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The writer is an Islamabad-based TV journalist and policy commentator. Email him at write2fp@gmail.com
A common refrain today laments the decline of the “rules-based world order”, implying that such an order once stood on firm ground. But rules require enforcement. In domestic systems, the state monopolises legitimate force. In the anarchic system of states, no comparable sovereign authority exists.
The United Nations possesses no independent coercive power. It derives its authority and agency from member states whose interests frequently collide, paralysing action. Add the veto powers, more equal than the rest, and the idea of a neutral global government begins to resemble aspiration more than structure.
Dominance, however, is real. Powerful states impose outcomes when they can, often clothed in the language of law or stability. Rules function when major powers align behind them. When they do not, enforcement dissolves.
Every time I hear the phrase “rules-based world order”, I think of May 10 last year. Before dawn I heard the explosions of Indian missiles from my study. My daughters were asleep in their rooms. My wife moved about in anxious silence. We both knew how easily a clash between nuclear-armed states can slide beyond recall. We have lived our lives. Our children have not. The thought of them inheriting a nuclear wasteland is not theoretical.
I waited for the rules-based world order to come to our rescue. It did not appear.
What mattered were the preparedness of our armed forces, our close friendship with China, and President Trump’s tweet diplomacy, which helped halt escalation at a decisive moment. I remain grateful. The rules-based order was not among those who made the difference.
If personal experience is dismissed as anecdote, history supplies sterner examples. The 2003 invasion of Iraq proceeded without clear Security Council authorisation. NATO’s intervention in Libya exceeded its mandate. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was unapologetic force. In Syria, interventions unfolded under elastic legal justifications. Power determined outcomes; legal rationales followed.
Rules do exist. Treaties are signed. Institutions meet. But rules without power are appeals, and rules backed by power reflect the interests of those who wield it. What is described as a “rules-based world order” is not a constitution standing above states. It is hierarchy expressed in procedural language.
The myth is not that rules are written. The myth is that they bind all equally, independent of power. When power converges, rules appear firm. When it fragments, they evaporate. That is not order transcending dominance. It is dominance speaking the language of order.
Power does not remain fixed in one place. If it did, the world might still be governed by Alexander’s successors. Dominance mutates, fragments, consolidates and reappears in altered form. We elevate certain moments as normative and dismiss others as deviations. That is where storytelling enters.
When the question is naked power, emperors rarely appear unclothed. They are draped in institutions, wrapped in charters, adorned with curated procedures. The fabric is called law, consensus, legitimacy. But the tailoring does not change the body beneath. What passes for order is often the emperor’s new clothes.
With cultural power at your command, and an army of historians, intellectuals, artists and storytellers aligned with you, even preference can be elevated into principle. Narratives harden into norms. What serves power is recast as what sustains order.
The restructuring of dominance we witness today is not novel. What is novel is the discomfort of those formed in the previous configuration of power, whose narratives once defined legitimacy and who still retain influence. Their alarm does not invalidate the shift. Power realigns; legitimacy follows.
At such junctures, appeals to emotion multiply. You are told the world will unravel if the old order, conveniently aligned with certain interests, is not preserved. What you are not asked is whether that order preserved yours.
Strip Hegel’s “cunning of reason” of its historicist arc and faith in progression, and what remains is far less elevated. Not the unfolding of Spirit, but calculated self-preservation. Emotive language deployed to disguise strategic interest. That is what is on display here.
In recent days, resuscitated stories about Jeffrey Epstein have resurfaced. The details are disturbing, and the media ensures attention remains fixed on the lurid elements. Spectacle is a diversion. When scandal dominates, deeper questions about networks of influence recede.
To believe Epstein’s proximity to wealth and authority was explained solely by depravity, or alternatively by espionage intrigue, simplifies what was clearly a dense ecosystem of elites. Powerful individuals gather because proximity to power consolidates influence.
Scandal satisfies outrage. It does not explain structural cohesion. The urgent question is not the pathology of one man, but the architecture that allowed access and durability. That architecture is about power preserving itself.
Abuse of children is not confined to a single scandal or geography. It occurs in private homes and public institutions. For two years, children in Gaza have lived under bombardment. In the United Kingdom, grooming gang cases have been an embarrassment and a source of shame for my diaspora and the system there. In India, Dalit children endure structural abuse that rarely commands sustained outrage.
The question is not whether these horrors are comparable. Each stands on its own moral weight. The question is why some become global obsessions while others fade into background noise.
Who shapes the hierarchy of outrage? The storyteller or your own observation? Selective amplification preserves the image of moral consistency without confronting the full distribution of suffering. And it spares you the uncomfortable question: where is the rules-based world order when all of this happens?
In short, beware of two assertions. First, that the old order served your interests more faithfully than whatever replaces it. Second, that the present turbulence is merely the whim of one leader or one faction. Structural shifts reflect realignments that rarely reverse themselves.
When President Biden succeeded President Trump after his first term, many expected rupture. What followed, in most strategic domains, was continuity with adjustment at the margins. Personalities change; power structures endure.
The lesson is neither comforting nor dramatic. You are on your own, as societies have always been. And if rules exist, they will be rewritten by those who command the prevailing balance of power. Order does not disappear. It is replaced.
There is no vacuum where order collapses. There is only a transfer of gravity.
