The eulogies are starting to wear thin.  The lamented passing of the rules and law-based order only makes sense to those who believed that such rules and laws existed in the first place.  How easy to forget that the spanning hegemon of each age always presumes that its laws and norms are objective universal features, putative and significant enough to be reverenced and inked for eternity.  That most irritating term “rules-based order” is more a stress on the order backed by might rather than the rules themselves, a figment of legal draughtsmanship.  Without a degree of might, there are no rules.  If there are those who refuse to abide by those rules, might will be brought to bear upon the recalcitrant and the disobedient.

This discomforting reality has either been shielded from the allies of the United States or purposely avoided.  Be it security guarantees, defence pacts, trade deals or mutual undertakings, the notion of an international order objectively existing and binding on all has been most attractive to the beneficiaries who have preferred to see less a brutish hegemon than a benign, nuclear armed caretaker.

Given the recent shocks inflicted by the Trump administration in terms of rhetoric and conduct on the very basis of international rules, politicians in allied and satellite states must reassure their voters about their feigned anger and synthetic outrage. 

Given the recent shocks inflicted by the Trump administration in terms of rhetoric and conduct on the very basis of international rules, politicians in allied and satellite states must reassure their voters about their feigned anger and synthetic outrage. 

Canada’s sense of sorrow at the demise of the international system as understood was conveyed through Prime Minister Mark Carney in his January 22 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  He reacted like one........

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