Abstract. This essay reads the “rules-based international order” as a Western myth, political creed, and incantation rather than as a clearly defined legal system. Written from the perspective of a decolonial semiotician, it begins with J.D. Vance’s Munich speech as a visible rupture inside the Western consensus, then distinguishes UN-based international law from the looser language of rules. The essay traces how the order is eroded from within and how Chinese and U.S. scholars offer parallel, unequally situated vocabularies for thinking beyond the Westphalian inheritance. It concludes by asking whether a multipolar world can build shared rules without turning plurality into another form of hierarchy.

I

Every few years, a phrase enters public life and begins to sound as if it explains everything. “Rules-based international order” is one of those phrases. It appears in speeches, newspaper columns, summit declarations, policy papers, and television commentary. It is usually spoken with confidence, as if everyone already knows what it means. I am no longer sure that we do. The issue is not whether international law exists. The United Nations Charter, treaties, courts, and diplomatic procedures exist. The question is different: by what process did this phrase become shorthand for Western authority, and why is it becoming harder to believe in it without asking who wrote the rules, who interprets them, and who is allowed to break them? Beyond that, Donald Trump’s second presidency has cast the “rules-based international order” into the dustbin: from his early announcements about taking possession of the Panama Canal and Greenland, through the open assault on Venezuela to capture its president and his wife, to the bombing of Iran, in coordination with Israel and without a demonstrated justification, simply because he could.

When I listened to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, my spontaneous reaction was: “Hmm, something is going on.” The moment reminded me of Vladimir Putin’s address at the same conference in 2007. The press then read Putin’s rebuke of U.S. unipolar dominance as aggressive and as a return to Soviet-era antagonism. Some commentators focused on his warnings against U.S. missile defense installations in Eastern Europe and NATO’s eastward expansion. Others understood the speech as a sign that Russia would no longer accept obedience to Western expectations as the condition of diplomacy. Vance’s speech produced a different but related unease: after the actions of Trump’s second presidency described above, the controversy no longer appeared only between Russia and the West but inside the Western camp itself, as European reactions to Vance made clear.

That impression stayed with me until I read Marc Trachtenberg’s essay, The Rules-Based International Order: A Historical Analysis. Trachtenberg, an international historian and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, examines the diplomatic and historical background of the phrase with unusual care. In the opening pages, he collects European reactions to Vance’s Munich speech, as well as reactions from U.S. Democrats and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. What interested me most was not only the disagreement itself, but the anxiety produced by the possibility that the West no longer shared a common language of order.

After all, I am writing here as a decolonial semiotician, not as a political analyst. What interests me is how the phrase “rules-based international order” works as a sign: what it authorizes, what it conceals, and whose vocabulary it presents as universal.

The most revealing reaction Trachtenberg reports came from Christoph Heusgen, the outgoing chair of the conference and a former adviser to Angela Merkel. For Heusgen, Munich seemed to mark a rupture in the transatlantic moral universe: after Vance’s speech, he warned that “we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.” He then tried to name what was at stake: “It is clear that our rules-based international order is under pressure.” This order, he insisted, had to rest on “a single set of norms and principles,” including the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the moment exceeded ordinary diplomatic language. Heusgen broke down in tears and left the stage before finishing his speech. The reaction to Vance was therefore not merely irritation. It was closer to alarm inside a political faith.

I was also familiar with Serge Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, who has repeatedly argued in The UN Charter Should Become the Legal Foundation of a Multipolar World that the “rules-based international order” is a U.S. invention designed to displace the UN Charter. Lavrov’s point is that the Charter remains the foundational constitutional document of the international system, alongside treaties, conventions, and agency-specific codes such as the International Health Regulations and international maritime regulations. Russia and China have repeatedly returned to that framework. One can question their own fidelity to it, as well as the fidelity of the United States and Israel. Relational consistency is fundamental here if we are not to fall into the ontological trap of either/or reasoning. Be that as it may, the distinction matters: the UN Charter is written law, while the rules-based order is a more flexible political vocabulary.

II

The phrase “rules-based international order” is usually presented as if it named something clear and settled. We are told that this order must be defended, that its rules are universal, and that its enemies are those who violate or seek to overturn them. But when one asks where the rules are written, who authored them, who interprets them, and why some states are punished while others are excused, the phrase begins to lose its solidity. It does not disappear. It begins to look less like a legal code and more like a political creed.

This does not mean, of course, that international law does not exist. The United Nations Charter exists. Treaties, conventions, courts, diplomatic protocols, trade agreements, and human rights instruments exist. But the “rules-based international order” is not identical with international law. It is a broader political formula that gathers selected laws, institutional habits, geopolitical memories, moral claims, and Western authority into one apparently self-evident expression. Its power lies precisely in this ambiguity.

The distinction matters because the two vocabularies are often deliberately blurred. UN-based international law is anchored in the UN Charter, treaty obligations, customary international law, sovereign equality, and the procedures of institutions such as the Security Council, where China and Russia sit as permanent members. The Western “rules-based order,” by contrast, is not a defined legal regime with a settled text, membership, jurisdiction, or agreed procedure for interpretation. It is a political vocabulary that can invoke the authority of international law when that authority is useful but can also move beyond the UN framework when Security Council authorization, sovereign equality, or treaty law constrains Western objectives.

This is why China and Russia repeatedly insist on the language of the United Nations, sovereignty, non-interference, and international law. Their argument is not that they themselves consistently observe these principles. Rather, they use the UN framework to expose what they describe as Western selectivity: the West appeals to international law when it supports Western policy but turns to the broader “rules-based order” when formal law becomes inconvenient. The result is not the abolition of international law but its displacement by ambiguity. UN law remains the public source of legitimacy, while the “rules-based order” becomes the flexible language through which Western power can claim legal authority without always submitting to legal constraint.

This ambiguity becomes visible in the cases most often used to invoke or challenge the rules-based order. In the Western account, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a clear violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and a direct assault on the rules-based order; Russia responds by shifting the frame to NATO expansion, Western security pressure, and strategic encirclement. In Israel-Palestine, Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, involved grave violations of international humanitarian law, especially attacks on civilians and hostage-taking; yet the broader legal question also includes occupation, settlement expansion, domination over Palestinian life, and the unresolved question of self-determination.

These cases should not be treated as equivalent, nor can they be resolved in passing. But they show why the struggle over international law is also a struggle over chronology, framing, and authority: who decides when the legal story begins, which violations count, and which historical injuries are made visible or invisible? These cases require fuller treatment elsewhere. They also recall Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s warning about “the danger of a single story”, a point I have discussed elsewhere and continue to find central to relational thinking.

For this reason, the phrase operates first as an incantation. It is repeated by presidents, diplomats, journalists, military alliances, think tanks, universities, and policy experts until it acquires the sound of common sense. The repetition does not simply describe an order; it helps produce obedience to the belief that such an order already exists. Like all incantations, its force depends less on demonstration than on authorized repetition. The more often it is pronounced from the right places, the less necessary it seems to define it. This is where my semiotic concern enters: the force of the phrase lies not only in what it names, but in what its repetition authorizes.

But incantation alone is not enough. Around the phrase there has also formed a cult-like attachment. This does not mean that the rules-based order is simply a cult, which would reduce the argument to polemic. It means that the phrase can become cult-like when devotion to it exceeds argument. At that point, doubt is no longer treated as inquiry; it is treated as betrayal. To question the order set by incantation means to threaten civilization, democracy, freedom, or the West itself. A similar incantation occurs when one calls Zionism into question for its state violence against Palestinians. One is then readily accused of antisemitism.

III

The shock of Vance’s speech was not only what he said. It was that he spoke from within the Western world while refusing to perform the expected ritual of incantation. If the rules-based order functions as a credo, then internal dissent appears as heresy. The believer does not need to know exactly where the rules are written. The believer knows that the order must exist because, without it, there would supposedly be chaos, authoritarianism, barbarism, spheres of influence, or the return of history.

There is a third layer: myth. Myth should not be understood here as a simple falsehood. A myth is a narrative that gives a community its sense of origin, moral direction, and historical mission. The myth of the rules-based order tells the West that, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it created a universal order of peace, law, democracy, development, and freedom. Within this myth, Western leadership is not one historical arrangement among others. It becomes the condition of civilization itself.

Myth converts geopolitical preference into moral drama. The West becomes guardian of order; its rivals become threats to order; dissent becomes appeasement; and the decline of Western primacy is imagined as the collapse of the world. This is why the phrase “rules-based international order” is so resilient. It is not merely an argument about institutions. It is a story about who has the right to define legality, responsibility, democracy, security, and civilization.

Here, the argument of Argentine law and international relations scholar María Celia Martínez de Castro becomes decisive because it helps explain the institutional background behind the wider crisis. Her language of “erosion from within,” “permanent coercion,” and “functional hollowing out” shifts the critique from belief to practice. If Trachtenberg helps us see that the rules-based order has no clearly written legal backing behind it, Martínez de Castro helps us see what happens when that belief system is operationalized through selective enforcement, sanctions, financial exclusion, security pressure, and instrumental uses of law.

The order erodes from within when those who claim to defend it hollow out its own conditions of legitimacy. If law is invoked selectively, if allies receive exceptions, if coercion is justified as legality, and if institutions become instruments for preserving a bloc’s declining authority, then the myth remains at the level of language while practice moves in another direction. The vocabulary remains: rules, order, democracy, responsibility, international community. But the function changes. The order speaks as law while operating increasingly as discipline.

This is why the crisis of the Western rules-based order cannot be blamed only on external challengers. Russia, China, BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and other non-Western platforms do not emerge simply as aggressors against an otherwise stable order. They also emerge as responses to contradictions already present within that order. Multipolarity is not only the result of new powers rising. It is also the consequence of an old order losing credibility from within.

This does not mean that the emerging non-Western multipolar order already provides a coherent alternative. BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization reveal the beginning of a different grammar of global order, but not yet a fully articulated system. Their appeal lies less in a complete rulebook than in a political sensibility organized around sovereignty, non-interference, civilizational plurality, development, infrastructure, security cooperation, and the right of states to follow different paths of modernization.

IV

At this point, the essay has to move from diagnosis to alternatives. If the Western rules-based order is losing authority, the next question is unavoidable: can the language of multipolarity produce more legitimate forms of rulemaking, or will it simply reorganize hierarchy under new names?

Xi Jinping’s language of “win-win cooperation” belongs to this emerging grammar. It contrasts itself with the zero-sum imagination of Western geopolitics, where the rise of one power is treated as the decline or containment of another. Yet “win-win” must also be analyzed critically. It is a political discourse, not proof that power asymmetries have disappeared. A non-Western order can criticize Western domination and still generate its own hierarchies, dependencies, and exclusions.

The task, then, is not to replace one mythology of universal authority with several competing mythologies of regional or civilizational authority. Multipolarity by itself is not liberation. It can become a world of rival blocs, competing empires, spheres of influence, and new forms of domination. The real question is whether multipolarity can be joined to a deeper multilateralism: not the old multilateralism of permission granted by the West, but a plural multilateralism of co-authorship.

That would require understanding regulation differently. The choice is not between a regulated Western order and an unregulated multipolar world. The choice is between regulation from above and regulation through negotiation. In the Western unipolar order, regulation often appeared through institutions whose authority reflected Western power. In a genuinely multipolar order, regulation would have to be produced among several centers of power, each bringing its own history, interests, vocabulary, and claims to legitimacy.

The myth of the rules-based order is therefore being challenged on two fronts. From within, it is hollowed out by coercion, selectivity, and institutional contradiction. From without, it is challenged by non-Western actors who refuse to accept that Western historical experience should function as global reason. The danger is that this challenge may reproduce domination in plural form. The possibility is that it may open the way toward a world in which rulemaking itself becomes shared.

The point, then, is not that order is unnecessary. It is that the incantation of order is no substitute for legitimate rulemaking. A phrase repeated often enough by powerful institutions may produce belief, but belief is not law. A cult-like attachment may defend the phrase against criticism, but devotion is not legitimacy. A myth may give the order emotional force, but myth cannot indefinitely conceal coercion, inconsistency, and hollowed-out practice. This leads to the next question: if the Western rules-based order can no longer monopolize the language of universality, what other vocabularies of order are becoming available?

Chinese scholarship is useful here because it shows that other vocabularies of world order are already being developed. Up to this point, I have been looking at the instability of the Western vocabulary: its legal ambiguity, its mythic force, and its erosion through selective practice. The next step is to ask what becomes thinkable once Western categories no longer monopolize the imagination of world order.

It is also useful to separate the different voices in the discussion. Vance and Xi Jinping speak from the world of the state. Their language is strategic and performative. Vance’s Munich speech intervened in the crisis of the Western consensus from inside the Atlantic world. Xi’s language of “win-win cooperation” speaks from the position of a rising power seeking to authorize a different diplomatic vocabulary. Both matter, but both are state voices: they do not simply describe the world; they try to move governments, publics, and institutions in particular directions.

V

Trachtenberg and Martínez de Castro occupy a different position. They do not speak as state actors, but as analysts of the language and practice of power. Trachtenberg helps expose the conceptual instability of the “rules-based international order” by asking where its rules reside. Martínez de Castro helps expose its institutional instability by showing how coercion and selective enforcement hollow it out from within. Their importance is not that they offer a rival doctrine of world order, but that they help reveal the gap between official language and political practice.

This is where Zhao Tingyang and Zhang Weiwei enter my argument. They help clarify the wider struggle over the language of world order in which Vance’s speech became meaningful. They show that the multipolar moment is not only a redistribution of power among states; it is also a redistribution of concepts. Their work asks whether world order can be imagined without beginning from Western liberal modernity as the only measure of legitimacy, civilization, sovereignty, or universality.

If BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the language of “win-win cooperation” signal a changing distribution of power, Zhao and Zhang point to a changing distribution of political imagination. They ask, in different ways, whether the categories through which the West has defined political modernity, sovereignty, legitimacy, and universality can still claim a monopoly over the imagination of world order.

That is why they matter here. They connect the critique of the Western order to the harder task of imagining what could come next. Zhao Tingyang’s idea of tianxia, or “all under heaven,” challenges the Westphalian image of world order as a competition among sovereign states. Instead of beginning from separate units defending their interests, Zhao asks how order might be imagined from the standpoint of coexistence within a shared world, where legitimacy depends on the capacity to include others rather than on domination or legal sovereignty alone.

Zhang Weiwei’s civilizational-state argument makes a related claim from another angle. China, he argues, cannot be judged only as a modern nation-state or by Western liberal measures such as electoral competition. It must also be understood through its civilizational continuity, administrative traditions, scale, developmental performance, social stability, and historical confidence. Together, these arguments help make a non-Western grammar of world order thinkable, but they should not be absorbed uncritically into state power. Tianxia can move beyond imperial rivalry while raising questions about hierarchy and who defines harmony; the civilizational-state thesis can challenge Western liberal universalism while risking a new form of political closure.

There are several Chinese scholars beyond Zhao Tingyang and Zhang Weiwei who are also working through the problem of world order from non-Western premises. Yan Xuetong, at Tsinghua University, approaches the question from political science rather than philosophy. In works such as Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, he criticizes the Westphalian system for its dependence on anarchy, raw power, and competitive state egoism. His alternative is the idea of humane authority, or wangdao, drawn from pre-Qin political thought. For Yan, a more stable international order would depend not only on material strength but also on moral leadership, social justice, and a hierarchy grounded in responsibility rather than domination.

Qin Yaqing, associated with China Foreign Affairs University, develops another important alternative through relational theory. Qin argues that mainstream international relations theory remains shaped by a Western and Aristotelian logic in which states are treated as separate, rational, and competitive units. Against this model, he proposes relational governance, drawing on Confucian ideas of relationship and process. In this view, the world is not best understood as a collection of isolated states defending fixed rights and boundaries, but as a web of relationships that must be continuously managed. Global governance should therefore emphasize harmony, adjustment, and the maintenance of relationships rather than a strictly legalistic or zero-sum understanding of sovereignty.

A further line of argument comes from the modern inheritors of Liang Qichao and from civilizational-state scholarship associated with institutions such as Peking University and Fudan University. Liang had already suggested that traditional Chinese political thought was oriented toward the well-being of tianxia, or humanity under heaven, rather than only toward the survival of a single state. Contemporary scholars such as Pan Wei and Su Changhe extend this concern into debates over institutional governance. They argue that the Westphalian emphasis on absolute sovereignty produces coordination failures in areas such as climate change, financial crises, and global regulation. Their alternative points toward cooperative governance, in which community interest and shared responsibility matter more than the unlimited veto power of individual states.

U.S. scholars have also questioned the obsolescence of the Westphalian system, though from a different location. I mention only two here. Richard Falk, a veteran scholar of international law, has long criticized the limits of the UN Charter system, especially the “victors’ justice” built into the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council. His response is not to strengthen state sovereignty, but to imagine an order after Westphalia from below, driven by global civil society, international courts, human rights, and the urgency of planetary survival.

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou approaches the issue from the angle of structural transformation and statehood after Westphalia. In A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order, he analyzes modern conflicts, hybrid actors, and transnational forms of violence as signs that the state’s monopoly over power has weakened and that new legal and regulatory frameworks are needed beyond the traditional Western state-centered model. These arguments overlap with Chinese critiques of Westphalia, but they move from a different location and toward a different horizon.

These parallels also prevent a simple East-West opposition. I use the word “parallels” deliberately: comparison too easily treats Chinese and U.S. positions as independent units, while a relational reading sees them as entangled within the colonial matrix of power. They are not entangled as equals. They are connected through an uneven history in which Western categories, institutions, and claims to universality have long organized the terms of recognition, legitimacy, and knowledge.

The point is not that Chinese scholars possess concepts while U.S. scholars remain trapped inside Westphalia. The point is that both are thinking from different locations within the same unequal structure. Chinese scholars tend to approach the exhaustion of Westphalia through civilizational plurality, historical experience, and the critique of Western universality. U.S.-based critics tend to approach it through global civil society, humanitarian law, state failure, hybrid violence, and planetary risk. Read as parallels, rather than as comparisons between independent units, they prepare the ground for Qin Yaqing’s relational theory.

Qin Yaqing’s relational theory gives this reading its conceptual vocabulary and complements my decolonial semiotic perspective. These intellectual locations should not be treated as separate camps standing outside one another, but as positions formed within an unequal field of power. Their aims and sites of enunciation are different, and that difference matters. If we read them ontologically, as simply Chinese or U.S. scholars, we remain inside the either-or trap that decolonial thinking has tried to displace.

The argument therefore moves on three levels. At the level of state discourse, Vance and Xi reveal competing performances of order: Vance exposes a fracture within the Western myth, while Xi proposes a language of non-zero-sum cooperation. At the level of scholarly critique, Trachtenberg, Lavrov, Martínez de Castro, and Lane expose different forms of instability in the Western rules-based order—conceptual ambiguity, tension with UN-based international law, institutional hollowing out, and transformation from within the United States. At the level of political theory, Zhao Tingyang, Zhang Weiwei, Yan Xuetong, Qin Yaqing, Pan Wei, Su Changhe, Richard Falk, and Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou show that the emerging multipolar moment is not only geopolitical but also epistemic: it challenges who has the authority to define order, civilization, legality, sovereignty, and universality.

VI

The final turn brings the argument back to the United States and to the Trumpism already introduced in the opening paragraph. Donald Trump’s second presidency and Vice President Vance’s address in Munich are not outside the crisis of the rules-based order; they are part of it. David Lane’s article on Trumpism helps me return to that opening from another angle: the crisis is not produced only by Russia, China, or other external challengers but also from within the United States itself.

Lane’s argument helps me read Trump’s second presidency not simply as the return of a disruptive individual, but as the political expression of a wider formation that has been taking shape for decades. Trumpism, in this sense, is not reducible to Trump’s temperament, his authoritarian style, or his erratic decisions. It names a broader project supported by figures such as J.D. Vance, patrons such as Elon Musk, conservative institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, and media circuits such as Fox News. Lane’s key point is that this formation gives ideological coherence to what he calls “a new form of American capitalism,” organized around “the primacy of American interests.”

That is why, in his view, commentators who concentrate only on Trump’s divisive personality “miss the big picture.” The larger issue is that Trumpism marks “a major departure from the consensus of the international liberal rules-based system” and may help authorize a world after Yalta in which China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States claim leading regional roles. What matters most, then, is the distinction Lane makes between Trump’s often inconsistent actions and the Trumpist doctrine itself: the latter is anchored in the protection of American capitalist interests through state administrative action and stronger economic, political, and social borders around the United States.

The debate made visible by Vance’s Munich speech should not be dismissed as a quarrel over diplomatic language. Trachtenberg helps explain the immediate shock inside the Atlantic world. Lavrov, Martínez de Castro, Chinese and U.S. scholars, and Lane clarify the deeper rupture that made that shock possible. Trachtenberg showed that the “rules-based international order” is less clearly defined than its defenders suggest. Lavrov made visible the gap between UN-based international law and a more flexible Western language of rules. Martínez de Castro showed how the order is weakened from within by coercion, selectivity, and institutional hollowing out. The issue, finally, is who gets to define order.

The same debate widens when read through Chinese and U.S. scholarship. Chinese scholars such as Zhao, Zhang, Yan, Qin, Pan, and Su ask whether world order can be imagined from civilizational, relational, and cooperative premises rather than only from Western liberal categories. Falk and Mohamedou raise related questions from within U.S. scholarship, emphasizing global civil society, humanitarian law, hybrid conflict, and the limits of state-centered sovereignty. Lane places Trumpism inside a larger transformation of American capitalism and global power. Taken together, these arguments do not provide a ready-made alternative, but they establish the condition for one: the old monopoly over the meaning of order is ending. A multipolar world will build shared rules without turning plurality into another name for hierarchy only if rulemaking becomes a practice of co-authorship rather than a privilege claimed by any single state, bloc, or civilization.

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