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View all search resultsIs honesty the best policy for the international order?
While some Western leaders’ recent acknowledgement that the old order is outdated might seem refreshingly honest at first, they seem to be in a rush to bury it for good without proposing reforms for a better, more just alternative for all.
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Children play with a graffitied missile casing on March 23, 2026, a day after it landed in the playground of an elementary school in the Israeli settlement of Peduel in the occupied West Bank amid the United States-Israeli war on Iran. (Reuters/Amir Cohen)
W
ith his recent speech describing the rules-based international order as a “fiction”, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made a mainstay of debates across the Global South fashionable in the West. Developing and emerging economies have long criticized the inconsistent implementation of international rules as well as the double standards at the heart of the international order. Now, a Western leader has acknowledged the hypocrisy, too.
Until recently, the Carneys of the world had invested considerable political capital in defending the rules-based order against such accusations. At the Munich Security Conference in February, the Saudi minister of foreign affairs remarked with relief, “finally, we are all of us being honest with each other” about the broken nature of the old system.
But should we really be rejoicing at this move toward greater honesty? What will come of Western leaders acknowledging how “imperfect” the old order was, “even at the best of times”, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it recently?
I ask as someone who has called for a more honest conversation about the inconsistencies of the old order and the legitimate concerns they raised. I had hoped that acknowledging the double standards would help reduce them, leading to a more constructive debate about how to strengthen international rules and norms. Yet now I worry that the honesty on display today is not serving either objective.
Instead of ensuring greater consistency or inspiring reforms to make the prevailing system more just and emancipatory, this newfound frankness often seems aimed at the opposite end: It is being used to justify blatant discrepancies and to depict any work toward more consistent global rules as futile.
Most of those who highlight the old order’s shortcomings are not promising to alter their own behavior. They may acknowledge the hypocrisies enshrined in that order, but their reactions to the intervention of United States President Donald Trump’s administration in Venezuela, as well as the US-Israeli strikes against Iran, confirm that nothing much has changed. They remain willing to condone or look past their allies’ rule violations.
Aside from Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, few Western leaders have called out the illegality of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Not even the European Union, a longtime champion of international law, has issued an official condemnation.
