‘The Weak Must Suffer’

The Eternal Fiction Of The ‘International Rules-Based Order’

The empty UN Security Council Chamber in New York City (Wikipedia)

These are exceptional times. The United States has been threatening to take over Greenland, an aggressive move against Europe. Now, and only now, are political leaders and compliant news media publicly acknowledging that the ‘international rules-based order’ is no more. Of course, it was only ever a convenient myth, blown wide open by the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Trump managed to dismiss Greenland’s status as part of Denmark with typical chutzpah:

‘I’m a big fan [of Denmark], but the fact that they had a boat land there five hundred years ago doesn’t mean that they own the land’.

It was a tragicomic remark, displaying Trump’s apparent ignorance of his own country’s history. As many pointed out on social media, the indigenous peoples of North America made the same point about the White settlers from Europe who came by boat and who stole the natives’ land and committed genocide.

Like a disgruntled toddler, Trump even linked his threat to seize control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize which, ludicrously, had just been ‘gifted’ to him by the winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (the Norwegian Nobel Committee later stated that the prize itself is non-transferable).

On 18 January, Trump sent an infantile text message to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre:

‘Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace’.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, responded to Trump’s threat to take Greenland:

‘Territorial integrity and sovereignty are fundamental principles of international law.

‘They are essential for Europe and for the international community as a whole.’

Her ostensible concern for international law was absent when it came to the recent outrageous and illegal US kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. Even worse, her concern for international law has been conspicuously lacking during Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on the Palestinians in Gaza.

In fact, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, strongly alluded to the fact that the supposed framework of international law, territorial law and sovereignty had been a sham all along. In a remarkable speech to the global elite at Davos, Switzerland, he began with an aphorism by the ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides that:

‘the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’

It is notable that Noam Chomsky has often cited this quote to highlight the gap between the stated lofty aims of great power and the brutal reality for those on the receiving end of imperial force. We are not claiming that Carney has suddenly become an acolyte of Chomsky. But perhaps Canada’s leader has been emboldened to speak out by recent world events and feels honour-bound to give an impression of someone being at least minimally honest to his domestic Canadian audience and the wider public.

Carney went on to say that:

‘We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.’

A glaring example, which he did not voice, is the Western condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while the West has refused to condemn or even acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, the US and its allies, including the UK, have been complicit or even participants in the genocide, having armed Israel, provided military training, intelligence support and diplomatic cover.

Carney continued to expand on the myth of the global ‘rules-based order’:

‘This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.’

No mention, however, of the appalling costs of that American hegemony to much of the world’s population.

Carney then added:

‘We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

‘This bargain no longer works.’

A ‘bargain’ for the comfortable in privileged parts of the world, perhaps; but not for those who have suffered US-inflicted wars, regime changes, ‘humanitarian interventions’ and much else besides.

The admission that ‘we’, a term which really means Western leaders and their media cheerleaders, have ‘largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality’ is significant. Obviously, any reasonably-well informed person has known this all along. But the media preferred to skip merrily past this crucial aspect of Carney’s speech, as we will see below.

Unwelcome Truths About US Imperialism

The rise of US imperialism, especially since the end of the Second World War, has been accompanied and promoted by grandiose assertions about spreading democracy, peace and prosperity. The self-serving ideology has underpinned all of the following horrors and many more:

· The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order ‘to bring about the surrender of Japan and end WW2’: a demonstrably false narrative.

· The overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically-elected leader of Iran to be replaced by the dictatorial, US-compliant Shah in 1953.

· The Indonesian coup in 1965, killing up to one million people, to install the brutal, Washington-friendly General Suharto.

· The invasion and bombing of Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) ‘to stop the spread of Communism’ in the 1960 and 1970s.

· Extensive support in the 1980s for right-wing governments and paramilitary groups in Latin America, utilising death squads to suppress leftist movements.

· The Persian Gulf war in 1990-91, with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 Iraqi military deaths, and up to 5,000 civilian deaths.

· Sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s which led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, including around 500,000 children under the age of five.

· The 2001 invasion-occupation of Afghanistan: the first of the US post-9/11 wars which have led to an estimated total death toll of around five million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan.

· The 2003 invasion-occupation of Iraq, leading to the deaths of over one million Iraqis.

· The 2011 bombing of Libya and the destruction of much its infrastructure, acting as a catalyst for a massive surge in jihadist activity across north Africa and the Middle East.

· The 2014 coup in Ukraine to impose US-backed regime change, fuelling dangerous tensions with Russia.

· Crippling economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, including joint air strikes with Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities; together with the fomenting of violence inside Iran by CIA-backed NGOs and Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.

· The strangling of the Venezuelan economy through sanctions, and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, on 3 January 2026.

All of the above is but a fraction of the crimes committed by the US empire over many decades. For more information, read any number of books by Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, William Blum, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Naomi Klein, John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Media Lens and others.

The British state-corporate media response was telling. The crucial segment of his speech about the longstanding ‘fiction’ of the ‘international rules-based order’ and ‘the gaps between rhetoric and reality’ was almost entirely buried. If we had responsible, public-service news media in this country they would have quoted that vital section, word-for-word, and provided relevant context and substantive analysis as to what it meant.

Predictably, the BBC’s online report simply omitted that part of Carney’s speech. BBC News at Ten devoted all of twenty seconds to the speech. The short snippet showed Carney saying that ‘the rules-based order is fading’, followed by his citing of the Thucydides quote. But BBC North America editor Sarah Smith merely said in her voiceover that his speech ‘echoed Greenland’s right to sovereignty’. The rest of Carney’s comments disappeared down the proverbial BBC black hole.

The Guardian had a live feed which quoted Carney saying that ‘the rules-based order is fading’ and that the world faces ‘“the end of a pleasant fiction and the dawn of a harsh reality of geopolitics” in which the great powers are unconstrained.’ But there was no elucidation to help readers understand the magnitude of Carney’s comments.

Worse, a dedicated ‘analysis’ piece in the Guardian made no mention of Carney’s remarks about the ‘fiction’ of the rules-based order, or ‘the gaps between rhetoric and reality’. It did, however, cite his quoting of Thucydides that:

‘the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’

The following day, Julian Borger, the Guardian’s senior international correspondent, had a comment piece focusing on ‘Trump’s rambling Davos speech’ that briefly quoted Carney’s observation about ‘the end of a pleasant fiction’, without exploring what that meant. Patrick Wintour, the paper’s diplomatic editor, took a similar approach in his comment piece, noting that Carney had ‘vowed he would no longer live in a state of nostalgia, waiting for an old world to return’. A deeper insight and explanation of the speech was almost comically absent.

It was safe territory for journalists to refer to ‘nostalgia’ for ‘an old world’ that would never ‘return’. But it was verboten to point out that the nostalgia was misplaced; that there never was an old world that adhered to an international order upholding peace, stability and democracy. As ever, the Guardian’s ability to steer clear of dangerous waters is testament to its establishment credentials.

The Independent had a short article briefly mentioning Carney’s observation that ‘the world order based on rules has become “fiction”’. The article also included the Canadian prime minister’s warning that:

‘If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.’

But the extensive brutal reality and sordid history behind the phrase, ‘the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests’, was left unmentioned and unexplored. To the Independent’s credit, however, the following day it published the full text of Carney’s speech. The Financial Times also published a transcript of the speech.

From our Nexis newspaper database searches, the above was the sum total of media mentions in the UK national press of the most vital passages from Carney’s speech. Judging by other people’s observations on social media, such as the responses to our viral post on X about BBC reporting of the speech, this pattern was repeated in other western countries.

US political analyst Glenn Greenwald made an important point:

‘It’s amazing to watch mainstream western media outlets completely and brazenly distort what Mark Carney said.

‘They’re pretending he was just attacking Trump: as if Carney was claiming we had a nice “rules-based international order” until Trump came along.

‘No. Carney said that this “rules-based international order” has long been a fraud that western nations pretended was true because it was in their interests to maintain this lie.’

Greenwald added:

‘But establishment outlets like the NYT, CBC, The Atlantic, The Economist, etc. etc. can’t grapple with or even acknowledge Carney’s confession, because those outlets have been central to embracing and ratifying and spreading this precise fiction.’

These are crucial observations about the media’s unwillingness or inability to honestly appraise and dissect Carney’s remarks. Although, to what extent Carney’s speech was really a ‘confession’, or whether there was an element of performative politics to assuage the public and maintain a semblance of credibility, is up for debate.

But, as always, for the ‘mainstream’ media, crucial truths about imperial Western power are not deemed worthy of significant broadcast, far less explanation.

DC

Update, 24 January 2026

The Guardian published a transcript of Mark Carney’s speech on their website.

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