The "Rules-Based" Order is Rotting
Dip, in analyzing the US's strong-arm approach to international policy, discusses the ways in which this "new" order isn't so new after all.
In a transition most forcefully embodied by the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, and Cilia Flores the first lady, the US government is moving from a “rules-based”, “rational” “management” vis a vis international policy towards the kinds of open violence indicative of colonialism and fascism.
This does not excuse previous periods of neocolonial conditions, nor does it necessarily represent a complete break from those conditions. When looking at the Trump admin’s approach to “diplomacy” through various “peace plans” for Palestine, Sudan, Western Sahara, and Ukraine, especially alongside the strong-arming of Venezuela, it is made clear that this “management” (ie specious modes of “peace”) feeds off of liberal respectability like a vampire, the more violent, fascistic wing positioning itself as its “anti-establishment” negation when it is actually its constitution. Liberalism vs fascism is reactionary, statist infighting, rather than a battle between the forces of “good” and “evil”.
Photo by Roma Kaiuk🇺🇦 on Unsplash
Palestine
In the case of Palestine, Trump has proposed a 20 point plan, approved by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), that sees him as the chair of a “transition board” that would oversee the reconstruction and economic stabilization of Gaza, an international stabilization force with multiple contributing countries, a demilitarization of Gaza, and a path to statehood for Palestine. The Palestinian Authority approves and welcomes the plan, though no Palestinian has had a say in the forming of the plan itself.
Disagreements to various parts of the plan come from Russia, China, Hamas, and Israel. Russia’s ambassador raised questions about the UN’s role in implementation, stating that it is a US initiative relying on Washington’s promises. However, the PA’s acceptance contributed to their (and China’s) abstention from the vote, rather than vetoing it. Hamas rejected the mandate for demilitarizing, and Israel rejects Palestine’s right to a state. Israel continues to break the terms of the ceasefire and restrict aid—the food that is coming in is mostly non-nutritious items like processed snacks. As of Jan 14th, phase two of the plan has been launched, establishing a “technocratic” structure to manage affairs in Gaza. Israel continues to violate the ceasefire.
Sudan
After a conversation with Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, Trump has committed to directly intervening in the war in Sudan. The war risks destabilizing the region and could lead to more conflicts and extremism. The scale of the war in Sudan is immense: in the past two years, 10s of thousands of people have died, over 14 million people have been displaced, and millions are experiencing famine. It is considered the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
A ‘Quad’ has been established between the US, UAE, Saudi, and Egypt to respond to this, and they are working on a joint plan to end the war. Focusing directly on the Quad countries risks sidelining Sudanese people, but it is important to note the mutual shirking of ceasefires from both the SAF and the RSF. The RSF has survived the fight against the SAF without official international support through their extensive networks to neighboring countries and the support of the UAE. Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, and the CAR are also logistics corridors for trafficking military supplies and gold. As the war continues (recently reaching 1000 days of fighting), there is a consolidation of forces, energy, and territory as conditions worsen for non-combatants.
Western Sahara
The Saharawi of the Western Sahara—a people indigenous to the desert, have been occupied for years, existing in a protracted, settler colonial conflict with Morocco since 1975. Through UN Resolution 2797, based on Morocco’s autonomy plan from 2007 and the US’s “peace plan”, they have had integration chosen for them over independence. The Polisario Front has denounced this, pointing out their lack of input and desire for self-determination. Algeria, a longtime supporter of Polisario, abstained from the vote due to concerns over the lack of Polisario Front contribution.
The plan allows for the Western Sahara to have their own executive, legislative, and judicial bodies, while Morocco controls their defense, foreign affairs, and religious matters. King Mohammed VI is looking to make sure that the Western Sahara has a “Moroccan character”, given that they’ve managed the territory since Spain’s… departure. This, along with Morocco’s other geopolitical moves, including growing closer to Israel, highlight the continued settler colonial project therein and the straying of the UN from (even pretending that they are) facilitating self-determination. This points to concerns that other states could use the same justifications of “administration” or “management” for similar such annexations, seeing occupation as legally legitimate.
Ukraine
The US, in collaboration with Russia, has created a 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine that favors Russia. It proposes a lot of things that Russia would want and benefit from in this conflict, including Ukraine ceding certain regions to Russia, incorporating Russian Language and Orthodox Christianity, and limiting the army size. Other parts talk about Ukraine not being able to join NATO, Russia ceasing attacks on Ukraine, and generally being brought back into the global economy.
Venezuela
As mentioned earlier, the Trump admin was able to capture Maduro & Flores, creating a more pliable situation in Venezuela. At least 83 lives were taken in the abduction, according to Venezuela’s Defense Ministry. A sham trial has been set up to charge them, and Maria Corina Machado, a critical interlocutor of Trump in Venezuela (who has “vowed” to become the next president), has boasted about the potential of the transition government to create a better situation for Venezuelans with Trump’s backing. The Trump admin themselves have been quiet about what this transition will look like (or even lead to) concretely. Maduro & Flores are being held in the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn until March 17th, their next court appearance. They both pleaded not guilty to the “narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine-importation conspiracy” charges, amongst others.
Questions around the Rules-based Order
Whatever the intentions, these moves indicate that Trump 2.0’s approach alchemizes “liberal” and “fascistic” approaches to rule, making apparent the contradictions in the “benign” presentation of the post-WWII “rules-based order”. That is to say, this “looks” different from the fascisms of wartime Italy, Germany, and Japan and post-war liberal democracies like the US and Western Europe, while being in continuity with both, through being “contained” by the same logics of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism alongside all of their co-constitutive systems of domination.
This means that it can be called something different if desired. Regardless, the things that are undesirable about fascism in its “classical” sense, namely its naked bigotry and violence, are part and parcel of even “classical” liberalism, with its veiled violence and bigotry. The distinction between these two kinds of societal management strategies is more about how these systems are discussed historically and how they talk about themselves, rather than the empirical realities of domination. These systems can flit between the poles of “naked” and “benign” or exist in a superposition of multiple points at once as needed.
The focus on fascism’s spectacle can actually misapprehend how Spectacle works, which encompasses both slow/mundane violence and the fast/sensational/spectacular violence that we normally associate with it. There is no neat-and-tidy separation between the violence of a fascist machine of yore and the “hegemonic statecraft” of the present.
The main thing to be understood is that liberalism and fascism are not different enough so as to be pitted against each other in a grander sense than any other inter-imperialist conflicts; the dominated lose no matter what. Fascism’s issues are self-evident, but even the “freedom” and “democracy” liberalism claims don’t hold up to the experiences of living under it, unless you are represented by whatever group holds the reins, or exist in a buffer class between them and the marginalized. Even then, from what I see and hear, those folks aren’t all that happy.
This beckons anyone who doesn’t want to be trapped in these frames to imagine other ways of relating. There are a lot of different alternatives to ordering society, beyond the fascism-liberalism “binary”. The ideas and proposals we should consider as seriously addressing the issues (poverty, misery, bigotry, domination, etc.) are all stateless. I don’t define the state as the equivalent to a “nation”, nor do I define it as an “instrument of class rule”, or even solely “the single legitimate authority over a given territory”, though all of those understandings are helpful in order to see the pitfalls of modern nation-states, along with the state form more broadly.
My understanding of the state relates to all of those things in a specifically hierarchical and exclusionary way. This is how it can have a “monopoly” on things like law and violence (which many a time are the same thing). I am against this formation because it, like other forms of domination (including capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy), harms life and living in ways that only serve the dominant class’s interests, while drowning everyone and everything in misery.
Societies organized along stateless lines have looked a myriad of ways, but I’m going to focus on three different and generalized modes of relating: deliberation, stigmergy, and enmeshment. These societies should be able to do the kinds of things that are useful for maintaining the ecology, labor, life, and living while not using domination as a “shortcut”.
Deliberation is all about talking about issues, problems, and other topics of interest in a shared forum, whether that’s an assembly, town hall, or anything like that. This is the most positive affirmation of what is often understood to be “democracy”, bolstered by an anti-bureaucratic ethos.
Stigmergy is all about leaving information in a place or context and other people/groups taking that information and acting on it, with patterns forming from the repeated combinations of that cycle. An example might be tiktok trends, or the #syllabus movement from 2010s Twitter. This would allow for people to coordinate without needing pre-ordained structures or spaces and allows for a high degree of flexibility and emergence.
Enmeshment is about building non-hierarchical networks, where each “node” or point in the network, whether it is a person or group, is connected to other people to share information and distribute tasks towards shared goals. This can roughly be understood to be more free-flowing than a deliberative mode, but less free flowing than a stigmergic mode, though all of these are meant to be non-coercive and non-domineering.
These are not mutually exclusive categories, and will likely have parts mixed, matched, expanded on, and interconnected in various different ways. This could create a resilient “structure” that avoids some of the problems and vulnerabilities of statecraft, including centralization, simplification, and alienation.
That goes for the form, at least. Content-wise, there should be certain values at the core of any structure, including anti-colonialism, (trans)feminism, disability liberation, youth liberation, and (ethno)ecology. These are core precepts that can be referred to so that whatever is created doesn’t fall into common gaps created both by states and by movements meant to improve or even go against them. Stated plainly, any efforts to change society, take it down, or build one anew should enable the flourishing of, at minimum, colonized, racialized, blackened, and indigenous people, marginalized gender folks, disabled and neurodivergent folks, and kids, in ways that bolster ecological wellbeing through culturally relevant models including decolonial approaches to science and traditional ecological knowledges.
If we don’t respond to not only the fascism-liberalism “binary”, but its byproducts like Trump’s regime and others like it, we are consigning ourselves to being dominated. The answers can’t come from states, they cause the very atrocities we’re fighting against. By using stateless forms, people can respond more flexibly to the various issues and challenges that life presents them with, orienting around collaboration, creativity, and complementarity.
