Editorial Note
On a cold morning inFebruary 2022, as Russian missiles struck Kyiv, Western leaders invoked a language that had once defined the moral architecture of the modern world. Putin’s aggression was condemned in the hallowed vocabulary of national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and rule-based international order. The West’s response was swift, sweeping sanctions, asset freezes and the exclusion of Russian banks from the SWIFT. And yet, for large parts of the world, another memory surfaced with incisive clarity – Baghdad, 2003.
The Iraq War began on March 20, 2003, when the US and allied forces launched airstrikes and ground operations. Within weeks, George W. Bush stood aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring “mission accomplished.” But what was framed as victory marked something more consequential: the erosion of international law and the normalization of its selective application.
The justification for war rested on claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat, placing Iraq within the rhetorical construct of an “axis of evil,” alongside Iran and North Korea. Yet the invasion proceeded without conclusive findings from UN weapons inspectors, undermining the very institutional processes meant to arbitrate such claims.
What followed is now part of the historical record. No stockpiles of WMD were found. Instead, Iraq descended into sectarian violence and protracted insurgency. Hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced, and Iraq’s social fabric torn apart. There were no sanctions against the US and its allies, no financial restitution and no meaningful accountability. The principles invoked in Kyiv – sovereignty, legality, order – had been fully negotiable in Baghdad. This moral dissonance reveals a deeper pattern that has been quietly corroding the legitimacy of the international system: the hypocrisy trap.
The “hypocrisy trap” emerges when powerful nations – those that design international law and multilateral institutions – begin to apply those very principles selectively. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and its Western allies set out to construct a new global order, one intended to prevent the recurrence of systemic lawlessness that had twice plunged the world into catastrophe. The result was an architecture of restraint: institutions such as the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, and the Geneva Conventions – frameworks designed to bind power within norms.
The legitimacy of this order rested not merely on its design, but on its perceived universality. Rules were meant to apply across differences of size, wealth, and political influence. Its compliance, in theory, was the great equalizer. Yet embedded within this architecture was a quiet paradox: it was, at once, a system of constraint and a system of power.
In reality, its genius lay in its ability to reconcile the two – to make hierarchy appear principled, to persuade states that the rules served a common good rather than the interests of those who wrote them. But that persuasion depends on commitment and consistency. When principles become contingent – invoked in one crisis, suspended in another – the illusion of universality begins to fade. And when that hypocrisy becomes habitual, legitimacy erodes. What remains of the international order today is, in many respects a shadow – a system that still speaks the language of rules, even as it is increasingly governed by diplomatic exceptions and geopolitical expediencies.
Hedley Bull, one of the most influential theorists in international relations, explored this tension in his landmark work The Anarchical Society. He advanced the central idea that even in the absence of a world government, a form of international society could be sustained through shared rules and norms – a proposition that remains contested.
The Cold War tested this proposition under conditions of extreme ideological and strategic tension. The rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States produced not chaos, but a tense bipolar stability – one sustained as much by restraint as by competition. Yet this stability was underwritten by repeated violations of the very principles both sides claimed to uphold. Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979) alongside American engagements in Vietnam were justified within a shared vocabulary of security and ideological necessity, even as both superpowers breached the principles they claimed to uphold.
In each case, the principle of sovereignty that is foundational to the rules-based order was subordinated to geopolitical imperatives: whether through the Soviet Union’s doctrine of limited sovereignty in Eastern Europe or America’s policy of containment in Southeast Asia. However, a relative level of sanity persisted for the preservation of humanity, as evidenced by the moral restraint and diplomatic prudence exhibited by President John F Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to a nuclear flashpoint.
The true test of the Western-led international order arrived with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the United States emerged as the sole superpower. In that unipolar moment lay an extraordinary opportunity – what the Princeton professor John Ikenberry describes as the chance for a hegemon to bind itself within rules and institutions, subordinating unfettered power to legitimacy. The United States could have consolidated a genuinely rules-based order – one it not only enforced but visibly adhered to – thereby embodying moral and intellectual leadership on a global scale. Instead, it increasingly drifted toward a foreign policy marked less by principled restraint than by the exercise of raw power.
Nowhere is this rupture more visible than in the contested assurances given at the end of the Cold War. The informal “not one inch eastward” understanding – conveyed by James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev during negotiations over German reunification – has since become a focal point of grievance. Its precise legal status remains disputed; no binding treaty codified it, and Western officials have argued the commitment was never formally made. Yet its political afterlife has been profound. Successive U.S. administrations – from Bill Clinton through George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump – oversaw successive waves of NATO expansion, extending the alliance from the Balkans to the Baltics and the Black Sea.
For Moscow, this was not institutional enlargement but strategic encroachment. From Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin, Russian leaders repeatedly signaled alarm, most explicitly in Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, which warned against a unipolar order enforced by military alliances. The war in Ukraine can be understood — without absolving Russia of responsibility for its aggression – as the violent culmination of a long-brewing structural tension between expansion and perceived encirclement. It is worth reflecting whether the United States would regard as acceptable the placement of adversarial missile systems in Mexico or Canada – comparable to NATO deployments in Poland, less than 100 miles from Russia’s western border?
Another inflection point in the erosion of the rules-based international order came with NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The crisis itself emerged from escalating violence between Serbian forces under Slobodan Milošević and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo amid widespread reports of atrocities against civilians. Framed as a humanitarian intervention to prevent ethnic cleansing, NATO’s military campaign carried a measure of moral urgency and international sympathy.
Yet the intervention proceeded without explicit authorization from the United Nations Security Council, owing to anticipated vetoes by Russia and China. This marked a significant departure from established legal norms. What was framed as an exceptional response to an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe also set a consequential precedent: that powerful coalitions could bypass institutional constraints when they deemed moral or strategic imperatives sufficiently compelling. It weakened the normative force of the United Nations and multilateral consensus, setting in motion a pattern visible in the 2003 Iraq War and later in Libya in 2011, where it exceeded the UN mandate of a no-fly zone to protect civilians into the regime change of Muammar Gaddafi. Such infractions have emboldened Russia to invade Crimea in 2014, and a US-led coalition conducting airstrikes in Syria from 2014 without a clear authorization of the UN Security Council. Critics have argued that these military interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria were economic interventions in disguise to gain control of these nations’ vast oil wealth and entrenching the US role as the regional hegemon.
Beyond direct military interventions, the erosion of the rules-based order has also been evident in the selective abandonment of multilateral commitments and consensus frameworks. The U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018 – despite its endorsement by the United Nations Security Council – raised concerns about the longevity of negotiated agreements. Similarly, its exit from the Paris Climate Agreement signaled a retreat from collective responsibility on global warming challenges, echoing claims that climate change was a “Chinese hoax.” Also, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 departed from longstanding international consensus on the city’s contested status, generating deep resentment across the Muslim world. Each of these decisions, defensible on policy grounds, traced a pattern of institutional disengagement.
This pattern extended beyond security and diplomacy into the humanitarian domain. The announced U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization in 2020 – though later reversed – raised concerns about the politicization of global public health institutions. Similarly, reductions or disruptions in funding through USAID have had tangible consequences across vulnerable regions. In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, U.S.-supported programs underpin services from HIV/AIDS treatment and malaria prevention to food security and disaster relief. Any contraction in this assistance risks interrupting supply chains, weakening fragile health systems, and exacerbating humanitarian crises. As Thucydides observed in his account of the Peloponnesian War “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” – that logic still endures.
This dissonance between principle and practice is not confined to Western nations alone. It is equally visible in the conduct of major Western corporations that pontificate human rights in global platforms while relying on supply chains embedded in low-cost labor regimes. Global brands such as Nike and Apple have faced sustained criticism over labor conditions in South and Southeast Asia, including excessive hours, unsafe environments, and allegations of child labor. These corporations introduced compliance frameworks only after public scrutiny exposed these practices. It underscores a disquieting truth: Western commitment to human dignity and labor rights is readily subordinated to cost arbitrage and profit maximization when no one is watching.
The ongoing US-Israel-Iran war hits the nadir of international liberal order, reducing institutions such as the UN to instruments of diminishing authority. It heralds a return to a “Wild West” morality, where power speaks louder than law. As Denis Diderot warned, “From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step” – a step now fully realized. The indiscriminate bombing of schools, hospitals, civilian neighborhoods and economic infrastructure in stark violation to Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute is no longer aberration but doctrine. Crimes against humanity are normalized in the language of security and divine sanction. As this illegal war rages on, the world witnesses an irreversible erosion of the rule of law and the crumbling of moral citadels, the West once so confidently erected.
Niccolò Machiavelli grasped this enduring truth: that the appearance of virtue often outlives virtue itself. What unfolds is not merely war, but the systematic hollowing out of the Western rule of law – leaving behind a global order where moral pretense survives, but moral substance has collapsed.
In the autumn of 2023, as Israeli airstrikes reduced large parts of Gaza to rubble, a senior G7 diplomat was quoted in TIME magazine as saying “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” the official said. “Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” It was not the kind of statement that makes press releases. But it was, perhaps, the most candid assessment of the liberal international order’s condition that a Western official had offered in decades.