Let us stipulate that the terms “international community” and “rules-based international order” have often been reduced to meaningless word-salads. Let’s further stipulate that some who invoke a “rules-based international order” seek the imposition of the Republic of Woke everywhere. Let’s even stipulate that the dream of a conflict-free world governed solely by international law and “dialogue” ignores the enduring effects of original sin in the political sphere.
That being said, there is something aggravating and irresponsible about rhetorical grenades being lobbed from the playpen subdivision of the “New Right” at the “idealistic fantasies” of a “rules-based” international order — to which no credible alternatives are proposed.
Want to know what a world without order, a world in which even tacit rules are flouted with seeming impunity, looks like?
It’s a world in which a megalomaniacal dictator, masquerading as a legitimate president and a defender of Christian civilization, murders his domestic opponents; crushes all public efforts to manifest dissent; fouls the communications space with lie after lie; invades a peaceful neighboring country and attempts to annex large swaths of its territory; authorizes the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians and willfully destroys kindergartens, maternity homes, and churches; denies the war crimes (including torture and mass executions) committed by his rabble of an army; practices energy blackmail; threatens the use of nuclear weapons; turns the traditional religious leadership of his country into blasphemous lapdogs; and disrupts the entire global economy, putting the weakest and poorest at risk of famine.
It’s a world in which another ruthless dictator, who imagines himself to carry the mandate, if not of heaven then at least of “history,” upends the world for well over a year through a pandemic he could not control (and may have created); tries to buy his way into world dominance by bribing Third World politicians while colonizing their countries through debt-inducing infrastructure projects that will allow him to project power globally; makes aggressive military moves against his immediate neighbors; practices ethnic and cultural genocide through “re-education” camps; destroys the freedom of a once-thriving city-state; demands that even approved religious groups kowtow to his “thought;” and imprisons brave men and women who speak truth to power about the freedom that so clearly frightens him.
It’s a world in which yet another manic dictator, this one with a nasty haircut, develops nuclear weapons and brazenly fires ballistic missiles over a neighbor, all the while running his country as a vast concentration camp in which starvation is an instrument of state policy.
It’s a world in which apocalyptic theocrats use the state apparatus to enforce their concept of the “highest good” by murder, torture and police brutality, while further destabilizing the volatile region they inhabit.
It’s a world in which non-state actors, like terrorist organizations, wreak havoc on others from their bases in failed states.
It’s a world in which an arrested adolescent, now in his mid-seventies, destroys the civil society and economy of a small, impoverished nation; puts his would-be political opponents under house arrest for months; builds torture prisons for priests; expels the Missionaries of Charity from the country; defames the Church through his regime-dominated media; and arrests a Catholic bishop on completely spurious charges.
That’s what a world without even tacit rules, and leaders willing to enforce them, looks like. Anyone who imagines that this kind of world would not eventually do grave damage to the United States is lost in an ideological fog and blind to reality. What happens to Ukraine; what happens to the Baltic states and Poland if Russian aggression is not defeated in Ukraine; what happens to Cardinal Joseph Zen and Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong; what happens to Taiwan and to the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province; what happens if the mullahs get the bomb or Al Qaeda reconstitutes itself; what happens in the failing states of Central America — all this is having an impact on us now, and surely will in the future.
It is true that America cannot be the policeman who reckons with every criminal regime on the planet. But someone must organize the posse when the lawless ones threaten the tacit rules that underwrite the minimum of order necessary to prevent the world from becoming a circular firing squad: a Hobbesian jungle in which all are set against all. Failing to grasp this elementary point suggests not only historical ignorance and strategic myopia. It also bespeaks a lack of understanding of the principle of solidarity, one of the four pillars of Catholic social doctrine.
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Mr. Weigel continues to display the weakness of his own inability to persuade, with what is now an exasperated voice simply insisting that anyone who is not on board with him in “the Kagan-Nuland-US-military-industrial-complex-war-without-end-for-regime-change-whenever-the-woke-establishment-says” is, as he blurts out, in the “playpen.”
It is a law of war that when you are too weak to defend, you must attack.
And my conclusion is that Mr. Weigel’s point-of-view is weak, indeed it is a crippled point of view, and thus be cannot help but attack any opposing point of view not on its merits, but simply by insisting that anyone who disagrees with him is somehow ignorant and childish.
The weakness displayed in this mode of argument indicate simply a presumptive and dismissive mindset.
I love my country. And I think Putin is a criminal and a war criminal, and I hope that the West helps Ukraine punish and defeat Putin’s Russian Crime Regime.
And I don’t agree with the US-war-of-regime-change ideology that it has captured Mr. Weigel, and thst he has been promoting since the horrific US invasion of Iraq.
And my conclusion is that this war in Ukraine has ensued because men and women like Mr. Weigel are adrift, and are being swept along with the “Beltway-War-Without-End-Mentality,” instead of being more prudent and understanding that world affairs involve recognizing that there are opposing powers and, like Mearsheimer observed, there is simply no getting around living with a balance of power. And men and women who, like Mr. Weigel, take sides with Robert Kagan and Tory Nuland, are taking sides with people who believe that the USA’s role in the world is to help establish, in the words of Kagan, “a new pagan ethos.”
That’s very bad thinking, and very bad company.
I suggest Mr. Weigel go back to the drawing board.
This war in Ukraine has ensued because a Russian bully has measured the American President and found him terribly lacking – he will NOT stand up to him, because he lacks the brains and the b…s to do so, and no one else does.
WE are the only ones who can stand up to this bully, and the doddering old man at 1600 Pa. Ave. has no intention of doing so. Putin KNEW this before he made the decision to invade.
I certainly agree with that. Putin had respectful fear of Trump, and obviously nothing of the same for The-Biden-Crime-Syndicate.
Another great masterpiece by George Weigel. Thanks for this. Really good (still need an updated picture)
And from where does this benevolent angel come? In the US, for decades the people have elected these megalomaniacs who have destroyed the currency, straight-jacketed us with Byzantine regulations, introduced laws that were beyond ridiculous regarding gender identity and (not the least) slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people per year in third world countries who never even planted their feet on US soil. Maybe the problem is in the system that is the problem. Maybe people should not put too much power in one man’s hands. Maybe people should not put their trust in princes.
If history were on your side, Pax Romana would have worked and we would all be living peacefully as Roman citizens. Or under the numerous attempts by nations to create global empires masquerading as a peace initiative. It has never worked and has always ended in mass bloodshed. That is what should be obvious to every student of history.
Or, maybe Weigel is actually agreeing with you?
Maybe a former president’s MAGA should have meant Make America Good Again? And, then, wouldn’t goodness and the common good include responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions and inactions, especially on the complex world stage? So, regarding a defended “rules-based international order,” maybe this need cannot be dismissed necessarily as neo-con jingoism?
Unclouded by the current era, Thomas More had this to say about that:
“…and when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country [world?] is planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake” (stage play by Robert Bolt, “A Man for All Seasons,” Act One).
So when should Weigel be taken to task for his cowardly refusal to cease acquiescing to a pontificate dedicated to an adolescent presentation of “rules” as capricious burdens invented by those committing the sin of backwardness?
My guess is that Weigel is that the path you suggest would be misread by most; that a direct critique of the current pope would be taken as an attack on the Petrine Ministry itself.
OR, that tenuous access to Vatican insider information would be withheld.
OR, that the credibility of Weigel’s Ethics and Public Policy Center would be discounted (getting at one of the layers of our discontent, the Catholic Project at the EPPC released on October 19 its “National Study of Catholic Priests”:https://catholicproject.catholic.edu/national-study-of-catholic-priests/).
OR, without engaging in intramural fault-finding by name, a good read is Weigel’s “The Next Pope: the Office of Peter and a Church in Mission” (Ignatius, 2020)—not to be confused with editor Edward Pentin’s concurrent “The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates” (Sophia Institute Press, also 2020).
Weigel’s book is an insightful, concise, readable, and pithy bucket list of what the next pope must do, including such as this: “…It would be well if the next pope had sown a capacity for such collaborative governance in his ministry. At the outset of the next pontificate, however, the pope must clean house in the Roman Curia. Doing this sooner rather than later will be better for all concerned” (p. 117).
A bit oblique some still might say, but not much imagination is needed that every line of the entire must-read book is written with the current pontificate in mind.
As a coda to my previous comment:
Mr. Weigel has utterly dismissed the warning of people like Mr. Mearsheimer, who asserted that part of the “world-with-rules” might consist in recognizing that there is a bslance if powers in the world.
In response to Mr. Weigel, Mr. Mearsheimer might suggest that Mr. Weigel and his allies-of-mind Mr. Kagan and Ms. Nuland are ignoring some of the basic rules.
“That being said, there is something aggravating and irresponsible about rhetorical grenades being lobbed from the playpen subdivision of the “New Right” at the “idealistic fantasies” of a “rules-based” international order — to which no credible alternatives are proposed.” Sorry, George, telling the truth about the New World Order and its propagation of the Ukrainian disaster is a “credible alternative.” You should apologize for failing to do so.
Well you left out Biden and his illegal usurpation of prescribed law for the deliberate destruction of liberty and prosperity in his country, under the control of a cabal that is unabashed in wanting to see western civilization destroyed and abolished. And you left out the leader of a Love-predicated religion who should be a paragon of virtue and unity who not only does not criticize the depraved action of your rogues gallery but treats with them and criticizes his clergy who try to stand up to the evil.
Nicely put. If a criminal gang oppresses people in a city in the USA in which I do not live, it is still my concern. I pay for national law enforcement agencies to fight crime that does not affect me. I pay for federal prisons to put those people in. I pay for a military to defend places I do not live. I am supposed to care for the wellbeing of other humans and helping to fight evils such as the Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Iranian regimes is part of my duty as a human and a Christian.
A lot of good thoughts, good insights, elegantly expressed, but way over the heads of most of us. As usual in many editorials, little concrete solutions offered. It is far easier to site the problems than offer a way out. Could a religious revival be a solution. One person at a time repenting and re- ordering his life toward Godly living would make a big difference. Each pebble dropped in water raises the water level incrementally. A lot of pebbles makes the water overflow. In short, perhaps the big solution starts with me and ends with us. God bless.
There are only so many countries in the world powerful enough to challenge the “rules-based” apostasy being advocated here, and, of those, only one, Russia, is a member of Christendom. At the moment, Russia refuses to march down the road of degeneracy and cultural and moral suicide, as Western Europe has done. I simply do not understand how one could possibly prefer the latter to the former. Suppressing dissent? Seriously? Suppressing dissent is literally written in the constitutions of many Western European countries, and it might as well be, in the United States.
This essay appears as yet another unfortunate essay in a depressing series of rather ill-disguised Worm Tongue in the service of the Wilsonian, one world, liberal rights order—an order against which we as Catholics must fight (as Blessed Karl of Austria literally fought). Man is not a unity; he is many. And he is not entitled to “define [his] own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life.” Quite to the contrary.
How can we possibly celebrate General Franco, and fail to celebrate President Putin?
This essay promotes a world in which the insatiable cult of liberal democracy forces all others to bow down before it. Vladimir Putin IS defending Christian civilization against the ever-insatiable depravity oozing out of the so-called “West” at the moment. HE has not disrupted the world economy; responsibility for THAT lies entirely with President Biden and his various enablers, including the author of this essay.
Is Mr. Putin fouling the communications space? Perhaps. But perhaps also the author should leave off addressing the mote in his brother’s eye, and look toward the beam in his own.
Frankly, Vladimir Putin began his invasion to counter the Kievan government’s deliberate attempt to eradicate the Russian people—Mr. Putin’s people—living in the Eastern part of the Ukraine. This last point is not debatable, and was in fact a circumstance encouraged, nay demanded, by the United States. As former Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi rightly states, “Ukraine violated the Minsk deal, Zelenskiy tripled attacks on Donbas and pushed Putin to a special operation.” I would like to know how Mr. Weigel lives with himself.
Finally, to quote a brilliant statesman, “[c]an’t you see the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? Meanwhile, people pretend that nothing is going on. I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.” That Mr. Weigel would compare his parade of horribles (the world’s authoritarians/dictators) unfavorably with the Western world order—an order that betrays its own peoples, condones, even supports, child mutilation, celebrates perversity, and engages in a deliberate drive to blasphemously eject God from the public square—is unbelievably rich. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, this Western world order is neither “Western,” nor “order.” I am afraid we are fast approaching a point where every man will have to make his choice. Mr. Weigel appears to have made his, and I feel sorry for him.
So a country with the second highest abortion rate in human history, Russia (The Vatican’s idealized China being first), which has promoted more wars than any nation in human history, and whose espionage activities have included human trafficking, pornography, and prostitution, “refuses to march down the road of degeneracy and cultural and moral suicide? Seriously?
And which way are abortion laws going in Russia? In the mid-1960s abortion statistics in Bolshevist Russia were gigantic. But in the last twenty years, state policy in Russia has been to increase birthrates (something the U.S. has never even considered—it would clash with an open borders, propositional “nation” ideology), and abortion has been a target of Putin legislation. In 2003, Russia enacted the first anti-abortion law since the fall of the Tsar. In 2011, a law was enacted slowly beginning re-criminalization. The wife of Prime Minister Medvedev (Putin’s pit-bulls) is the head of a pro-life organization called “Give Me Life!”
Compare LGBT “rights” legislation in Russia, with that in the Kievan regime.
Not sure where one gets the idea that Russia has “promoted”(?) more wars than any other nation in history, although I’m not sure what kind of condemnation that is necessarily.
“Seriously”?
Rachel Levine.
Enough said.