Garri Hendell: The Case for the Rule of Law- “International Edition”

The Trump Administration seeks to entirely dismantle the rule-based international order that has governed global affairs since World War II, in so far as it hasn’t already done so. The president and his allies in this project mock the limitations and imperfections of international law, multilateral organizations, and NGOs. They promise a better world–or at least a more prosperous America–in which our country acts as it wishes, unconstrained except by the president’s personal “morality”.

This approach to global affairs is contemptuous of the value of institutions and of our hard-won gains since the Second World War, wildly naïve about what might be accomplished by starting anew, and recalls nothing more than our domestic experience with DOGE. DOGE was, of course, a steroidal wrecking ball of a government program, which outsourced a kamikaze “audit” of federal government departments and staffing. The result of this largely amateurish and ineffective effort: a decimated and bleeding civil service, a grotesque loss of Congressionally-mandated functions, and not a heck of a lot of cost savings or other benefits. The negative effects, on the other hand, have been significant. 

At the most charitable view, DOGE represented an entrepreneurial, Silicon Valley-type spirit of iterative innovation where you launch things in a half-baked but enthusiastic way and then attempt to fix the airplane in flight. Everyone in the military knows that national defense, at least, does not work this way. While in tech one may be able to “fail forward” through various bankruptcies and re-imaginations of one’s money-making idea, defense is ponderous, redundant, and designed never to fail. The non-negotiable contract with the American people and all that.

At worst, this impulse to move fast and break everything only to remake it into something better is a by-product of a dark corner of American thought calling for authoritarianism in the mold, perhaps, of Hungary’s Orban or Turkey’s Erdogan.  Like excessive intellectual enthusiasm for executive power, it threatens to undermine American Constitutional democracy. These philosophical approaches serve not to advance the American project, but to subvert it.

I have written elsewhere regarding the right reasons to use military force, as well as the law that, since the Second World War, has supported that analysis. At a more basic level, prosperity is a function of stability and stability is a function of peace. These lessons can manifest themselves almost anywhere.  Last spring on a trip to Hawaii my family and I spent a thoughtful afternoon learning about the challenges of vanilla cultivation; we came away with a robust understanding of how the benefits of civilization rely on long and time-consuming logistic chains. Disruption likely does not bring renewal. It brings chaos and loss of civilizational gains. 

Perhaps it would be useful for us to re-articulate our shared definition of what “works”. In America we can all agree on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The post-World War Two era also saw an international consensus on a rules-based global order, which included frameworks for conflict resolution, economic integration, and global trade.

The experience with trade is instructive. It contributed to massive global economic growth and an historic reduction in poverty. Whether or not the benefits of this growth were experienced equitably or as any given commentator might prefer, I think we can all agree that raising the standard of living for everyone across the globe was and remains a worthy goal, not just morally, but from a practical standpoint. Prosperous neighbors start fewer wars. Aid is cheaper than military intervention. This logic also applies to global health programs and other foreign aid programs which have been resolutely dismembered over the last year. These programs cost pennies on the dollar compared with the cost of conflict, to say nothing of hard-to-measure gains in American soft power or the immeasurable value of lives saved.

Whatever our individual vision for the future, fracturing the global legal order and transforming America from the uni-polar protector of the world order to a grubby regional hegemon is not the way forward. We know the right answer, because we and the world have benefited from this formula for generations: military preparedness combined with robust global economic activity, alliances, global cooperation, respect for and adherence to the letter and the spirit of the rule of law. The more we decrement these things, the further we move away from what we want to see for us and for our children. 

At home and abroad, populist leaders wish to tear down the institutions and norms that have enabled an imperfect, but nevertheless historically remarkable, period of peace and prosperity. We must struggle to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, shift the balance back towards the good, and formulate strategies to preserve and, if necessary, rebuild what is lost.

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Garri Benjamin Hendell is a member of the Society for the Rule of Law.