A Finely Fractured Consensus: American Motivations for Rules-Based Order

Are international politics governed by power or by principles? The February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia has raised the issue of whether might makes right in today’s world, or if there is a broader set of rules and principles which states ought to abide by, even when they might not agree with them. Following the end of the Second World War, the United States and the West forged what many call a rules-based international order, in which states conduct their activities. During the four decades of the Cold War, this Western-led order ran up directly against a communist-led order, of which the Soviet Union and China were the chief proponents. The end of the Cold War in 1991—symbolized by the razing of the BerlinWall two years earlier—suggested that the Western world order had won out and was therefore superior to its communist competitor. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama put forth his well-known “end of history” thesis concerning the inevitability of Western liberal democracy and the universalization of democratic values worldwide, anchored by an American-led international order—one which is more commonly known as the liberal international order.