The Country with No Clothes

Australia's strategic vision, expressed in our written policy and reaffirmed by statements from our ministers and public agencies, continuously references a global rules-based order: a system of agreed controls that disallows certain aggressive or inhumane behaviours between states. This order, it is claimed, is critical to our national wellbeing. Each White Paper since 2009 and the National Defence Strategy released last year identifies the protection of the global rules-based order as a key objective of Australia's foreign policy, citing increasing 'challenges' from aggressors as a serious impediment to our ‘continued security, stability and prosperity’.^[2] As these adversaries more boldly override international norms, with increasing territorial disputes in regions such as the South China Sea, a consistent darkening of grey-zone tactics, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, members of the government describe the rules-based order as ‘increasingly under pressure’^[3] while commentators question whether each deterioration will mark its collapse.^[4] We describe the order like a dam on the verge of bursting. This picture is counterfactual. It misrepresents the causes of the behavioural changes we are seeing in the international sphere, changes that are already mounting pressures upon the ADF and will continue to do so. ADF members need and deserve a clear and truthful strategic vision in order to prepare for and react to the profound shift our world and our region in particular is undergoing.

The rules-based order is not under threat; it demonstrably never existed. It has always been a fabrication, a means to effectuate and license normal power politics. International affairs in our current era—and in all eras before it—are comprehensible solely as an interaction of near-equal actors in an anarchic system. A shallow inspection of history shows the ‘rules’ are of much less concern to the behaviour of states, regardless of political or cultural types, than relative strength.

The current tension we are experiencing is not the result of a collapse of order, but a power shift. The global power structure is changing, as it was always destined to with the inevitable relative decline of American power, from a unipolar system in which one hegemon of singular strength is able to guarantee its desires over those of others, to one that is multipolar, with competing actors of equivalent strength vying for their own interests. The result is an increase in disputes as the upstarts attempt to assert themselves.

In order to effectively predict and prepare for this revolutionary continuation of the norm, Australians, especially those of us involved in the planning and application of foreign policy, must be made aware that the ‘order’ of the last few decades has been nothing more than obedience to threat, and that what is to come will be more of the same. Yet despite our actual actions proving that we are aware of this, in our rhetoric we continue to tout the rules-based order like Hans Christian Andersen's naked emperor flaunting his imaginary clothes. Like the emperor, if we do not confront our reality, we are liable to be irreparably embarrassed.

The Concept of a Rules-Based Order

To understand that a rules-based order is not what we have, one must understand what a rules-based order is. In the grand tradition of diplomatic language, the description provided in our core policy documents for this supposedly key element of our strategic vision is so diluted as to be essentially meaningless. In the 2016 White Paper the rules-based order was described as ‘a shared commitment by all countries to conduct their activities in accordance with agreed rules which evolve over time’.^[5] This is effective posturing, leaving what rules and which authorities constitute the order deftly unsaid so as to allow us to pick and choose which aspects of international law are relevant as is convenient to ourselves. However, as an actual functional definition, it is inadmissible.

It is first fundamentally a misnomer. An order is not as lax as a shared commitment and rules do not alter in as casual a manner as this definition implies. There is a disconnect between the phrase ‘rules-based order’ and what is being described, which appears to be a culture of acting within expressed norms. That is not an inaccurate reflection of the nature of our regional co-operation, so I would suggest changing the terminology used—a ‘norms-based culture’ rather than a ‘rules-based order’—except for the second, larger problem doing so would reveal: this definition is also disconnected with the rest of our rhetoric.

The kind of vague co-operative attitude it details could not conceivably have the effect necessary to constitute the strategic keystone we claim the order to be. It would not even be subject to the rule of law we worry is deteriorating.^[6] The order we are talking about is clearly more than a shared commitment, yet even claims of a common fidelity are difficult to swallow when one is faced with the consistent pattern of non-compliance. Declarations of an ‘order’ are inedible.

A proper rules-based order would be a collected “body of the rules, norms and institutions that govern relations among the key players in the international environment.”^[7] That is, a conglomeration of institutions and agreements that have the ability to control the behaviour of states. Without a means of control over behaviour, rules cannot be rules and an order cannot be an order. Control is not within the capacity of our current international legal system. This is not to say that international law has no influence on behaviour, it sometimes structures or affects how actors interact, but importantly it does not govern how they interact, leaving interstate affairs fundamentally anarchic.

To examine how a rules-based order should function we can examine the ones that do exist: those within the states themselves. Thomas Hobbes’ work Leviathan is the foundation for modern Western theory on the purpose and function of state control. In the etching by Abraham Bosse that adorns its cover, the sovereign, the entity with authoritative right over the actions of a state, is presented as a crowned giant composed of hundreds of humans, holding in one hand a crosier and in the other a sword. These tools symbolise the two crucial elements of state-imposed order: the supreme authority to create laws, and the physical strength to impose them against those who would disobey.

Our government is more complexly designed than the convulsive parliamentary monarchy of Hobbes’ time, yet with regard to the creation of order it functions the same. Via the pooling of wealth and power sacrificed from its subjects, the sovereign is made unchallengeably strong, almost god-like in comparison to any one of its constituents. That singular, leviathan strength is needed to overcome and restrain the diverse wills of those under its reign; it is the difference between counsel and command. Individual resistance against it is so futile it is utterly illogical, and so the behaviour of rational subjects shifts to accommodate the instruction of the sovereign. The sovereign gives its instructions clearly in law, connecting them with consequences severe enough to dissuade disobedience. This is how order is made.

It is important to note that order is not necessarily good. Sovereigns can be tyrants. In fact, those most obsessed with power and control are likely to create the most effective systems of order. An order is not identifiable by the positivity of its results, but by its ability to control the behaviour of actors within it.

Our international legal system can create rules but it has not been provided with the power to enforce them, and is therefore incapable of maintaining or being an order. Sanctions can terrorise tinpot dictators and proclamations can cause momentary embarrassment, but to achieve actual control the system would need to have some ability to either incentivise or disincentivise an action in excess of the desire an actor has to conduct that action. To do so, it would need to have a strength independent of and substantially in excess of its most powerful subjects. Without a means to force compliance, the rules of our international legal system are shapes on paper and the order is an illusion.

Oops, All Violence! The Actuality of the Atomic Era

If not an order then, what do we have? The absence of order is, by definition, anarchy. In an anarchic system there is no control of actors’ behaviour independent of the actors themselves. They determine their own relations. There may be norms and traditions, but actual rules in such a system cannot exist; an individual’s conduct can only be trusted to be guided by their interests and is limited only by their strength. As such, interactions are defined by the deference of the weak to the whims of the powerful. This is pure power politics, the use of—and correspondingly the submission to—power without restraint to achieve one’s ends. The behaviour of states in our current era is explainable only through the lens of power politics—that is, via the same means that statecraft was conducted before the United Nations, before the League of Nations, before the treaty of Westphalia, and prior even to the properly established concept of the state.

The machinations of power politics are governed by and most visible in the conduct of the major powers, those actors with significantly superior strength over their peers. The behaviour of these behemoths is the least constrained and the most impactful. Three broad genres of power structure can be derived from the distribution of major powers in an anarchic system: unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar. These structures allow one to understand and predict state behaviour to a degree of accuracy international law cannot. In the time since the establishment of our current order we have experienced the first two of these structures. The upheaval we are now experiencing is caused by our underway transition to the third.

At the beginning of our current era, in the wake of the Second World War, the globe first experienced a bipolar order, one defined by the competition between two opposing superpowers, the US and USSR. In a bipolar order, such as existed between Athens and Sparta prior to the Peloponnesian War, the two powerful poles are led to clash by the prisoner’s dilemma inherent in anarchy. (Two-actor anarchic systems reward aggression more reliably than co-operation.^[8]) Their antagonism splits the political domain between them and causes conflict to arise where their influences meet. During the mid-20^th century, both of the major powers generated their own sphere of control—NATO and the ‘West’ against the Warsaw Pact and the Eastern Bloc—with points of tension emerging where they converged, physically symbolised by the Berlin wall. In the developing world both powers sought to expand their influence and deny their opponent’s, resulting in the outburst of proxy wars fuelled well beyond proportion by their escalatory intrusion. Minor powers either aligned themselves with one side or another, bartering their support for access to the connected economic and security opportunities, or attempted to balance neutrality without leaving themselves exposed. The rules, so freshly written, were not obeyed.

At the fringes of these realms where the poles’ influence met, military interventionism was constant and massively destructive. The weak guises sometimes applied by the superpowers to pretend they were acting altruistically to support the self-determination or defence of locals were not borne out in their actions. In 1963, when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was no longer a tenable conduit for its will, the US greenlit his assassination and established a military government under its direction instead. America’s operations in Vietnam then spilled over into neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving defoliant and ordnance that would ail both countries for generations. In Afghanistan, the USSR’s bombing attacks and deconstruction reduced the population of Kandahar by almost 90%. Unquestionably, the devastation of these countries was not in the interests of the locals. Nor were these actions endorsed by the UN Security Council.

Within their own spheres the major powers aggressively pursued their wants without respect even for the ideology they used to excuse their proxy wars, let alone international law. The USSR drove tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia to prevent popular reformist movements that would have lessened its control. Meanwhile, in order to thwart land reforms that undermined its economic objectives, the United States cynically conducted a subversive guerrilla and aerial bombing campaign to overthrow democratically elected Guatemalan President Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán,^[9] an echo of its subversion of Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh following his nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry.^[10]

Driven by a need to dominate their competitor, the two major states of the 1945-1989 period pursued the expansion, consolidation, or exploitation of their control. What peace existed in this time had very little to do with the influence of the international legal system. Open warfare was fended off by the superpowers’ fear of their opponent’s nuclear deterrents, not the rules. This is borne out by the many times it came within a hair’s breadth of eventuating.

The bipolar structure and its connected Cold War concluded in 1989 with the collapse of the USSR and the symbolic destruction of the Berlin wall. With only one superpower standing, the United States became the supreme power or hegemon of a unipolar structure, becoming by right of its unparalleled power the primary influence on international affairs. This structural shift changed the forces influencing international relations as dramatically as the removal of one of the Earth’s real poles would change its magnetism, creating the political environment that has existed for the last 36 years: one of relative peace.

Simultaneous with the shift to a unipolar order, the global number of deaths in conflict experienced a gradual but clear decline.^[11] Was this the order finally coming into being? Was this the US with its newfound supremacy stepping into the role of the ‘world’s policeman’ and finally putting power behind the long-neglected rules? A hegemon is not so far removed from Hobbes’ Leviathan, able to greatly shape if not totally govern the behaviour of others by the threat of its unchallengeable might.

In short, absolutely not. The hegemon does not change for the world. The world changes for it. Just over a month after deconstruction of the Berlin Wall began, the US invaded Panama in ]flagrant violation of international law’ according to a resolution by the UN General Assembly.^[12]

Our current global order myth is rooted in our experience of this period, when Australia as an ally of the world’s supreme leader enjoyed easy security and prosperity and the globe was in relative peace. But our attribution of this peace to the rules stems from a causal fallacy.

Peace results from the clarity of threat rather than the reduction of it. By the theory of hegemonic stability, conflict will naturally lessen in a unipolar system in the same way that children will stop squabbling when one brandishes a knife. A hegemon has the luxury to pick its wars; few will be foolish enough to pick one with it. The threat of its force alone will often be sufficient to gain its way.^[13] The most destructive conflicts of the 1945-89 period had been America’s. Now they no longer had to be fought. Aided by economic institutions like the IMF and World Bank, the US forced its way into markets globally, restructuring foreign industries with its inordinate financial power to couple with its own, combining cheap labour from developing nations with its own developed industries to create a global network of supply that provided it with greater spoils than war could.

The vision of the US as the ‘world’s policeman’ developed in this time, partially because it wanted it to and actively accentuated the humanitarian aspects of its operations, but also as a result of a real phenomenon. There was undoubtedly a true and unprecedented philanthropic influence on the decision-making of the West in the post-Cold War period. In Kuwait, Somalia, and Yugoslavia, America’s leadership took actions that genuinely attempted, though rarely succeeded, to punish aggression and atrocities. This impulse, however, while connected to the tenets of international law, did not originate from the international legal system but from the quirk of its liberal democratic design.

A sovereign is composed of the joint strength of its subjects. If subjects cease to support the sovereign, it ceases to exist, as you would if your cells decided to just walk away. This means any state is to some extent sensitive to public opinion. Even authoritarian states must consider how their acts will be perceived by their people, otherwise China would not be determined to suppress its Tiananmen Square massacre and Jamal Khashoggi and Sergei Kourdakov would still be alive.

A liberal democracy is more sensitive to public opinion than most. The ruling elite of a liberal democracy are periodically reviewed by the public in elections and may be replaced if out of favour. Their status and power are tied to the public perception of their actions. With a culture of relatively low censorship, politicians within the United States need to maintain an appearance of representing the will of their constituents to maintain their position. This was especially true post-Vietnam, the backlash against which had convinced the leadership of the United States that it could not afford to enter wars that could not be sold to the public.

The humanitarian bent of American, and general Western, foreign policy in the 1990s came from within. The American public demanded a positive narrative of self that was rooted in the same altruistic philosophy that informed the development of international law. To some extent, this public will was informed as well by the laws themselves, and that is a non-negligible source of power for the international legal system, but the important distinction is that the compulsion to act—or appear to act—in a humanitarian manner originated internally, not externally. No longer engaged in strategic competition, the US as a liberal democracy reacted to the direction of its public’s paragonic desire and for that reason its actions corresponded more closely with the law. It was still far from obedient to it. The perception of righteousness became a necessary precondition for American military intervention, but the actual reasons never changed. The key determinants of whether a state would be subject to US intervention from 1989 to 2001 were its relative weakness and its connection to American economic or strategic interests, not the nature or scale of its atrocities.

Then in 2001 the sentiment guiding the hegemon changed. The effect of September 11 on the psyche of the American public reverberated up to its leadership and into its behaviour. The narrative needed became suddenly one of strength. The United States’ penchant for humanitarianism withdrew, and its conformity with international law declined. The Bush administration felt an overwhelming pressure to produce an image to their voters of American soldiers crushing an Islamic force, or at least that is the most generous reasoning one can give for why it chose to intentionally fabricate a justification to invade Iraq.^[14] Beyond dubious under international law, the war on terror was also poorly conceived. Force can only control behaviour for as long as it is applied. If it has been misapplied, when it is removed it leaves no lingering effect other than resentment. The harder the occupying forces pushed to convert their targets in the Middle East, the more opposing ideologies and resistance, dubbed ‘terror,’ proliferated. In the ruins of the relatively modern though authoritarian Iraqi society religious extremism blossomed and women’s rights plunged to medieval lows. In the mountains of Afghanistan every defeated jihadist returned twofold, hydra-like, albeit with less facial hair than before. Change happened inverse to what was intended. (But exactly as should have been expected; Robert Taber’s War of the Flea foretold the failure of such counter-insurgency operations before even Hamburger Hill, some three decades prior to the war on terror.^[15]) The exhaustion of these wars gradually sapped the hegemon’s willingness to pick fights, and for a time the global undulations of power stagnated again into unipolar peace. It is that peace that is now deteriorating.

I have focused so far on the gap between the rules and reality in the conduct of the most powerful states. None of this is meant as a criticism of these states—certainly some of their actions deserve criticism but that is not the purpose of this article. They are simply those least restricted in their actions and so most obviously not obedient to the supposed rules of the global order. Being more free to do bad does not make them morally worse than those who would do the same if they were unrestrained. Their behaviour is exactly what one should expect in an anarchic system; exactly what Thomas Hobbes would have predicted in 1651. Had world power centralised in Mozambique, the nature of our interactions would be the same. That nature is conspicuous in Australia’s own actions as well.

Australia has always been as shrewd a power player as anyone. As with the major powers, Australia’s foreign interactions are inexplicable for a country concerned with upholding international law, but entirely predictable for a middling country attempting to seek its own wealth and security. On the global stage we are obedient to power. Regionally we are exploitative of it.

Since our imperial beginnings Australia has always sought security by ingratiating itself with a bigger benefactor, serving its interests beyond our own in the hope that when we would need its aid it would somehow be compelled to do the same in return. When this failed to eventuate with Britain, we boldly switched our allegiance to the United States ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’.^[16] It is to our patrons, not the rules, that our actions on the global stage have been devoted.

Australia has joined the United States in every one of its major conflicts in this era, regardless of their apparent legality. Although our military contribution is never decisive, our contribution generates real political value in legitimising the act of our allies. As President Eisenhower observed prior to the Vietnam War, ‘The token forces supplied by these other nations, as in Korea, would lend real moral standing to a venture that otherwise could be made to appear as a brutal example of imperialism’.^[17] This legitimisation of behaviour is one of our core acts of service and is omnipresent in our foreign policy. Australia is constantly vocal on rules breaches from powers adverse to its bloc, but defensive on those from within. The killing of civilians in Ukraine has warranted our open condemnation and comprehensive sanctions against Russia from the commencement of the invasion, but the IDF’s operations in Gaza, which have resulted in a significantly greater number of civilian deaths per capita, have only recently received criticism. (Footnoted here is Ex-Green Beret Anthony Aguilar’s account of the killing of civilians during a GHF aid distribution.)^[18] What limited action we have recently taken regarding our ally’s rule-breaking seems to have been given begrudgingly in response to snowballing public demand and has consistently lagged behind the already delayed movements of our larger allies. Air incursions from China upon its neighbours arouse censorious statements but the unilateral bombing of Iran, which in its best light appears to have been an act of preventative—illegal—instead of pre-emptive—possibly illegal—defence, received our unequivocal support. The recent intimations of violence from the United States on its neighbours and even allies, and its broad abandonment of economic agreements, including those it shares with us, have barely aroused comment in comparison to our reaction to the relatively minor Chinese tariff spat of 2020.

Our behaviour in the international sphere is inconsistent with both international law and itself, but entirely consistent with support for our patron, which is consistent with the expected behaviour of a middle power wanting to align itself with someone able to guarantee its security in an anarchic system.

In the smaller pond of our region though, where we find ourselves to be a rather large fish, we act no differently to the global sharks, taking whatever action suits us at the time. Our treatment of asylum seekers, the reader is surely aware, has been both internationally criticised and idolised for its indifference to human rights.^[19] Similarly, when Pacific island nations beg us to maintain our emissions obligations, we plug our ears.^[20]

The clearest example of our local power-politicking has been in our interactions with tiny Timor-Leste. In 1974 we tacitly endorsed the Suharto regime’s occupation of the former Portuguese colony despite being aware of the dictatorship’s propensity for aggressive repression and violence against civilians.^[21],^[22] Tired from fighting the existential threat of a communist Vietnam—can you imagine what our world would have looked like?—no will or resources remained for us to insert ourselves in a conflict so inconsequential and far away. Suharto was after all an anti-communist and therefore more or less on our side, which was presumably a comfort for Australian journalists Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, and Roger East who were murdered while reporting on the invasion, or the tens of thousands of East Timorese killed in the massacres and famines which followed.

By 1999, however, circumstances had changed. The global power structure had shifted. There was no longer an arch enemy for us to obsess over, the West had begun to test its might, and the demand for independence from the local population had become too conspicuous to be ignored. Australia decided to support intervention ‘not only because it was right but also because it was in our national interest to do so’.^[23] INTERFET and its subsequent operations were in some respects close to the gold standard for global humanitarian operations; however, the supremacy of the latter driver over the former in Australian foreign policy quickly became clear to the East Timorese. Until 2018, we used the opportunity of their independence to attempt to gain access to the Greater Sunrise gas fields via a series of duplicitous negotiations.^[24] The frustration caused by our attempts to assert our control over the local resources led General Alfredo Assuncao to describe Australia as ‘the main enemy of the country’^[25]—a stunning accusation considering someone else had forcibly occupied that country for the previous 25 years. In 2003 Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri’s vexation at the progress of negotiations over economic rights caused him to publicly implore ‘don’t try to convince us because we know quite well that it's not legitimate’.^[26] Australians looking to point fingers of blame at the failure of the global rules-based order should cut their nails lest they hurt themselves.

What order exists between states is based on strength and how it is dispersed. Last time the structure of power distribution changed, so did the way we interacted. Now the unipolar period is ending and the shape of international relations is set to change again. The world is going to be multipolar, composed of a system of many competing powers as occurred in the Napoleonic period. Neither this nor its consequences should be surprising. The simple natural size of the world’s states meant that there was never going to be a hegemon forever. Behemoths of population and territory like China, India, and Indonesia have gradually but constantly developed in the last century to rise towards parity with the giants created by the colonial era. Such growing powers will increasingly challenge and disobey ‘rules’ that do not suit them. They will attempt to create spheres of influence of their own, with their own alternative ‘orders’ and instruments. The previous hegemon, meanwhile, will be forced to retract and adapt. If it does not do so apace with the shifting reality, there will be conflict. This conflict, as it was between the equal giants of the bipolar period, will often be cold or indirect, or conducted by means beneath that which would instigate outright warfare, like the grey-zone tactics we see in the South China Sea today. It is not a surprise that China, the most ascendant alternate power with opposing ambitions to the current global way of being, is becoming more and more antagonistic to adherents of the US-led order. All of this, and all that is to come as more states rise to the major stage, is explainable via power politics, as international affairs have been for all of time. The ‘rules’ will be, as they have always been, largely inconsequential to the shifting might. They will move for it.