Amid the mayhem and war crimes of the Trump administration, there has been much liberal angst about the decline of the rules-based international order. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos is a famous example, but you can find echoes of it in op-eds, social media posts and TV coverage across the Western world.

For decades, the story goes, the world was a stable system based on cooperation and rising prosperity, until Donald Trump came along out of nowhere and took a wrecking ball to the whole thing. Now, we are entering a new, dangerous era of constant competition and conflict. As Carney put it, with a nod to Thucydides:

“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

There’s just one problem with that story: the rules-based international order never existed.

Carney and others often pause briefly to acknowledge that the story of the rules-based international order was “partially false,” before going on to continue their argument about its merits and how disastrous its demise is. That is akin to sweeping some very large items of furniture under a very small rug. The hypocrisy and lies cannot be relegated to a footnote when they were so central to how the system operated.

First of all, let’s talk about the phrase itself. The rules-based international order is usually presented to us as a benign gift from Western leaders who, appalled by the violence and barbarity of World War II, set about to construct a system that would prevent such a catastrophe from happening again.

But nobody in that period ever talked about a rules-based international order. This graph from Google Ngram shows how often the phrase is mentioned in books published in each year. It’s a flat line for most of the 20th century, before surfacing in the late 1990s and spiking in the late 2010s.

That’s because the foreign-policy priorities of Western leaders had little to do with rules and order, and a lot to do with preserving their colonies in the case of Europe and defeating the scourge of communism in the case of the USA. They didn’t want to be constrained by rules in either case, and they weren’t. The USA conducted regime change, installed and supported violent dictators, fought violent wars, assassinated opponents, etc. Britain tortured and castrated Mao Mao rebels in Kenya. France fought bitterly to hold onto Algeria, with a cost of more than a million Algerian lives.

These are just a handful of examples among many, many others. The great powers were never constrained by rules. The zenith of the rules-based international order looks a lot like a world in which the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

So why the spike in usage of the term in recent decades? It’s simple: after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet menace, the West needed a new organizing principle to justify American hegemony. There was some talk in the 1990s of the end of history, peace and prosperity and that kind of thing, but that wouldn’t support massive spending on the military-industrial complex.

So the rules-based international order was born, with America as “the world’s policeman”, fairly but firmly enforcing those rules. As we’ve seen, though, that was never the case. Based on the historical evidence, America looks a lot less like the world’s policeman and a lot more like the world’s mob boss.

And there, perhaps, is a hint at the true meaning of all this worry over the decline of a fictional order. Mob bosses, after all, unleash violence on outsiders while being fiercely protective of their clan. As long as you’re part of the famiglia, you can enjoy the riches and just look the other way when someone else ends up at the bottom of a river in concrete shoes.

A few things have changed under Donald Trump, and one of them is that American aggression is no longer directed solely at the Global South. Now, Canada is threatened with Anschluss, Denmark is threatened with the seizing of Greenland, and Europe is very bluntly told that the U.S. is no longer its protector. Then there are the trade wars, the tariffs, the barrage of ideological warfare. Imagine a mob boss telling his most trusted lieutenants that he’s going it alone and doesn’t need them any more. That’s more or less where trans-Atlantic relations are right now.

Another thing that’s changed under Donald Trump is the abandonment of pretences. A war of aggression is a crime under international law: it’s what many Nazis were prosecuted for at the Nuremberg trials. Previous leaders of the U.S. and other war-mongering nations have gone to great lengths to justify their wars of aggression by painting them as acts of self-defence or ensuring that they were sanctioned by the UN Security Council. So we had to live through absurdities like invading Afghanistan in support of women’s liberation and searching every inch of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that nobody really expected to find.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. He just unleashes air strikes, abducts or kills foreign leaders, lets the civilian casualties mount, and he doesn’t even try to make it anything other than what it is: a war of aggression, aka a war crime. He doesn’t even bother to consult Congress, let alone the UN.

That puts his allies in a very difficult position. Even the most invertebrate politicians like Sir Keir Starmer have been forced to issue mild rebukes and carefully worded prevarications. Tony Blair stood proudly behind George W. Bush throughout all of his war crimes, and he could do so because he had plausible deniability. Who could possibly have known that the WMD were fake? He and other Western leaders could support mass violence while plausibly claiming to uphold the rules-based international order. Now, that line is impossible to walk.

I’ve been focusing on war and violence, perhaps because the destruction in Iran is so fresh in my mind right now, but the other much-praised elements of the rules-based international order were a fraud too.

In his speech, Carney talked about things like “a stable financial system” and “frameworks for resolving disputes.” He means institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, which, in the liberal Western imagination, set fair rules and boundaries to support free trade around the world and enhance prosperity.

Here’s what Harvard International Review has to say about the IMF’s record in that regard:

“After West African countries were forced to follow the IMF’s structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s, spending on education decreased by 25 percent and spending on healthcare decreased by 50 percent. This reduction in important social services spending caused an estimated 500,000 deaths of children in Africa.”

Meanwhile, the WTO was used by rich nations to open markets in poor nations. The rules only applied one way: poor countries had to remove subsidies for their domestic industries in the name of free trade, while the EU continued to subsidize its agriculture, the USA continued to subsidize its cotton, etc. For some reason, this article about Burkina Faso cotton farmers going out of business due to US cotton subsidies stuck with me so much that I found it again 20 years later. Then there’s the case of Chiquita lobbying Washington to use trade rules to cripple the Caribbean banana industry, devastating the economies of small islands, and a thousand more examples. (And, as an aside, people often forget that the WTO, despite often being presented as a foundation of post-war prosperity, was only created in 1995.)

Despite my bashing of the rules-based international order, I desperately want it to exist. A true rules-based international order is our only hope of securing a future with any measure of peace, justice and shared prosperity. Here are what I see as the minimum requirements of such an order:

• Abolition of the UN Security Council. Why should a handful of former colonial powers have veto power over the rest of the planet?
• A democratic, transparent United Nations that represents the interests of all people in all countries and has genuine power to resolve disputes.
• A global agreement to place very low caps on military spending and drastically reduce current arsenals—comparable to the nuclear disarmament of the 1980s but for all kinds of weapons.
• Divert former military spending to investment in ending poverty and improving people’s lives. It would take just 4% of current global military spending to end global hunger by 2030, according to the UN. Imagine what we could do with the other 96%.
• Immediate agreements to end fossil fuel dependency and avoid the worst effects of climate change. If a rules-based international order can’t create and enforce rules to make the planet liveable for the next generation, then what good is it?
• Acknowledgement of historic injustices and a genuine effort to make amends through concerted policies to reduce inequality, both within and between nations.
• Prosecute all war crimes equally—no exemptions for powerful nations or leaders. If anyone does what Trump and Netanyahu just did, they should be arrested and tried in court, like any other law-breaker.

What we had from Truman to Biden was nowhere close to that. What we have under Trump is undoubtedly worse, undoubtedly more dangerous, but please stop lamenting the demise of a system that never existed. Instead, let’s focus our energies on building a genuinely rules-based, genuinely international order while there’s still time.

Sure, I know it’s impractical. Even seeing just one of those bullet points come true in my lifetime would be a miracle. But without it, we only have increasing barbarism on a burning planet to look forward to, so I think it’s probably worth a shot.