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The liberal world needs to ditch the world order - Coggle Diagram
The liberal world needs to ditch the world order
Introduction
Since the US invasion of Venuzeula there has been a lot of discussion about the legality of this action and what it means for internation law and the world order that emerged after the fall of the USSR.
Much of this debate focuses on the idea that the US having taken this action has emboldened autocrats to ignore the system that the West had worked so long to create. However, what is not being meanignfully dicussed is two more important questions: does this world order actually exist? and why should Western liberals care.
Does the world order really exist?
We are told that there is a system of interntional law that governs the way that states inertact with each other, we are told that this system prevents the world slipping into what it was like in the 1800s where wars were frequent and might made right.
However, it's important to stop and think whether this system exists and whether anyone outside the West really ever believed it existed.
Since Mudoro's capture there seems to have been a collective amensia among people involved in politics, on a recent episode of the Rest is Politics Rory Stewart questioned what the events in Veneunzuala would mean, he asked whether (and I'm paraphrasing) whether China would feel embolden to act against Tiawan, whether Europe could do this against Belarus and whehter Russia could do this against Ukraine.
The flaw in this is clear, Russia has done this towards Ukrain, Russia has openly flaunted international law by invading Ukraine. Furthermore China occupies Tibet and Iran has drastically reduced state capicity in Iraq and Lebanon by creating armies it controls there.
None of these countries have debated whether they are following international law, instead they have just done what they want. To them the world order is meaningyless, something to use in angry press releases, but nothing more.
Should we care if the world order is gone?
If the world order no longer exists (if it ever did) should liberals mourn its passing, should we seek to rebuild the system and bring autocrats back into the tent? No.
Autocrats are never going to follow the rules, if they did almost all of them would be out of power.
Instead the West should lean into the idea of fighting for its values and freedoms. The advance of democracy and human rights should not be stopped becuase intervention in another country is not legal, just look at Syria.
The West had no legal cause of action in Syria, Russia would not permit military action against the Assad regime because it was Russia's route to a warm water port in the Mediteran. What was the outcome?
A more then decade long civil war, a country destroyed, a refugee crisis in Europe that has fuelled the far right and unimagable crimes committed against the Syrian regime against its own people. The destruction of the civil war is international law's legacy in Syria. And Syria is not unique across the world countries and people's have suffered by those that believe in democracy and human rights have played by the rules and those that don't haven't.
Conclusion
The world order the liberal world claimed existed is sham and its death (or the death of its idea) should not be mourned by the liberl world, but celebrated.
The West can be freed from the idea that its interactions with autocracis that have no care for international law are bound by a rules based order. Instead the West should act, fight for its beliefs and in the process, show our enemies the unimaginable might of the Western alliance.
Muduro was captured while protected by Cuban soliders, Russian missile defence systems and Chinese radar. The US lost no soliders when they captured him. Let that be a lesson for us. The West can fight for its values so why shouldn't it?