In his first year in office, Donald Trump has declared a desire to annex Canada. He has repeatedly mulled invading Greenland. He has launched strikes on Iran and Venezuela and endorsed a new Monroe Doctrine for the Americas. He has dispatched his Vice President and Secretary of Defense to excoriate Europe and cozy up to Russia. He has pivoted away from free trade and towards mercantilism and ever-shifting tariffs. According to many commentators, the rules-based order that has been the object of American foreign policy for decades is under the most serious assault in its history—an assault led by its creator. The rules-based order has guaranteed world security and prosperity, we are told, and it is the responsibility of any reasonable person to defend that order and rebuild it after Trump is gone.
None of this is true. The rules-based order is not a strategic concept that has guided American policy since 1945. The rules-based order is a recent invention that emerged during the War on Terror. The rules-based order is a fatally flawed construct that contained basic tensions that Donald Trump has merely brought to a head. If we are to forge a new global order that can stand against a new age of imperialism, we need to consign the rules-based order to the trash.
To understand why, we need to understand the actual history of the rules-based order, not the phantom histories its proponents provide. Per CSS researcher Boas Lieberherr, the concept of the rules-based order "entered official political discourse in 2008" in a speech by Australian PM Kevin Rudd; it then appeared in the Australian Defense White Paper in 2009; in 2010 American Secretary of State Hilary Clinton used it public comment, and from there it spread across the American and Western foreign policy establishments—the Google ngram below shows its rather explosive growth in this period, as well as its absolute absence from the world prior to the end of the 1990s.
As Lieberherr notes, different official documents define the rules-based order in different terms—some placing heavy weight on the United Nations, others on vaguer "evolving norms," others on American primacy. As an intellectual construct, the rules-based order is something of a changeling: a child with no parents and no fixed definition.