You Can't Make Me

On rules-based international politics

Way back when my daughter was a toddler, one evening I ran her a lovely, warm, bubbly bath. I got her ready for it; then, with not a stitch on, she announced: “I don’t want a bath”.

I said: “But it’s bathtime.”

She said: “You can’t make me”.

I said: “Well, actually, I can,” and I picked her up and put her in the bath.

I tell this story not to revel in my own tyranny (once in the bath, she forgot about the confrontation and had a nice time playing with bubbles) but to illustrate a basic fact of human relations. That is: the foundation of authority is the ability, when persuasion fails, to compel obedience. A whole intricate edifice of political theory has grown on that foundation, covering political form, the difference between just rule and tyranny, and so on. But the grit in the political oyster is this question: who, in a standoff situation, can say “Well, actually, I can” and have it be unarguably true.

I’ve found myself thinking about that bathtime episode, as it’s dawned on me that “rules-based international order” enjoyers don’t seem to get this. Or, rather, if they do it’s tacit, mystified, and shot through with cognitive dissonance.

Nowhere is this more visibly so than in the would-be empire of rules: the European Union, whose collective mindset is illustrated by the tale one maritime expert recounted to me, about a discussion he had on re-opening European shipyards with an official from the European Commission. The official told him, with a merry laugh, that there was no need to do this - because the way the world now works is that “America finances everything, China makes everything, and Europe sets the rules”.

In turn, the EU is only the rules-y-est bit of a much bigger empire of rules: the so-called “rules-based international order”. And what I find bewildering in contemporary discussions is the way it seems as though this “bathtime question” simply needn’t be asked, or is somehow assumed already answered. That is: if a polity or group of polities sets the rules, only for someone to say “You can’t make me”, whose job is it to say “Well, actually, I can”?

Trump’s foreign policy, since taking office, has repeatedly hit this sore point - prompting a slew of curious and (it seems to me) not very well-thought-through responses. In response to his recent public spat with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy over the terms for a putative peace with Russia, for example, the EU’s high representative for security and foreign affairs, Kaja Kallas, lamented on X that Trump has abandoned Europe. “The free world needs a new leader”, she said, with the suggestion that such a leader might come from the EU or that the EU could as some kind of collective offer that leadership. Across the pond, meanwhile, Harvard Law professor Heidi Matthews denounced the USA’s combative turn in relation to Canada: in her view the rules-based international order should now be reconstituted sans the Land of the Free.

Absent America, though, how would such an entity answer the bathtime question? Who says: “Well, actually, I can”? To answer this question is to grasp the real reason European states were so willing to disarm themselves in the first place (spoiler: it wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a preference for social spending). And it’s to understand why European leaders are now in the apparently contradictory position of both making bellicose noises about Russia, while also fighting tooth and nail against American pressure to take on a greater share of European defence spending.