Three Cheers for the Collapsing ‘Rules Based’ Global Order |
Foreign Policy > Global Politics
Three Cheers for the Collapsing ‘Rules Based’ Global Order
There exists a growing mismatch between the original design of the “rules based” order and the evolving realities of modern conflict.
Kim Ezra Shienbaum | April 29, 2026
On February 28, 2026, the world awoke to something many had long insisted could never happen. But it had. Epic Fury and Lion’s Roar were shots across the bow of the almost 80-year-old “rules based” order.
Together Trump and Israel had launched a direct strike on Iran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead. Much of his inner circle was gone with him. No United Nations resolution had authorized the attack. No effort had even been made to secure one. Even the U.S. Congress had not been informed.
The postwar “rules-based international order” invoked for decades had simply been ignored.
Since its post-World War II inception, western leaders insisted that this order was the indispensable framework of global stability: rules, institutions, procedures, legitimacy. Yet when the moment came, those same rules proved optional -- discarded not after debate, but quickly and unceremoniously. Even its most ardent defenders now seemed to concede its weaknesses. As the crisis unfolded, the European Commission president lamented that the system was being eroded by a “league of authoritarians” before adding a striking admission: it could no longer be relied upon as the sole means of defending Western interests.
Others had already reached that conclusion. Donald Trump, fresh from his own precedent-shattering intervention in Venezuela, had long treated the “rules-based order” less as a constraint than as an inconvenience. Israel, facing existential threats, had spent years undergoing heightened scrutiny.
What happened on February 28 did not destroy the tottering rules-based order. It merely revealed what it had already become: a system with rules invoked selectively, enforced unevenly, and defended most loudly by those who benefited from its........