Ukraine Is the End of the Rules Based World Order

The Ukraine conflict definitely is of huge global significance. If it ends in anything that could be even slightly construed as a Russian victory it will be the most significant change in the world order since 1991.

For the past three decades the US has been the undisputed lone superpower, the leader of the rules based world order and supreme arbiter of the law, literally the world policeman with an absolute monopoly on violence. That means no war, genocide or ethnic cleansing can happen anywhere on Earth without the blessing of Washington. And by extension, when someone does receive permission to carry out a war or genocide, their opponent (whoever that is) has no choice but to meekly accept it. Resisting just causes more force to be applied against you. It is in concept no different than the police. The police have a license to kill, and in any confrontation with private citizens the police are always right. As I said this is a monopoly on violence. I can’t break into your house and make a bunch of demands, but the police can.

A functioning state needs two things to be properly called a government; a monopoly on collecting taxes, and a monopoly on violence, which I already mentioned. When these two institutions in particular degrade past a certain point, the state fails. When the police are absolutely corrupt, taking a ridiculously unacceptable amount of bribes, beating up and shooting people for the hell of it, and not caring about actually stopping criminals, the public stop believing in them. The citizens form gangs and militias to protect themselves, and start to consider the police as just another enemy you might encounter on the street. At this point the reputational loss is pretty much irreversible and you have a textbook example of a failed state. That’s exactly how the US-led rules based world order deteriorated, and it happened on both the civil “taxation” front and the militant “police” front.

First off, the US government is hilariously corrupt, you can literally buy a US senator for less than a Mexican police chief. For example, Ted Cruz sold out to Israel for less than a million dollars, that’s just embarrassing. I think a Mexican police chief would be insulted if you offered him that little, and tell his men to beat you up instead, then plant cocaine in your car. Bribing American politicians is so laughably cheap I’m almost surprised there isn’t an app for it yet like Robin Hood or Coinbase. That would actually be really funny if you could buy $5,000 in Ted Cruz coins and he’ll simp for you for 30 minutes. Like ChatGPT tokens but for a rетаrd.

Then there’s the second problem that the US just repeatedly and endlessly invades people, and is never not invading someone. And of course that it doesn’t help that almost literally anyone with a little oil and heroin money can bribe the US government to invade their enemies. I’m not even exaggerating when I say the US legislature is just a 24/7 auction of various foreign countries trying to outbid each other for who to invade next.

But despite everything, the rules based world order lurched along for a surprisingly long time. That’s simply because no other major country had a particularly compelling reason to oppose it. Even Russia didn’t. On the contrary, Putin was trying for a very long time to get a seat at the US table. If Russia got that seat, there would be no war in Ukraine now. But there is a war and I’ll tell you exactly why.

It is not enough for other major countries to cooperate with the USA. They must be subjugated by the USA. Every major country is subjected to a loyalty test; the USA does something that is so flagrantly and insultingly against their interests the only choice they have is to either initiate hostility against American interests, or shut up and sit in the corner like a whipped dog.

That’s what happened to France in 2003.

Iraq was France’s foothold in the Middle East, and in turn France was Iraq’s main western sponsor. Of course just a shadow of what France had after WWI but hey something is better than nothing. Then Bush said “Okay gang, we’re gonna go take out Iraq!” Think about that. It’s the equivalent of befriending the nerdy bullied kid (Iraq) at school, then the cool kids say “Hey let’s beat the shit out of him!” What are you going to do? Stand up for him and probably get beat up too, or step aside and let him get jumped by ten bigger kids? France chose the latter.

But they didn’t relent quietly, and perhaps that was worse than doing nothing. They politely protested Bush’s blatantly illegal and immoral invasion, and got humiliated. US media outlets pulled every dirty trick in the book, mocking the French for being cowards, surrendering all the time, being “surrender monkeys,” etc. Of course Iraq got toppled and occupied and France was humiliated for even protesting.

Now mind you, the French public at the time was overwhelmingly against the upcoming invasion of Iraq, and just as overwhelmingly anti-American and anti-Bush. Chirac’s government had the voter mandate to take harsher action. They could have left NATO, embargoed the US, seized American assets… they could have done everything they did to Russia in 2022. If the French had been particularly ballsy they could have put several thousand troops in Baghdad and said “An attack on Iraq is an attack on France.” Any kind of serious pushback would have derailed the “surrender monkey” narrative. A country that transgresses the rules based world order can be called a lot of things, but not cowardly.

The economic fallout of such disobedience would have been dangerous and costly, but France would have preserved their national pride. Instead, the government capitulated.

Russia has had several such tests over the decades. They were supposed to capitulate in Chechnya but didn’t. They were supposed to capitulate in South Ossetia and let the Georgians ethnically cleanse the Ossetians but didn’t. They were supposed to let the Maidanites take over Crimea and invade NATO to occupy the bases but didn’t. Each loyalty test was more forceful and high stakes than the previous, and there was no offramp because that’s not how empires work. The rules based world order could not afford to tolerate disobedience, so had to keep revisiting the matter until compliance was forced.

Some things are different now than they were in 2003. The rules based world order is much weaker now than in 2003, and more desperate. The rules based order’s share of the world economy is much smaller, so the bite of economic hard power is much less severe. And lastly, the large majority of humans are just tired of being under the yoke.

That means if the order throws every tool they can at Russia and still fail, that will lead to a cascade of failures. If one country challenges the rules based world order and lives to tell the tale, that means others can, and they will. That is why the eurocucks in particular are so scared. They threw away their sovereignty in exchange for being junior partners sharing the invincibility of the rules based world order. If it turns out to not be invincible, then that means they threw away their sovereignty for nothing.

Ian Kummer

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

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