RIP the ‘rules-based international order’

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked a famous aphorism from Thucydides’s seminal history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fourth century B.C.: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

“Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry,” Carney said, lamenting the demise of what’s known as the “rules-based international order” — a system of rules and norms that Canada and many other smaller powers have prospered under since the end of World War II.

“The rupture in the world order,” Carney said, is “the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the