Objective Fallacy: Eulogies on the Passing of the Law Based International Order

by Binoy Kampmark / February 14th, 2026

The eulogies are starting to wear thin. The lamented passing of the rules and law-based order only makes sense to those who believed that such rules and laws existed in the first place.  How easy it is to forget that the spanning hegemon of each age always presumes that its laws and norms are objective universal features, putative and significant enough to be revered and inked for eternity. That most irritating term “rules-based order” is more a stress on the order backed by might rather than the rules themselves, a figment of legal draughtsmanship. Without a degree of might, there are no rules. If there are those who refuse to abide by those rules, might will be brought to bear upon the recalcitrant and the disobedient.

This discomforting reality has either been shielded from the United States’ allies or deliberately avoided. Whether it is security guarantees, defence pacts, trade deals, or mutual undertakings, the notion of an international order objectively existing and binding on all has been most attractive to the beneficiaries, who have preferred to see less a brutish hegemon than a benign, nuclear-armed caretaker.

Canada’s sense of sorrow at the demise of the international system as understood was conveyed through Prime Minister Mark Carney in his January 22 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He reacted like one newly born to bald realities, making a few mild concessions that the previous state of things had been something of a convenient sham. He acknowledged, for instance, that the 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 varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” Carney’s grievance was that the order, as understood, had turned back to bite with feral ferocity. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

On February 13, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz did much the same thing at the annual Munich Security Conference, explaining why the grumpy motto of the gathering was “under destruction”. The order in question, one of rights and rules, was “currently being destroyed.” Imperfect as it was, “even in its heyday [it] no longer exists.” Making sure not to attack the United States for being a smash and grab culprit in this process, he referred with predictable consistency to “Russia’s violent revisionism” and war in Ukraine, and China’s “strategic patience” that might, in due course, well put it “on an equal footing with the United States in military terms.”

With a heavy note of resignation, the Chancellor seemed to mourn the challenge to, and possible dethronement of, US leadership, a time that had been good for Europe’s lotus-eaters. The world had since altered, and the Americans had adapted. As should Europe and Germany. The latter, in particular, had haughtily “criticised violations of the international order all over the world” without having “the means to solve the problem.” What was needed was a “mental transformation”, one focused not on “hegemonial fantasies” but on “leadership and partnership”. To do so, Merz proposed a foggy four-pillar “freedom agenda”: strengthening Germany and Europe “militarily, politically, economically and technologically”; creating a sovereign Europe; reiterating, despite the bruising challenges, the continuing importance of the transatlantic relationship; and pursuing a global network of collaborative states. “Europe and the transatlantic relationship remain central, but they are no longer enough on their own.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for his part, told the same conference that the term rules-based global order was “overused”.  In any case, it had, with ghastly effect, replaced the national interest, prized “a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade”, seen the outsourcing of “our sovereignty to international institutions” while selfish states feathered their welfare systems “at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves” and diminished the significance of national borders (those naughty migrants again).

The remarks by Carney and Merz about an upended world that was never up to begin with exaggerate the collapse of an order that was only relevant because it had been promulgated by US power and the promise of a Pax Americana. Give Washington access to your military real estate, and its armies and nuclear weapons would defend you, much like a protection racket, against invisible threats.  The term “joint operation” would alleviate local concerns about the loss of sovereignty.

Given the recent shocks inflicted by the Trump administration in terms of rhetoric and conduct on the very basis of international rules, politicians in allied and satellite states must reassure their voters about their feigned anger and synthetic outrage. The truculent orange monster in the White House must be abominated but remain un-ostracised: he retains the keys to the castle. Whatever is said in Washington about the reliability of its allies, a number of European countries, Canada, and Australia have systems of interoperable dependence with the US imperium when it comes to military deployments.  Ambitious chatter about an independent European deterrent against fictional hordes of Russians readying to march across the continent remains a gurgling fantasy.

Since an enforceable legal system of rules assumes the presence of violence exercisable by some authority (that’s one for the legal positivists), its application has always been artificially constrained through the UN Security Council. This gave the comforting illusion that force could be regulated even as bullying powers could wage surrogate wars in distant theatres, crushing aspiring revolutions and social experiments while overthrowing elected governments.

Seeing as countries – and the US in particular – have openly torn off the mask of hypocrisy in observing international restraints, there is much to commend the crude fact that the rule of the gangster will be applied when self-interest demands it. Throw in sufficient arms and personnel, and one is sitting pretty. Ending the pantomime of the rules-based order does not spell an end to the system of power that continues to exist.  It simply never went away.

Blind and Deaf to AUKUS: Australian Planners and Elusive Submarines

by Binoy Kampmark / February 13th, 2026

There were never the sharpest negotiators in the room, resembling a facsimile of Bertie Wooster in desperate need of the good advice of his manservant Jeeves. The Australian defence establishment has yet to find a wise head who will finally tell them that the A$368 billion AUKUS pact between the three Anglophone powers of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States has only one oversized beneficiary in mind.

While the Australian treasury gets drained in throwing cash at US naval yards in acts of stealthy proliferation for Washington’s military industrial complex (A$1.6 billion has so far been forked out), it is becoming increasingly clear that a good gaggle of officials and lawmakers have no appetite to either relinquish Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSN-774) to the Royal Australian Navy or to give its sailors sovereign control of them if that were ever to make the Pacific journey. The sale of the SSN-774 to Canberra is part of Pillar 1 of the AUKUS enterprise, envisaging, in addition to providing such boats to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), the rotational deployment of four US SSNs and one UK SSN to Australia out of Western Australia, the subsequent construction of three to five replacement SSNs for the US Navy, and aid Australia in the construction of three to five SSNs based on what will be a new UK-Australian design.

A good temperature reading of reluctance regarding the Virginia-class boats can be gathered from those invaluable reports from the Congressional Research Service, Australian officials, and journalists often ignore and seem reluctant to consult. Given that the US Congress will be the final arbiter of whether a single Virginia SSN is ever transferred into Australian hands under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), these comprehensive overviews plot the concerns for US lawmakers and what direction is likely regarding the expectations of AUKUS. Australia’s doddery and woolly-minded political class ignore them at their peril.

The latest report, authored by Ronald O’Rourke and published on January 26, 2026, lacks a glamorous title. But there is enough punch in Navy Virginia-Class Submarine Program and AUKUS Submarine (Pillar 1) Project: Background and Issues for Congress to sting officials in Canberra into a state of nightmare-inducing worry.

The issues for Congress identified in the report are not new. These include whether the procurement rate for the financial year (FY2026) of the SSN-774 and subsequent years should remain at 2 boats per year, or be adjusted; how the Navy and Department of Defense are using funds from the submarine industrial base (SIB) since FY2018, and how this has affected the production of Virginia-class boats; the maintenance backlog of SSNs in service and its impacts “on SSN – and overall Navy – capabilities, and steps the Navy plans to take to reduce the backlog”; and potential benefits, costs, and risks arising from the procurement rate and the way SIB funds are used.

The crucial test here, and one that would do away with any suggestions of Australian sovereignty on the matter, is how such “benefits, costs, and risks compare with those of an alternative of procuring up to eight additional Virginia-class SSNs that would be retained in US Navy service and operated out of Australia along with the US and UK SSNs that are already planned to be operated under Pillar 1.” Concern is expressed, as with previous reports, about the lack of clarity as to whether Canberra would support the US in a future conflict with China. “Selling three to five Virginia-class SSNs to Australia would thus convert those SSNs from boats that would be available for use in a US-China crisis or conflict into boats that might not be available for use in a US-China crisis or conflict.” Rather crushingly, the report goes on to question Australian prowess regarding the use of the boats, in that deterrence against China would become less persuasive if “Beijing were to find reason to believe, correctly or not, that Australia might use its Virginia-class boats less effectively than the US Navy would use them.”

Australia’s role as an appendage of US strategic deterrence against China in the Pacific is crudely confirmed: its bases are mere platforms for Washington’s warmaking plans, with the RAN left undistinguished and diminished. This applies both to the naval component and RAAF Base Tindal in the Katherine region, which will host six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. Australia’s signatory status as a member of the Treaty of Rarotonga, also known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, would, if it has not already, cease to be relevant.

The review of AUKUS conducted by Trump’s Undersecretary of Defense Policy, Eldridge Colby, while not available to the public, can hardly have deviated from the central premise that parting with the Virginia boats will be only possible if the production rate of submarines rises to 2 a year, and given that, what strategic implications would arise regarding US control over them.  Colby had previously warned that the AUKUS pact would only “lead to more submarines collectively in 10, 15, 20 years, which is way beyond the window of maximum danger, which is really this decade.”

When Colby’s completed review was sent to the Australians last December, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell released a statement insisting that the recommendations for the review were for the benefit of improving the security pact. “Consistent with President Trump’s guidance that AUKUS should move ‘full steam ahead,’ the review identified opportunities to put AUKUS on the strongest possible footing.” It is hard to see how Australia ends up well here.

Australian pundits on the strategic cocktail circuit have suggestions as to how to sell Canberra’s broader capitulation to the US imperium and its military. These are drearily unoriginal. On the stationing of B-52s in the Northern Territory, for instance, Miranda Booth, writing for the Lowy Institute Interpreter, suggests the rather crusty propaganda line of collaboration. “The key is to put an emphasis on joint plans for training and exercises that build solidarity and trust, and enhance regional interoperability.” Such duplicity would magically dispel the appearance that Australia was merely a servile and willing client to US power.

The Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles, a fool of Chaucerian proportions, deserves a star of commendation in his denials of what AUKUS really entails. On his regular sojourns to Washington, he always comes back with the same glassy ignorance, failing to digest any contradicting briefings or literature that might have appeared. He has a story to tell a public he wishes to gull, and he always insists on sticking to it. Pity for Australian electors, it’s never the right one, let alone accurate.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.