The Law of the Jungle

The façade that once legitimised empire has collapsed. What remains is power without apology.

The liberal rules-based order is dead. With his invasion of Venezuela, his threats to Greenland, and his trade war, Trump has dealt the final blow to the idea of a global ‘community’ of states, each agreeing to abide by a common set of rules based on respect for free trade, human rights, and sovereignty.

Of course, the liberal rules-based order was pure ideology, designed to lend legitimacy to a global economy based on imperialism. This ideology was already crumbling when Trump came to power, leaving little more than a hollow façade in its place. The rules never constrained the behaviour of superpowers like the United States, even as they were applied forcefully to weaker states. But even façades serve a function — otherwise there would be little point in erecting them in the first place.

Liberal Imperialism

Much fun has been poked at the idea of the liberal rules-based order. Its alleged rules have been flouted so often, and so blatantly, by so many of the states tasked with upholding it that defending it seems fatuous. Nevertheless, this system has been critical to the functioning of global capitalism — and its collapse will have significant consequences.

The rules of the liberal rules-based order were never strictly binding. But because they commanded a degree of common ideological support, they could still shape states’ behaviour. Most of the time, you don’t obey the law because you’re worried about getting caught. You obey the law because ‘it’s the law’. If the political system under which you live commands legitimacy, its laws will be obeyed. If it doesn’t, they’ll be disobeyed – regardless of the punishment for doing so.

For a period, liberal ideology was so dominant, and so widely accepted, that the rules of that system carried some legitimacy. They provided a common frame of reference for what counted as acceptable behaviour. Invading a country to spread democracy? That’s acceptable. Invading a country to access its resources? Not acceptable*.

In practice, these rules influenced the framing and interpretation of states’ behaviour more than that behaviour itself. Powerful states could still largely do whatever they wanted, but they had to refer to the commonly accepted rules to legitimise their actions — as when Blair and Bush concocted evidence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The need to come up with a good excuse did, of course, have real world consequences. When Blair and Bush’s lies were exposed, a real political crisis ensued. And on more than one occasion, poor countries successfully managed to leverage the rules of the system to secure meaningful – if limited – gains.

Might makes Right

The fact that the rules sometimes worked is what gave the system a degree of legitimacy. The belief that the world system functioned according to commonly accepted rules helped to make it appear fair. It also allowed liberals to dismiss critics of globalisation who argued that the system was simply imperialism by another name. Sure, the system might not be perfect, but it was better than nothing – better than total anarchy.

But this partial constraint on the power of those at the top was enough to earn the system the ire of many on the right. Hardcore conservatives have long believed that might makes right — that the weak should obey the strong. They found the idea that the actions of the powerful could be constrained, even symbolically, by the demands of the weak deeply offensive — both at the national and international levels.

For much of the twentieth century, these voices remained marginal. Then came the financial crisis, the exhaustion of the neoliberal growth model, and the rise of China. Without cheap credit and the illusion of bubble-driven prosperity, the structural unemployment and rising inequality produced by neoliberal globalisation in the west became increasingly visible. The new right capitalised on this upheaval with remarkable success, as their ‘might makes right’ philosophy had a unique appeal to a dislocated working class.

But this ideology also provided a framework for reshaping international politics. Dismantling the liberal rules-based order would allow for the reassertion of American hegemony after what conservatives viewed as decades of declining US power. A US president would no longer need to justify a decision to invade another country — nor risk humiliation when that justification was exposed as a lie.

Trumpism represents the culmination of this long-term project to destroy the liberal rules-based order. Trump will invade whoever he wants to invade, tariff whoever he wants to tariff, and abduct whoever he wants to abduct, whenever he thinks he can get away with it. His actions are to be respected not because they are justified, but because he is strong. Such is the law of the jungle.

Naked Imperialism

Trump’s reorganisation of the world system might seem like a victory for the right, but it is better understood as a symptom of long-term decline. The purpose of the liberal rules-based order was never really to constrain the actions of the United States. Its primary function was, as outlined above, to provide legitimacy to a world system structured around American imperialism.

As I outlined in this piece, the power of this ideology was already waning when Trump came to power. Now, he has torn down the façade, leaving us with little choice but to confront the reality of naked imperialism. This matters because it forces us to acknowledge that the world we inhabit is fundamentally unfair. The economy, politics, and international affairs do not operate according to shared rules and norms; they operate through the domination of the weak by the strong.

This shift would not pose such a problem for US imperialism if American power were unassailable. But it isn’t. Emerging powers are increasingly capable of challenging US dominance across large parts of the world — and Trump has destroyed the ideological framework that once helped to justify suppressing those challenges.

Trump can no longer plausibly claim that China is an evil empire on the grounds that it violates sovereignty or represses its population. Those claims ring hollow when stripped of the liberal values that once underpinned them. In a world where legitimacy no longer rests on democracy, freedom, or human rights — because these have been exposed as ideological justifications for empire — the only remaining principle is power itself.

In this sense, Trump may have helped to clear the path for the next hegemon. The liberal rules-based order has not been overthrown by an external enemy — which might have allowed it to retain some legitimacy — but has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The international system is an increasingly lawless place, so there is ample space for new visions of what should come next.

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* There’s a lot more to be said on how these rules were formed, and which ideologies and movements influenced them – from independence movements championing decolonial narratives; to western states pushing liberal ideology; to business leaders championing the ‘rights’ of big corporations. If you’re interested, check out books like Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire, or Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists.