The ‘rules-based order’ has failed in its mission – helping the West do whatever it wants

When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had to come up with a speech for EU ambassadors, she tried on a punk rock routine similar to the one that scored former central banker and current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney a standing ovation at Davos. But one key difference made it a tone-deaf flop: she forgot to bring her mirror.

Carney’s critical point was a confession – that it’s the people running Western democracy who are the problem. The same ones the US has been successfully cuckolding for years through their own complicity. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney said.

Queen Ursula instead tried to pawn off blame entirely on the system itself – saying that the “rules-based system that we helped to build with our allies” could no longer be counted on to defend EU interests. And that they all need to consider “whether our doctrine, our institutions, and our decision making – all designed in a postwar world of stability and multilateralism – have kept pace with the speed of change around us” or if it’s “a hindrance to our credibility as a geopolitical actor.”

Suddenly, the old rules are no good anymore because they can no longer defend the interests of this establishment amid this new war in the Middle East – but that’s mostly because the rules haven’t kept up with the level of institutional corruption that these people have been practicing.

Within hours, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said that the problem is disorder, not the rules that the EU has again selectively refused to enforce amid the latest Israeli-American Middle Eastern bombing campaign.

Ursula reacted to the backlash by paying lip service to her “unwavering commitment to the pursuit of peace… and to international law.” Great, so when can we expect the sanctions package against Israel and the US?

And what are these new rules that she has in mind, anyway? Maybe write them down so the rest of us can see them? But they’re not going to do that – because one of two things would happen. Either the rules they wrote for themselves would be so wildly detached from the expectations and reality of their own citizens and sound like the rest of the stuff that comes out of their mouths, or else they’d produce a very inspiring document full of lofty moral language that they’d immediately violate before the ink is dry.

So for now, it looks like they’re just going to keep using the failure of this “rules-based order” as a talking point that does all the heavy lifting in explaining away their own ineptitudes and inaction amid the current global chaos.

Such a big mystery how they got to this point. Gas prices way up, markets down – but blame the international law that you refuse to follow or enforce in any meaningful way. Apparently the rulebook is the problem, not the people treating it as optional reading.

This so-called rules-based order really just means the international law and treaties created after the Second World War that were supposed to prevent another global conflict from popping off. And Western leaders have spent the last few months talking about how all of a sudden the system is no good. Which raises an obvious question: Why did it supposedly work for decades but now it’s “broken”? Here’s a thought – maybe it’s because the people running the system these days are doing whatever they want and not actually following the rules. Feels less like a design flaw here and more like a compliance issue.

These folks have international law written in black and white right in front of them and instead of applying it straightforwardly to the unprovoked US-Israeli bombing of Iran, for example, the response becomes: “Hmm, how can I suck up to the aggressor and avoid condemning them, because we need their cooperation on something else?” Or: “How can I make this situation in Iran somehow about me and extract something out of it for my shady interests?” Or better yet: “Is there a way to leverage this tragedy to get people to empty their wallets so I can spend my way out of looking totally incompetent on a whole bunch of other stuff?”

The average citizen is fed up with war and inflation and the EU is like: “Well, that sucks, but what can you do?” Shrug. “We live in a reality where Russia violates peace, China disrupts trades, and the US challenges the international rules-based order,” European Council President Antonio Costa said recently. Like they’re innocent put-upon bystanders and not the architects of the misery foisted upon their own citizens as a result of their own collusion. It’s become painfully obvious that they never had any intention of following any rules or script – beyond whatever charade that Washington wants to stage from one minute to another. It’s only when Trump showed up that blaming the rule book became a convenient excuse.

Israel’s envoy to the EU has also said that international law doesn’t fit modern threats. How convenient for him, since Israel has been doing a lot of hands-on research in that area lately. Know what would make modern threats fit the law? If the EU actually insisted on applying the law to Israel and Washington. Funny how the enforcement part is always where enthusiasm selectively runs out.

Can’t expect a backbone to grow overnight, though. But hey, baby steps. Step one apparently involves going into the back room and smacking little Zelya’s (aka Vladimir Zelensky’s) backside for playing games with the tap of the EU’s oil supply running across Ukraine from Russia and into landlocked Hungary and Slovakia. After pretending like they’re too busy watching their favorite soap opera in the next room, EU brass are finally like, “Come on man, knock it off.” That might work. Assuming that he’s not holding out for another addition to the national collection of golden toilets. Step two is staying out of the Strait of Hormuz when Trump commands them to help clean up the mess he made. They’re also starting to more openly long for the days of cheap nuclear energy, with Queen Ursula now calling that breakup a strategic mistake.

Look, Ursula, whatever you need to tell yourself to make pragmatic reality sound like a bold new vision instead of the discreet burial of failed ideological experiments is totally fine. Just – if you could hurry it up a little please, that’d be great.