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Why shouldn’t I be able to vote based on rhetoric from Russian bots? What if they make better arguments than the domestic media? Why is my vote illegitimate because I’ve internalized a truth that came from a source you don’t like?
“Sounds like someone controlled by an oligarch to me…” (sarcasm)
But seriously, this is a major shift in Cthulhu swimming leftwards and making people go insane. If every right-wing win is de facto evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed.
Did you mean to say ipso facto (by itself/automatically)? De facto is used more like "essentially" or "more or less", which, while it works here, seems a bit unidiomatic.
Why? Right-wing movements in many places have come to oppose American globalist hegemony recently, and "rules-based world order" has always been politics speak for "obey the American globalist hegemony". If the people internalise what you said and consider anti-$thing wins to be tantamount to [enemy action] and pro-$thing wins to be tantamount to [cluster of positive affect], this seems pretty good for $thing.
I was speaking in a right-wing dialect, with brevity, and with the contrast between the two definitions above in mind. You're right that I was not clear because de facto is probably the worse usage here. I'll restate it: "If every right-wing win is assumed to be evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is declared a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed because WWIII is inevitable."
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...?
The phrase 'rules-based international order' grew in prominence in international affairs literature as a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq, where it was a form of criticism of the US (for not relying on UN Security Council approval). It was later adopted by the Obama administration during the American-European post-Bush reconciliation to distinguish itself from its predecessors, and later was repurposed against Obama's successor as a condemnation of Trump's willingness to break with various institutions, including the WTO, the Paris Climate Accords, and the JPCOA.
In so much that 'rules-based order' is used in regards to Americans, it has consistently been an anti-hegemonist critique of the Americans, not a hegemonist call to obedience to the Americans.
There's no visible spike in ngrams around 2003; in fact it starts growing around 2000 and grinds to a halt around 2006. You could maybe argue that the later growth was due to the Obama administration's use against Bush as you posit, though it seems that the graph starts growing a bit late for that. A search for opinions on its usage in the wild before Russia/Ukraine mostly brings up references to Australia using it with respect to China (example). I also tried to search for the phrase filtering for things up to 1/1/2014, and the top results that were dated correctly are about the ICC ("only for Africa and thugs like Putin"), a paper that flat out only has the phrase "American liberal hegemonic order" in its non-paywalled part, and a Clinton speech referring to the US as the cornerstone of "rules-based international order".
I think the problem is not so much how the term "rules-based international order" is used with respect to the US, but that the term is basically not used with respect to the US at all, except by a few low-agreeableness cranks who can't read the room. German newspapers can barely publish a single article about what Russia or China do in their neighbourhood without referring to the "rules-based order" or adjacent terminology such as "war of aggression" ("Angriffskrieg", a German favourite), but either of those things is hardly ever mentioned when discussion the wars of the US or Israel at all. The other "rules" are evidently also only for Africa and thugs like Putin.
If someone creates a set of rules for you to follow (and the ones that created them were American institutions, which many of these articles are not shy to brag about) but does not need to follow the rules themselves, to follow the rules is to accept their sovereignty over you.
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One way to put this is that it's an example of the classic political debate "must the King obey the law?" In a "rules-based world order", the hegemon can still make the law, but they also have to obey it. This is, of course, good for the nobility (State Department, UN, Davoisie, etc.) and bad for a maverick King (Bush, Trump, etc., though one was too hawkish and one is too dovish), so one's position on the issue tends to be defined by who you support in that power struggle. Very few people in high places want a revolution that breaks both the Crown and the Court, but that sort of multipolarity is popular with outsider critics.
The issue with this metaphor is that the nature of international law is that it quite often isn't.
As a project, international law theorists spent a good part of the 90s/early 2000s trying to build / impose an expectation of abiding by certain premise that others hadn't agreed to, and then using the non-compliance as a lever against those who had never consented, even though on a legal level international law rests on the consent of the states who choose to take part in elements of it. Sometimes states are agreeing to things they don't consider an objection at the time- see UN charter law- and sometimes violation of laws they have agreed to is a worthy tool- see nuclear non-proliferation violations- but in other cases international laws are used by select in-group members as a diplomatic cudgel against those who never consented to them in the first place.
The Rules-Based-Order rhetoric regularly invokes the later category, which tends to be more obvious whenever international law institutions like the International Criminal Court are invoked against non-members. It's not that the law was made but its makers refuse to follow it- it's that laws are made by and for some groups who then go on to demand that others must obey, or that customs that aren't common laws are insisted as universally applying as a matter of law.
So in this metaphor, this is more akin to the nobility of one Kingdom, let's call it Aporue, writing laws to govern the conduct the kings of Acirfa and Acirema. Some of these laws even give them the right to try and imprison the kings and nobles of these distant lands. If those other Kingdoms agree to adopt such laws... great! Fine and dandy, assuming all other things are fair. But if they don't, and Aporue tries to impose them regardless, this is less a political debate about the King following their own laws and more an attempt at a political imposition against the laws of the other Kingdoms.
That actually fits even better into a feudal metaphor - a potpourri of overlapping contracts and privileges, such that the Bishop of Israel cannot be tried in a lay court, that the Free City of Moldova may have elections free from the meddling of the Duke of Russia, that the Emperor is obliged to varying yearly gifts of aid, that the Peace of God obtains here and here, but not here, and so on. Rule over a feudal realm and over a world-system looks pretty similar, because they both come out of attempts to realistically and multilaterally negotiate in a state of anarchy.
Alternatively, that's an even worse feudal metaphor because that wasn't how feudalism worked, nor does or did the US rule over a world-system.
There are substantial differences between 'a complicated mess of formal hierarchical relationships' and 'not in a formal hierarchical relationship at all.'
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