July 3, 2026

Friday. The envisioned talk did not happen, but this in a nutshell is what I would have told the student participants in this UN-oriented workshop: 

Talking about a "rules-based order," I would have started with a reference to something Mahatma Gandhi probably never said, when asked (or not) about Western Civilization: "It would be a good idea." We hardly have one today, maybe never really did, and yet as a globalized world, we can't really live without a common way to face up to shared challenges. The problem is political. Under the right circumstances (most of the second half of the twentieth century), the "international community" (if something like that ever really existed) can make good progress in building a rules-based order. However, as the history of the past two centuries shows, the very particular rule first put in writing by Thucydides keeps asserting itself: "the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept." The conclusion, especially for the participants in your program, is that one should be very clear-eyed about the temptation for great powers to make their own rules, and, given that, think and work hard with all the others (those states, groups, and individuals for whom a credible international rule book is of crucial importance) on maintaining and augmenting laws, treaties, institutions created since 1945, and to convince great powers (those subject to the temptation of "might makes right") that in the long term, a credible rules-based international order is in their interest too. The globalizing world prior to 1914 did not have a common way to face up to shared challenges, and there came a big, global war; the world of the 1920s and 1930s had an inadequate international rule book, and an even bigger war came; the world of the Cold War, and beyond, did much better, until the beginning of the twenty-first century. We don't have a new world war yet, and nothing is inevitable until it happens. But (a historian's warning): while history does not repeat itself, it does often rhyme.