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Notes -
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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