Opinion | US talk of defending the ‘rules-based order’ is fooling no one

Washington cannot claim to want to avoid a conflict with Beijing while simultaneously pushing its vision of a US-led global order – especially when such an order insists on excluding and outcompeting China in the Indo-Pacific and beyond

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, pictured in Washington on January 18, is expected to visit Beijing in February. Photo: AP

Published: 1:30am, 21 Jan 2023Updated: 2:49am, 21 Jan 2023

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to visit China early next month, but the prospect of any serious progress being made remains pretty dismal. As expected, Blinken has already styled his trip as part of US efforts to uphold the “rules-based international order”, with China as its chief strategic rival.

At the same time, White House official Kurt Campbell, the “Indo-Pacific tsar”, has been trying to convince Beijing of the necessity of building security “guardrails” to avoid a war between the two countries.

It is odd that the Biden administration seems oblivious to the fact that these two notions – building guardrails and upholding a “rules-bases-international order” – don’t exist in a symbiotic relationship but, rather, are mutually exclusive.

Members of the China policy elite in Washington, many of whom are arrogant but generally ignorant about Chinese history, have long held the view that the current rules-based international order is defined by universal values, never mind the ugly legacy attached to it. But this order is hardly inclusive and created for the benefit of humanity.

It is not even a peaceful and harmonious system, despite its benign-sounding name. All international orders are power politics by procedural means. They entrench the power of dominant states and allow them to exclude and subdue their rivals.

In fact, all major international orders of the past four centuries were led exclusively by Europeans and white peoples. They were orders of exploitation and racial exclusion, designed by dominant powers to destroy or outcompete rivals.