Could the madness of Donald Trump revitalise the rules-based order?

The rules-based international order may yet benefit, in net terms, as countries respond to disruptive US policy. Indeed, we could see other states choosing not to double down on the existing order, instead working to reconceive and construct a transformed one.

One possible scenario is an outright collapse of multilateralism: not just of the post-1945 institutions but also of the norms, principles and values-based commitments underpinning them.

In that scenario, seeing the US approach abandon rule-based frameworks, states would dispense with the notion of a quasi-constitutional order with the United Nations Charter at its apex. They wouldn’t even bother with the usual lip-service to these features. Instead, they would reorganise relationships and postures to fit a highly transactional and pragmatic scene: a flat, decentred and open-ended sphere-of-influence situation reminiscent of imperial eras.

A second scenario would see greater, not lesser, engagement and investment by non-US actors in a new age of multilateral cooperation. This would be catalysed by a desire for predictability and co-governance to counteract the new turbulence and unilateralism coming from US policy—behaviours that now mix into those more long-standing problematic ones of actors such as China and Russia.

There is already some evidence supporting the plausibility of this second scenario.

Take the recent massive free trade agreement between the European Union and India. It hardly shows states abandoning international legal forms and forums, rather trying even harder to negotiate rule-based cooperation mechanisms. It could be read as states observing the US approach (and the spectre of a raw-power world) and deciding instead to structure their relations in legal institutionalised ways. US withdrawal from some UN forums during Trump’s first term prompted others to revitalise those bodies. Similarly, we might see galvanisation resulting in a pluralised rules-based scene: so-called variable-geometry global governance, with an assortment of issue-specific commitments and alignments.

In overall terms, this would see rules-based governance enhanced, though potentially with quite different institutions and re-calibrated norms (around, for example, how easily states can legally exit a treaty commitment).

For such a scenario to eventuate, the US approach would need to be perceived as so disruptive by enough other countries that it catalyses and sustains diverse coalitions. These might include the EU (and its leading members), India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and South Africa, as well as other so-called middle powers such as Japan, Australia and Canada.

Of course, having watched the United States effectively cloak its own interests in global governance schemes for decades, China would hardly ignore the opportunities a superpower vacuum would yield within such emerging coalitions. Moreover, commentators have yet to really absorb that we might then have a series of patchwork rules-based orders: ostensibly inter-locking, but with a spectre of fragmentation so prevalent that it becomes difficult to talk of international law as any vaguely coherent set of shared norms.

An entirely possible third scenario is continuity, wherein the current normative and institutional framework somehow muddles along. This would happen if enough key players see enough incentives to largely sustain the status quo, while the US itself selectively does so. Some institutions and forums fall away—reform here, funding shifts there—but the architectures, artefacts and assumptions of the post-1945 order largely endure.

For Australia, one assumption about that order was that the US would always champion it both in word and deed. Given the US’s current approach, Australia may have to reconsider its philosophy and posture. Such a strategically isolated, trade-dependent middle power is deeply reliant on a world governed by widely ratified rules. It shudders at the idea of a world governed only by power, pragmatism and unenforceable promises of protection.

The term rules-based order is something of a euphemism—its content is quite subjective. Australian discourse tends to roll out the term as if one might uphold the system simply by reiterating how important it is. Prevailing debate perhaps overlooks the fact that while Australia’s instinct and interest is certainly in a principled rules-based order, it is not necessarily the case that it must be the comforting, familiar, US-underwritten, post-1945 one. Australian nostalgia for a revived 1990s multilateralism might preclude opportunities to better shape whatever other system or systems might emerge.

Canberra might need a clearer position on all this by March, when Canada’s prime minister visits to explore how like-minded middle powers can either shore up the existing order or help forge a distinctly different one—or ones.

This article was published by The Strategist.