf. Operation Epic Fury has hiked oil prices. And with the President demanding that allies step in to unblock the Strait of Hormuz given Washington’s reluctance to bear the steep price of doing so, it has injured American prestige and paraded the limits of its capacity, robbing its power of the quality of latency.
More broadly, Trump’s predations have encouraged Canada into China’s arms (others are quietly following suit), as well as retaliations to his punitive tariffs. There is a carefully discrete but growing Allied distancing under way, in particular their desertion from his foolish military adventure in the Gulf.
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There is surely a saner ground on which to build our foreign policy world view. Our world cannot be a rules-based place in the absence of a Leviathan willing to enforce such rules in disinterested manner, a force that would be so powerful as to trigger resistance in the first place. Neither is it a place where the strong can get away with thinking they can just do anything, to anyone, at any time, regardless of hard consequences. We don’t have to fetishise international courts to recognise that laws generally embody honourable principles and violating them may be defensible but is a serious act only justifiable by a stern raison d’état.
We don’t have to fetishise material strength to recognise that hard power is the reserve currency of international life. The element missing from legalism, and nihilism, is the virtue of prudence, or the pursuit of practical wisdom with an eye to limits, consequences and the long term. Neither power worship nor flawed visions of juristocracy can substitute for wisdom, which must begin with the world as it is.
