Dr Tony Donaldson
The 1987 Sri Lanka crisis serves as a quintessential case study in the inherent contradictions of the “Rules-Based International Order.” During this episode, India violated Sri Lankan airspace—blatantly ignoring sovereignty to conduct a “humanitarian” airdrop—only to immediately pivot toward enforcing sovereignty through a treaty designed to bar other foreign powers from the island. This illustrates a defining characteristic of hegemonic power: by maintaining fluid and selective definitions of “legitimate intervention,” a hegemon preserves maximum strategic flexibility.
The United States and its Western allies frequently employ this same duality. These double standards are not failures of the system; they are core components of how it functions to sustain global hierarchies. While the West defends these inconsistencies as a “Lesser of Two Evils”—arguing that an imperfect system is better than a “Law of the Jungle”—this is a false dichotomy. In reality, the Rules-Based International Order is not an alternative to the Law of the Jungle, but rather a sophisticated rebranding of it. It is a system where might makes right, and the interests of the powerful are prioritized at the expense of everyone else.
Furthermore, this modern Law of the Jungle has evolved beyond mere military aggression. It is now fundamentally financial. Through the weaponization of sanctions and the control of global banking systems like SWIFT, the “Rules-Based Order” can starve a population into submission without ever formalizing a declaration of war. We have seen the devastating results of this evolution from the “club to the ledger” in Syria, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and Cuba. Ultimately, a system that uses the language of law to justify the starvation of nations is not just an inherently predatory architecture of power, it is evil.
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