When the phrase “rules-based order” is invoked, it is intended to describe the organization of the international system since World War II, a system marked by the presence of international institutions such as the United Nations that seek to organize relations between states enough to at the very least avoid another world war. But invoking the phrase can also induce eye rolls, largely because the ostensible protector of that order—the United States—is selective in supporting the rules it is ostensibly based on.
U.S. President Donald Trump would not invoke the phrase if, as his former adviser Steve Bannon once put it, you threatened to shoot him. But even his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, who was a seemingly staunch supporter of the U.S.-led order, demonstrated the hypocrisy that often accompanies use of the phrase by openly criticizing the International Criminal Court when its decisions went against U.S. interests, as in the case of the Israel-Hamas war, but praising them when U.S. interests were served, as in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hearing the phrase “rules-based order” can lead to questions about “whose rules” and “what order.” But one rule in that order appeared to hold firm over the past 80 years, if not earlier: the norm against coercive territorial acquisition. It is an idea that was expressed in both the ill-fated Covenant of the League of Nations and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Treaty, which sought to ban conquest as a legally acceptable means of state practice. While those early efforts failed, the idea lived on, eventually becoming the core provision of the United Nations Charter. Specifically, Article 2 clause 4 of the charter holds that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”