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Notes -
The Rules Based Order was always a mirage. It had just enough legitimacy and teeth to appear that the strong and weak had certain standards to follow, but it existed in a world of True US hegemony so the US could give crumbs to “rules” while maintaining such thorough dominating power that they could step in with overwhelming force when they want to.
It’s the same thing I say about Free Speech. When it’s no true threat you allow it to happen. A professor at Wesleyan spouting some communists stuff in the 1980’s doesn’t matter. When communists have a legitimate chance of taking your country you executing a bunch of them. Or you end up losing and die yourself. The best recent example that free speech is fake is after Trump 1 and MAGA became a real threat the left tried as hard as they could to end MAGA free speech. They just didn’t have enough political power to kill it. Power is real.
Maybe it's too simplistic to approach the matter like this but I'd say it was the Kosovo War and the Iraq War of 2003 that fatally weakened the legitimacy of the concept of the rule-based international order.
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So how do we get from here to a point where it isn't?
Because if we descend into open kraterocracy, we're never going to reach the stars.
We don’t?
The powerful - US - is never going to sacrifice its interests to the UN or whatever rules the US creates to boost legitimacy. Those rules will only apply 90% of the time, but then be completely ignored the 10% of the time when US interests disagrees with the rules.
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The fundamental flaw with Rules Based Order today is that it lacks a trusted, fair arbiter to enforce it. Team America, World Police is maybe the closest you we've gotten to it, and almost anyone is going to be able to point out the flaws in that model (they may disagree on specific incidents, but not on the overall conclusion). You'd need to get buy-in and perceived legitimacy in how you make and enforce the rules. And those aren't easy questions: which government has legitimate sovereignty over certain regions or peoples (many such cases)? Who gets independence and who gets subrogated to another state? What sorts of international trade should be allowed, or not — how do you feel about whaling? Carbon emissions? WMD programs? Superintelligence? What army enforces the rules against willful violations?
None of these are easy questions, and I don't propose wholesale answers to them here. But existing attempts at frameworks other than "One Liberal Nation Rules the Waves" [1] have treated these as unimportant or easily settled, devolving into Mean Girls clubs (foreign intervention is okay when we do it) or ineffective stages for international grandstanding (see the UN). One man's terrorist might be another's freedom fighter: how do you convince everyone there you can fairly decide? I certainly don't have a good answer for you to any of these.
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