Trump and the unmaking of global rules

Al Mayadeen English (awip)
Al Mayadeen English

America first, int'l law last: From Gaza to Ukraine, Trump’s foreign policy accelerates the erosion of global norms, weakening multilateral institutions and normalizing power over law.

In an analysis by Patrick Wintour, The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, the present moment is framed as one of historical suspension, echoing Philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s warning that periods between orders are defined by uncertainty and heightened consequence. In such times, Wintour suggests, even modest political choices can reshape the global landscape.

Writing against the backdrop of 2025, Wintour argues that many Western leaders now see the post–Second World War system of international relations as faltering. The rules-based order that the US helped build after 1945, he notes, is facing a deep crisis of legitimacy, as legal norms and institutions struggle to command authority in an increasingly fragmented world.

In Wintour's view, there was no shortage of advance notice about the damage Donald Trump would inflict on that global framework.

In February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the rupture in stark terms during his Senate confirmation hearing. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” he said. “And all this has led us to a moment in which we must now confront the single greatest risk of geopolitical instability and generational global crisis in the lifetime of anyone alive here today.”

Rubio argued that the rules-based order rested on a flawed belief that national interests could be subordinated to a “liberal world order” in which all nations would converge into a Western-led democratic community. Humanity, he said, had been told it was destined to abandon national identity and become “one human family and citizens of the world.” “This was not just a fantasy,” Rubio added. “We now know it was a dangerous delusion.”

From global steward to nationalist power | That worldview was reinforced in the latest US national security strategy, which warned of European cultural erasure and pledged support for nationalist parties favouring “strategic stability with Russia.” The document declared that Washington would no longer try to “prop up the entire world order like Atlas.”

On paper, such statements amount to a coherent articulation of “America first". In practice, however, Trump’s foreign policy has been chaotic, an uneasy mix of professed non-interventionism and erratic interventions that blur global norms with naked national interest. There is no straight line to Trump’s diplomacy, only what one observer likened to “a catherine wheel of disconnected explosions.”

As Donald Trump Jr. has boasted, his father’s unpredictability is treated as an asset. For US allies, that personalization of power offers just enough false hope to delay confronting the reality of America’s strategic rupture.

Contempt for international law | Amid the disorder, one theme has remained consistent: Trump’s disdain for international law and the values embedded within it, particularly national sovereignty and the prohibition on using force to alter borders. In their place, he has embraced what critics describe as “sheer coercive power," a form of mobster diplomacy built on threats, blackmail, and transactional deals.

The approach is starkly illustrated by Ukraine. Faced with the option of expelling Russian forces, something the US could enable by adequately arming Kiev or cultivating a lucrative partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin to exploit Ukraine’s resources, Trump has clearly favoured the latter, as per the piece. Ukraine, it seems, is expected to “pay any price, bear any burden” to serve the Trumpian economy. For the EU and Nato, this is a decisive moment for the future of European sovereignty and the UN charter itself.

Sovereignty for sale | The same logic extends to Venezuela, which sits atop an estimated 303 billion barrels of oil, roughly a fifth of global reserves. Like Greenland, Canada, and Mexico, its sovereignty has attracted Trump’s predatory gaze.

After warnings on social media that killing Venezuelan civilians without due process, through US attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, would constitute war crimes, US Vice-President JD Vance replied bluntly, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” The Pentagon later claimed it was lawful to kill shipwrecked sailors stranded at sea because they were deemed combatants posing a security threat.

As Wintour puts it, Trump’s disregard for rules has also shredded the foundations of free trade. Leveraging the sheer scale of the US market, his administration has sought not only financial concessions from allies but changes to their domestic policies. A country’s standing in Washington is determined less by democratic credentials than by its leader’s personal rapport with Trump and his inner circle, an arrangement that resembles a modern court rather than a rules-based system.

Gaza and the collapse of universality | "Israel’s" occupation and bombardment of Gaza, often met with European acquiescence, has further exposed the fragility of international norms. Beyond the immediate brutality, it has laid bare the selective application of supposedly universal principles.

Majed al-Ansari, a foreign policy advisor to Qatar’s prime minister, described the moment starkly. “We are living in an age of disgusting impunity that is taking us back hundreds of years. We are reduced to giving concession after concession not to stop acts of aggression, but to ask those responsible to kill fewer people, destroy fewer neighbourhoods.”

“We do not even ask them to have respect for international law,” he added, “but ask to take a step back from going 100 miles away from international law.”

Targeting the institutions of law | Alongside these policies has come a direct assault on the institutions designed to restrain power. Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), described in an interview for Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed,” Guillou said. “For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent me an email cancelling the reservation, citing the sanctions.”

For upholding international humanitarian law and the rights of Palestinian civilians, Guillou said he had effectively been pushed back into a pre-digital existence. European banks closed his accounts under US pressure, while companies refused him services. Palestinian rights groups such as Al-Haq have faced similar treatment for cooperating with the ICC, while judges at the International Court of Justice have taken evasive measures to protect their assets.

Withdrawing from multilateralism | The US has also exited or undermined multiple UN bodies, including the Human Rights Council and UNESCO. In total, Washington is estimated to have cut $1 billion (£750 million) in UN-linked funding and dismissed around 1,000 government staff whose work supported multilateral institutions.

At the UN General Assembly, the US has appeared almost to relish its isolation. Other forums, such as the World Trade Organisation, the Paris Climate Framework, and the G20, have become arenas for confrontation, where Washington either absents itself or demands deference. John Kerry, a former US secretary of state, summed it up by saying the US had shifted “from leader to denier, delayer and divider.”

“When the United States walks away,” Kerry warned, “old excuses find new life,” adding that China has benefited from the vacuum left behind.

Faith in law, doubt in its power | The retreat from international law is particularly jarring, scholars argue, because wars such as Gaza have pushed legal language into the heart of public debate. Dr. Tor Krever of the University of Cambridge notes that “the language of legality has become the dominant frame of popular and political discourse.”

In a special issue of the London Review of International Law, more than 40 academics examined whether this renewed faith in law can bear the weight now placed upon it. Prof. Gerry Simpson of the LSE acknowledged his own doubts, saying he had to reconsider international law’s limits “in the face of the enormous faith that had been placed on it, especially by the young.”

Prof Thomas Skouteris, dean of the law college at the University of Khorfakkan, described the mood as “fin de siècle.” “The more present international law appears,” he wrote, “the less decisive it feels … What once promised order increasingly reads as performance.”

Hypocrisy and submission | The contradiction is most visible when Western leaders cite UN rulings, only to submit moments later to Trump’s demands, lavishing praise, offering concessions, and, as Nato’s Mark Rutte infamously did, calling him “daddy".

Few leaders resisted what historian Rutger Bregman called “immorality and unseriousness … the two defining traits of our leaders today.”

One exception was Tom Fletcher, head of the UN humanitarian agency OCHA. In May, he challenged diplomats to consider what they would tell future generations about Gaza: “Maybe some will recall that in a transactional world, we had other priorities. Or maybe we will use those empty words: We did all we could.”

From order to disorder | A similar despair was voiced by Oman’s foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who warned, “We are worryingly close to a world in which certain kinds of foreign intervention, if not outright invasion and annexation of territory, are accepted as a normal part of international relations.”

Al Busaidi argued that the erosion of restraint predated Trump, tracing it back to the post-9/11 meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the current moment, critics say, marks an acceleration.

Some on the left argue that international law’s loss of credibility merely exposes a long-standing truth. The Marxist historian Perry Anderson has argued that it is “neither truthfully international nor genuinely law.” Others point out that the US has never signed the Rome Statute or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and has long treated legality as optional.

China and Russia have made similar critiques. “International rules must be based on international law and must be written by all,” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in 2021. “They are not a patent or privilege of a few.”

A fragile inheritance | Despite its flaws, some insist the system remains worth defending. Christoph Heusgen, the outgoing chair of the Munich Security Conference, warned that the rules-based order is “easy to destroy, but much harder to rebuild.”

Yet Ansari, reflecting on a year of faltering diplomacy, offered a bleak conclusion,

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Image: © Associated Press. Video. In line with our policies, we address notices of alleged violations under the United States "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA). If you believe that your copyright has been infringed on our site, please contact us, and we will promptly remove your photo from display. editor@a-w-i-p.com. AWIP: https://a-w-i-p.com/index.php/aW7G