The Spectator Australia Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolas Maduro was a brilliantly executed coup. It was also an exhibition of America’s hard power, power that has underpinned the rules-based international order that protected America’s allies for decades. Now those allies fear that the rules-based order is as much a smoking ruin as Maduro’s Caracas compound. European hysteria is, however, misplaced. President Trump has not inaugurated a new era of disorder, he has responded to realities about which European elites have been in denial.
The post-war international order has been crumbling for more than a decade. And British governments have been enablers of that process. One of the most determined users of hard power in subverting every restraint has been communist China. British policy, accelerated under this government, has supported China’s economic rise and acquiesced in its suppression of freedoms.
The rules-based international order only works if its adversaries are too scared to defy it
We were cheerleaders for China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, assuming that would tame Beijing’s authoritarianism. Instead, China turned our naive belief in free trade and our faith in trans-national institutions into a mechanism for transferring jobs, intellectual property and wealth into their hands.
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