In a rare sighting of a Matt Gurney column from The Line outside the paywall, he shares some of his thoughts after attending this year’s Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia:
For those who don’t know, the “Forum”, or HISF, is an annual gathering of military leaders, defence and intelligence experts, and others whose work relates to defence and security issues, from across NATO and the Western alliance broadly. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, it is something of a jewel in Canada’s defence crown, a chance to bring some very powerful and influential people to a gorgeous Canadian city to wine and dine them, in hopes that they don’t realize our military is a disaster that is largely incapable of contributing to our collective defence. The agenda is always divided into a mix of free time for social networking, off-the-record chats (which are generally the most interesting) and also a series of on-the-record events that can be quoted from, and which are broadcast live online.
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In our latest episode of The Line Podcast, we discussed this at length, in the context of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former defence minister. I quipped on the pod that the “rules-based international order” is a lot like the “sanctity of marriage”. It’s something we talk about as if it exists, and we’d all like it to exist, but it really doesn’t. It just doesn’t. It’s an ideal worth striving for, but not actually a thing that exists and can be counted on. The Line had also previously written about our belief that there is no rules-based international order in a prior dispatch, and then ran a counterpoint to that perspective by a reader who disagreed. It was a good counterpoint! It didn’t change my mind.
Shearer tackled the question directly, and so perfectly that I think his answer has changed my view of the situation. It hasn’t changed my opinion, but it has changed how I’m going to describe it. Here’s what Shearer said (I’ve tidied up the quote a tiny bit for clarity, but you can watch the whole thing around the 39-minute mark of this video). For context, the panel was about the so-called “CRINKS” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the challenge they are posing to the Western alliance. I’ll include Coomarasamy’s question, and then show you what Shearer said that made me go “Huh”.
Coomarasamy: Are we in a world now where we can’t really talk about a rules-based international order, but two separate, competing ones?
Shearer: That’s a big question. I think the rules-based order, frankly, turns out to have been, in hindsight, a power-based order. It was unchallenged U.S. military power that made possible the liberal order of the last 50 years. With all its benefits for so many countries. Was the U.S. always a perfect hegemon within that system? Occasionally not. It would shift its weight around, and there were consequences from that. But overall, it worked because the United States was a relatively benign hegemon.
That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I have intuitively felt in the last few years, and haven’t done a good enough job explaining. I grasped it in a big-picture intellectual sense, but I hadn’t been able to shrink it down into a single sentence like that. When Shearer said that the rules-based order was, actually, a U.S. military power-based order, it clicked in my brain. That’s the way to articulate it.
For the last few decades, we thought we were living in a rules-based-international order, and planned our lives around that. But what we were actually living in was a global order led by a relatively benign global superpower and preserved by its astonishing military power.
And that world is ending.
