A version of this essay has been published at https://swarajyamag.com/world/the-rules-based-liberal-world-order-or-whatever-is-coming-apart-at-the-seams I don’t know about you, but I have long been a fan of the ‘liberal rules-based international order’, although to be quite honest, I have had only a rather vague idea what it meant. It sounded pretty good, though. I mean, how could any reasonable person be against ‘liberal’, ‘order’, and ‘rules-based’?  It is only lately that I have learned this is strictly a marketing moniker. It’s a bit like the Moral Majority, which has a nice ring to it, and made waves as a bunch of fiery literalist Bible-thumpers some years ago. It turned out, alas, that they were neither particularly ‘moral’ and certainly not a ‘majority’.  If I recall correctly some of its brightest stars were found in flagrante delicto, including one fire-and-brimstone preacher who was caught twice in cars with street prostitutes. Just like the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Similarly, the ‘liberal rules-based international order’ is neither liberal, nor rules-based, nor an order. It is essentially a post-World-War-II mechanism to perpetuate the rule of the victors in that conflict, giving them a free pass in world affairs for as long as possible. In particular, it was an arrangement that assumed that the US would remain the paramount global power for the foreseeable future.  That ‘order’ almost immediately fell  apart because the Soviets and the Americans started a rivalry for spheres of influence, including the Soviet evangelization of communism. The Americans embraced the Domino Theory and began counter-evangelization of democracy as the antidote to all the evils of society.  This ended up in the Cold War, although to be fair, the US did help a number of its allies to prosper. They were mostly white European countries, but also East Asians. Through the power of suggestion (hurrah, New York Times and Hollywood) we have been led to believe that the world is moving steadily towards the triumph of ‘democracy’, which turns out to be a euphemism for a world where Western European/American dominance is written into law. Note how this means the United Nations Security Council has France and Britain, who really don’t deserve to be there; but not Germany and Japan, who do, along with Brazil, South Africa and India. Similarly there is a (written or unwritten?) rule that the World Bank’s President has to be an American. This was followed scrupulously until a South Korean (presumably a friend of America) was given the job in 2012. It is now back to an American. Along the same lines, the IMF’s Managing Director has always been a Western European, with the current incumbent being a Bulgarian former World Bank acting President, with a bit of a chequered past: she was found to have inflated Chinese data to make it look better during her term at the World Bank. Similar stories, I suspect, can be told about all the other major multinational organizations, for instance the WHO which the Chinese have turned into their fiefdom. The Russians, who probably did more to defeat the Germans in WW2 than anybody else, have been denied much of a role.  Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it. That old caste system has a ‘First World’ consisting of the US and Western Europe, a ‘Second World’ consisting of the Soviet Union/Russia and Eastern Europe, and a ‘Third World’ consisting of everybody else. There have been some minor changes, such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the UAE becoming honorary (but not full-fledged) members of the First World.  The other side of the picture is a certain feudalism that this caste system perpetrated, and that has persisted throughout the last 75 years. Feudal First Worlders dominate the serfs of the Third World. Today, First Worlders decry the neo-feuda