796: THE RULES-BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER: AN ANALYTICAL OVERVIEW

 

The Rules-Based International Order (RBIO) refers to the framework of multilateral institutions. It includes legal norms, treaties, and agreed principles that govern interstate relations.  Its foundational architecture was constructed between 1944 and 1948 (at Bretton Woods, San Francisco, and Geneva). It rests on several interlocking pillars, namely, the United Nations system and its Charter, the Bretton Woods financial institutions (IMF and World Bank), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the WTO), international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and a constellation of specialised agencies addressing everything from civil aviation to maritime law.

 

RBIO: Core Principle and Architecture. The core logic of the RBIO is that states conduct their international relations according to agreed-upon rules, irrespective of their relative power. Sovereignty of every nation is respected. Disputes are resolved through negotiation, arbitration, or settlement rather than force. The architecture has four distinct dimensions.

• • The security dimension is embedded in the UN Charter. It prohibits the use of force except in self-defence or with Security Council authorisation.

• • The economic dimension is based on open trade. The IMF and the World Bank provided financial stability and development assistance.

• • The legal dimension encompasses international humanitarian law, the law of the sea (UNCLOS), diplomatic immunity conventions, and the human rights law.

• • The normative dimension consists of shared expectations about sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs, and the illegitimacy of territorial conquest by force.

 

Strengths and Achievements. The RBIO’s achievements between 1945 and roughly 2000 were genuinely significant. It presided over the longest period without a great-power war in modern history. It managed the decolonisation of Asia and Africa without a general war. It provided the framework within which the Cold War was conducted without becoming a hot war. The NPT successfully limited nuclear proliferation far below what analysts predicted in the 1960s. The WTO oversaw the greatest expansion of international trade and the associated reduction in poverty in human history. The UN system provided a forum for diplomatic management of crises. For smaller states, the RBIO provided something particularly valuable: the principle of sovereign equality. A small state in the RBIO has the same legal standing as a large one, the same right to vote in the General Assembly, the same protection from invasion under the UN Charter, and the same access to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. This was not merely formal; it genuinely constrained the behaviour of large states in ways that pure power politics would not have.

 

Erosion and Challenges. The RBIO has been under sustained pressure since at least the early 2000s, and that pressure has intensified dramatically in the past decade. Several forces are driving its erosion simultaneously.

• • Great-power revisionism is the most fundamental challenge. China and Russia (both permanent Security Council members) have concluded that the order serves American interests more than those of the others. Both powers have made clear that they regard the RBIO as an American instrument of hegemonic management rather than a genuinely neutral framework of rules.

• • American ambivalence has further eroded its credibility. The United States has repeatedly violated RBIO in pursuit of its interests. It has been invading countries without Security Council authorisation. The Trump administration’s explicit scepticism of multilateral institutions, its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and UNESCO, and its transactional approach to alliances have all signalled American willingness to instrumentalise or abandon the RBIO framework.

• • Institutional dysfunction has made the order less capable of responding to its own violations. The UN Security Council’s veto mechanism, designed as a great-power concert that would enforce collective security, has been paralysed by great-power competition: Russia and China routinely block action on issues where Western powers seek Council authorisation. In contrast, Western powers do the same in reverse.

 

The RBIO and India

India’s relationship with the RBIO is historically complex and strategically consequential. India benefited to some extent from the RBIO in the process of decolonisation.  India has also been a persistent critic of it, particularly during the Cold War, when the “rules” appeared to serve the interests of the superpowers more than those of the newly independent Global South.

India’s founding foreign policy framework (non-alignment) was, in significant part, a rejection of the Cold War RBIO’s demand that states choose sides. India insisted on the right to conduct its foreign policy according to its own interests rather than as a subordinate within one of the blocs. This instinct has evolved into the contemporary period as “strategic autonomy”, i.e., India’s resistance to formal alliances, its simultaneous maintenance of relationships with multiple powers, and its selective engagement with multilateral institutions.

India’s current RBIO stance is sophisticated and deliberately ambiguous. India rhetorically endorses the RBIO — particularly its sovereignty and non-interference norms, which protect smaller states from great-power coercion — while simultaneously resisting specific RBIO rules that constrain its own behaviour or that it regards as serving others’ interests. India’s approach is therefore not revisionist in the Chinese or Russian sense. It is not seeking to dismantle the order.  

The erosion of RBIO creates specific dilemmas for India. On the one hand, the weakening of sovereignty norms and the normalisation of great-power unilateralism expose India to greater pressure from China. China’s revisionist approach to the LAC boundary and its behaviour in the South China Sea both challenge the RBIO norms. On the other hand, India is uncomfortable with the RBIO in its current American-led form, which it regards as selectively enforced and structurally weighted toward Western interests.

India’s preferred outcome — a reformed, more genuinely multipolar RBIO in which India has a larger voice commensurate with its growing power and population — is articulated through its push for permanent UN Security Council membership, its leadership of the Global South within forums like the G20 and BRICS, and its consistent advocacy for “development-first” norms within multilateral economic institutions. Whether this reformist vision is achievable in the current environment of great-power competition and norm erosion is one of the central strategic questions India will face in the decade to 2037.

 

The RBIO and the Pre-emption Paradigm

The US-Israel strikes on Iran illustrate the RBIO’s erosion in its most acute form. The strikes bypassed the UN Security Council, the NPT verification mechanism, and the IAEA inspection framework — three of the order’s most important institutions for managing nuclear proliferation. They were conducted without Security Council authorisation. They targeted a sovereign state’s domestic infrastructure. And they were widely accepted by the Western strategic community as legitimate, demonstrating that the gap between formal RBIO rules and the actual standards that major powers apply to their own behaviour has become operationally significant.

For India, this creates a specific doctrinal implication. If the RBIO’s formal rules no longer reliably constrain great-power behaviour in the nuclear domain, India cannot base its security planning on the assumption that those rules will protect its own nuclear infrastructure from pre-emptive attack. For that matter, they will also not prevent adversaries from conducting sub-conventional operations against Indian interests. The RBIO cannot substitute credible deterrence, but remains valuable as a diplomatic framework.

 

Repercussions.

The RBIO is neither dead nor fully effective. It is structurally weakened and being selectively enforced. It is still functioning in domains where great-power interests converge sufficiently to sustain it. What has changed is the normative credibility of the order, i.e. the shared expectation that rules apply equally to the powerful and the weak. That expectation, never fully realised, has been further eroded by a decade of great-power unilateral action. The result is an international environment in which rules provide guidance and legitimacy only to the major powers, when convenient.

For India, navigating this environment requires exactly the combination of strategic autonomy, credible conventional deterrence, selective multilateral engagement, and coalition-building that its foreign policy has historically pursued — but pursued now with greater urgency, greater resources, and greater strategic coherence than the drift of recent years has always provided.

 

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