Real collapse of the rules-based order began at home – Jonathan Ayling
THE FACTS
- Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has warned that the rules-based international order is fraying.
- A system that helped restrain great power conflict seems irretrievable.
- A rules-based order depends on more than rules written on paper.
In his State of the Nation address on Monday, Prime Minister ChristopherLuxon warned that the rules-based international order is fraying. Like many leaders across the West, he spoke of a world in which restraint is giving way to force, norms are collapsing, and power is once again eclipsing principle.
The return of blunt realism, embodied most starkly by US President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy, is widely treated as a moral catastrophe. But the real irony is not simply that the rules-based order is collapsing, it is that the West itself hollowed out belief in its own rules long before strongmen stopped pretending to respect them.
Concern is understandable. A system that helped restrain great power conflict seems irretrievable. There is, however, something deeply ironic about who is making this argument.
Some of the loudest mourners of the rules-based order are also people who, for decades, argued that it never really existed. They insisted that rules were merely instruments of domination, that moral language was a mask for power, and that institutions were not imperfect guardians of shared norms but inherited structures of systemic oppression.
If that were all the case, then the arrival of realism should not shock us. It should feel inevitable.
I do not share that worldview. I believe there are truths that do not originate in power and that must not bend to it. I believe rules exist precisely to restrain the strong, not merely to legitimise them. But in responding to this new context, we must not ignore the intellectual path that has led us here.
For much of the past half-century, a dominant strain in Western intellectual life has trained its attention relentlessly on power. At its best, this work exposed complacency and forced institutions to justify themselves. But it also carried a corrosive premise that, once absorbed beyond ivory towers, proved destabilising; that moral claims are never independent of power, only expressions of it.
Michel Foucault treated truth less as something to be discovered than as something manufactured by power relations. Judith Butler recast language not primarily as a vehicle for meaning but as a weapon itself. Kimberle Crenshaw reframed social life as an overlapping grid of unavoidable domination, where identity determines oppression and moral standing. Even if you’re unfamiliar with these academics, their impact has been profound.
Together, these ideas dissolved the notion that shared norms could be legitimate. By teaching that power sits behind every truth claim, they replaced moral reasoning with permanent suspicion. Institutions became mechanisms of control. Disagreement became violence. Politics became an endless struggle.
What filtered into popular culture was not subtle theory but its most destabilising conclusion: that legitimacy itself is a fiction. A society taught to doubt the legitimacy of its rules should not be surprised when it stops believing in rules altogether.
Trump’s realism is not an aberration from a culture that has spent decades moralising about power. It is a crude, stripped-down version of the same impulse. If everything really is about power, then the only mistake is pretending otherwise.
This is not to say that Trump has been persuaded by Foucault, Butler or Crenshaw. I would bet Greenland he has never read them. The point is simpler and more troubling: Once moral credibility has been dredged away, nothing remains to contain the cynical and calculating.
The same dynamic plays out closer to home in our political language. When terms such as “Nazi”, “racist”, “extremist” or “antisemitic” are applied carelessly, simply because we disagree, they stop functioning as warnings and start functioning as weapons.
People who are told that disagreement itself places them beyond the pale eventually stop caring about the norms of the society that expelled them. If every argument is treated as harm, there is little incentive to argue responsibly. If dissent is framed as proof of moral corruption, some will decide they might as well embrace the role assigned to them. “You say this is who I am. So be it.”
This is not a defence of those labels when they are deserved. There are real extremists. There is real racism. There is real antisemitism. But moral language only retains its force when it is used with care and restraint. Inflate it, and you devalue it. Weaponise it, and you invite retaliation in kind.
A rules-based order depends on more than rules written on paper. It depends on a shared belief that those rules are legitimate and that moral disagreement does not automatically imply malice. Once that belief erodes, raw power rushes in to fill the vacuum.
Yes, the liberal world order matters. New Zealand should care about international norms and worry about a world where might is right. But we cannot spend decades teaching that our culture is built on nothing more than oppression and lies and then act shocked when self-interest and deceit prevail. We cannot insist that morality is merely power in disguise and then recoil when power stops bothering with disguise.
You ordered critical postmodern cynicism. Bon appetit.
What we are witnessing now is not simply the failure of the rules-based order. It is the consequence of a culture that lost faith in the moral foundations that made such an order possible. Renewing it will require less grandstanding and more confidence that truth, restraint, and legitimacy are not illusions, but hard-won progress: Incomplete, but worth defending.
Jonathan Ayling is a strategy consultant and professional director. He is the former-Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary advisor in both Government and Opposition.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.