IT’S amusing how the defenders of the ‘rules-based international order’ don’t realise that they sound so tired and ‘last year’. It’s as if the early critics of Einstein were complaining that he hardly mentioned Newton’s Law of Motion, and therefore just didn’t get it. There are what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shifts’ in politics as well as science, when the old language becomes incommensurable with the new.
The election of Donald J Trump marks such a rupture in the established ways of doing things. The globalists sense danger and have sent their commentariat apostles out on mission.
Step forward Mr Paul Wood, who has written an article for The Spectator warning of an ‘age of autocracy’, an epochal full-on assault on the way things are meant to be done, overseen by an expanding yet exclusive club of ‘presidents-for life’. This new and shocking impulse to keep power is a real and developing threat to the sacralised structures of world order, he suggests. This will not do.
Mr Wood correctly names the current membership: Putin, Xi, Lukashenko, Sisi and Kim. His central thesis, based on cod psychoanalysis, is that President Trump is itching to become a made member of this international gangster clique.
The piece is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from anything granted a nihil obstat by the Jesuitical mind of Mr Michael Gove. Which is to say it is a tapestry of awfulness, threaded with the familiar mix of innuendo, globalist complacency and the de haut en bas snootiness which seems to be the required tone of all discussion relating to the 47th US President.
Consider the following alternative journalism:
‘Now Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is trying to join the club. He has engineered trumped-up charges of terrorism and corruption against the man who might beat him in forthcoming elections, Istanbul’s mayor. More importantly [my italics], Trump openly admires such autocrats and clearly wants to be one himself.’
Got that? It’s bad enough that a politically vulnerable Erdogan resorts to lawfare, but what’s even worse is that Trump (himself a victim of politically suborned judicial mischief, let’s not forget) ‘clearly wants’ to be a member of the same fraternity of vulgar dictators.
This is not analysis so much as confirmation bias seasoned with a sprinkling of psychobabble. If possible, it gets worse:
‘President Trump’s mental pathologies are well known, his character shaped by his bullying, “high-functioning psychopath” father, according to a book by Trump’s niece, Mary.’
I am not sure that leaning into the tawdry and historical dynamics of the Trump family is conducive to worthwhile clinical diagnostics.
When he’s not cosplaying Dr Frasier Crane, Mr Wood is clutching his pearls over the threat the President presents to the ‘rules-based international order’:
‘Trump’s generals tried to explain the concept to him at a meeting in a bunker in the Pentagon early in his first term. He called them dopes, babies and losers, adding, “I wouldn’t want to go to war with you people”.’
I suspect that the generals were not so much ‘explaining’ anything to Trump as trying to win him around to the then Defence Department perma-government orthodoxy, which later proved so woefully ineffective under the waxwork ‘presidency’ of Joe Biden. I don’t know about you, but I find myself grateful that President 45 was unpersuaded by the people who went on to ‘mastermind’ the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Before lamenting the alleged decline of the ‘rules-based’ order we should take a moment to think about what those rules are, who they benefit and, most importantly, where they come from.
The new internationalists are the contemporary Gnostics, a self-defined expert class, one which takes itself to possess insights unavailable to those of us less blessed. They speak of ‘international rules’ as if they are timeless, abstract Platonic Forms (like the number 7, or the perfect triangle). When asked how these mysterious universals can interact with the particularities of actual geopolitics, they seem to find the inquiry impertinent.
The answer to that last question is that they do it by aggressively embedding globalist assumptions into national law. The problem with the veneration of these Platonic rules, it is becoming clear, is that it is coming increasingly to corrupt the local as much as it does the international.
We experience this in the United Kingdom where the priorities and obsessions of the ECHR have been transported via the Human Rights Act into UK law, infecting every decision of the domestic judicial process as a result. This is most obvious in the example of immigration law, where the language of ‘human rights’ has been used, it seems, to write a national suicide note.
The internationalists are cultivating a geographical/psychological mirage, by fooling us into thinking that the global and the international are somehow far away and over there, distant and useful objects of collective disdain. Meanwhile their coup has moved right here and is gathering pace. We have reached the point where policy formulation – and how it’s reported – are purposely at odds with the history and particular circumstances of these islands.
Paul Wood sees the emergence of a new autocracy as being a problem because their vanities, expansionist ambitions and indifference to domestic opinion threaten the established orthodoxy. Some of us see the orthodoxy, the rise of a rapacious globalism serviced by rules neither you nor I ever consented to, as being the bigger problem.
I didn’t mention that Mr Wood used to work for the BBC World Service. But I’m sure you’d worked that out for yourself.
