After hypocrisy: reclaiming the Westphalian core of the global order

Despite Trump’s claims of victory, America’s war against Iran has been a catastrophic failure, for itself, Europe and the world. Strategically, Iran has only strengthened its regional influence. Its ruling theocrats remain in situ. Tehran’s nuclear enrichment programme, while damaged, is intact. And so are its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen.

For energy-dependent Europe, a stagflationary crisis seems all but inevitable. Chaos and violence rules in Lebanon, where over a million people are now displaced. And yet, beyond declaring this is ‘not our war’, Europe’s leaders have so far failed to stake out a clear position against the US-Israeli campaign. Only Pedro Sanchez has openly distanced Spain from the war, earning himself an earful of abuse from the White House.

Macron, Merz, Meloni and Starmer took a more muted stance, grudgingly giving the US access to their airspace and military infrastructure. But that did not stop Trump from making Europe the scapegoat for his botched campaign. ‘NATO wasn't there when we needed them, and they won't be there if we need them again,’ the President fumed as Iran gained the upper hand in the conflict. The future of the alliance hangs yet again by a thread.

A compass spinning

The war reveals just how confused and disoriented Europe has become since Trump’s return to office, how rapidly its sense of self, history and destiny is now shifting. Until recently, the international rules-based order was Europe’s absolute lodestar, offering direction and sure-footedness. It formed the foundation of the continent’s self-understanding as a ‘normative power’. Had the Europeans followed their old instincts, the verdict on America’s war would have been unequivocal.

Instead, they chose to invoke different geostrategic and normative orientations. ‘This is not the moment to lecture our partners and allies,’ German Chancellor Merz asserted, days after the war started. Channelling his inner Carl Schmitt, Merz argued for the temporary suspension of international law. Were the Mullahs not responsible for the torture and death of thousands of Iranians, particularly women, and a whole range of other crimes?

The debate about legality ‘partly misses the point’, Commission President Von der Leyen concurred. ‘Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old world order, for a world that has gone and will not return.’ Let us not shed tears over the Iranian regime, she opined, and adopt ‘a more realistic and interest-driven’ way of doing things.

There are powerful reasons why Europe needs more interest-driven realism in its foreign policy, not just for the purely opportunistic need to keep the US within NATO. As Mark Carney argued at Davos, the old rules-based order is no longer functioning. Rather than pretending it still does, middle powers like Europe should develop novel ways of thriving in world dominated by power and strength.

But the trouble with Carney, who came out cheering on the US-Israeli war, is that he fails to provide the world with a new compass. He correctly calls for an end to the hypocrisy of the liberal rules-based order but cannot tell us what direction we should turn to next. Nor does Von der Leyen explain how her new realism might recognize boundaries set by law. If we are living in a post-liberal order, what rules now anchor the modern state system? Or are there no longer any rules at all?

A world of will and power

Unfortunately, that is precisely the conclusion the US and Israel have arrived at. Decapitating Venezuela, invading Greenland, ending entire civilizations, annexing the West Bank, wiping peoples, states and cities off the map: for the US and Israel these are now purely issues of subjective will, power and (one would hope) considered strategy.

It could be argued that the powerful have always done as they please, without recognizing constraints of law. But it is hard to escape the impression that the US administration is making a more fundamental break with the past. Before Trump, US presidents still viewed illegality as a problem to be solved or at least disguised. The need to appear legitimate to the world, and not least to the American people itself, could stop them from doing ‘crazy shit’, as Obama called it. Before invading Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush frantically tried to persuade the UN Security Council.

Today, the need for such appearances has been dropped. Operation Epic Fury exists in a voluntarist universe where legality is meaningless, and no one bats an eyelid at the threat of sending a civilization of some 90 million people ‘back to the Stone Age where they belong’. Tensions with the law no longer need to be navigated because there are no longer any rules to abide by. The Supreme Leader just ‘needed to go’, Tony Soprano might have said. The rest was a matter of deploying ‘maximum lethality’. As Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War, pointed out, ‘We … do not fight with stupid rules of engagement: we untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.’

US official rhetoric and imagery make war look not just loads of fun, but exhilarating, life-enhancing and ‘good’ in the way Ernst Juenger’s 1920 book The Storm of Steel finds a deeper purpose in the carnage of trench warfare. ‘Death and destruction from the sky all day long,’ Hegseth crows with a visible sense of fulfilment. ‘We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.’

Both he and Trump frame the operation as biblically sanctioned, a Christian war to deliver the world from evil: ‘Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,’ Hegseth beseeched Jesus in a religious service at the Pentagon in support of US soldiers. ‘Give them wisdom in every decision … and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.’

Finding Europe’s new north

For Europe, a world without rules is deeply unappealing, as the Iran war shows. But what alternative order could it propose? Spain’s Sanchez argues that what is at stake is ‘not old versus new order, it is international order versus international disorder’. European Council president AntónioCosta points out that the world should remain rules-based since ‘the opposite of rules is chaos, and that is what we have today’. This may be true, but if they plan to double down on the liberal rules-based order that emerged after 1945 and then matured after the Cold War, we are not making progress.

Too much has changed to breathe life back into the old order, which was the result of particular historical conditions that no longer exist. America’s unipolar moment is over. Today, large parts of the non-Western world summarily dismiss reviving liberal internationalism as a return to the hypocrisy Europe has finally begun to acknowledge. The better approach is to explore rules-based solutions that are more amenable to today’s multipolar and ideologically pluralistic world.

There is a stubborn but mistaken belief in Europe that the very principle of rules-based order was invented from scratch after World War II by the democratic West, and that consequently there simply is no rules-based alternative to the liberal order. According to this view, before 1945 there was nothing but unregulated violence. (‘The world of yesterday,’ says Sanchez, ‘is the world without rules.’) Moreover, should the liberal international system collapse, the world will inevitably slide back into the same age of darkness.

We should oppose such binary thinking, which can only lead to defeatism. Attempts to impose order on chaos through rules and normative codes date back to well before 1945 and, crucially, they precede the age of liberalism and democracy. The core of international law as we know it is formed by the Westphalian principles around which Europe’s princes and autocrats sought to organize peace several centuries ago, after religious war had ravaged the continent. They include the equal rights of states to sovereignty and territorial integrity, obligations of non-interference in the domestic affairs of others, the binding nature of interstate agreements (pacta sunt servanda), as well as bans on assassinating foreign leaders, wars of religion and other ideological crusades.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, European states devised an elaborate system of continental diplomacy and summitry based on those normative codes. It aimed to guarantee their survival as sovereign and independent entities and to ensure peace. The continent viewed itself as a pluralist club of states, each with its own distinctive identity and administrative practices, but bound by a common interest to preserve the balance of power amongst themselves and prevent the emergence of a continental hegemon, which the Napoleonic wars had threatened in the decade before. States had their interests, but the pursuit of those interests was constrained by obligations they owed to the state system as a whole.

The point is that the idea of rules-based order went through distinct phases and incarnations, as well as through periods of decline and renewal, before it assumed its post-1945 and post-1989 liberal shape. Presumably, it can evolve again. If Europe wishes to keep rules at the heart of the state system, a process of renewal is precisely what it now needs to instigate. Together with other powers who retain some faith in the power of law, it needs to recalibrate its compass and ascertain which bits of the multilateral order need preserving and which parts need trimming away, considering that the age of liberal hegemony is over.

It can be expected that such a process of renewal will lead to a reaffirmation of minimalist neo-Westphalian principles of order, the diplomatic source code for state systems that are pluralist and multipolar. Maximalist principles enshrining liberal values and Western-style democracy in international law are less likely to survive. Making the world safe for democracy is not an agenda non-democracies can agree with, a reality Europeans like Sanchez and Costa should be clear-eyed about. If shedding our naiveté about liberal values in foreign policy is what Von der Leyen and Merz mean by realism, they may yet be on the right track. However, they would err in giving up all legal constraints on state power. In its origins, international law was never a liberal or idealist invention. On the contrary, it roots are realist and found in the realization that government and human nature are flawed and imperfect.

Whatever the outcome of the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the imperial sense of impunity that fuels Trump’s war ought to cause greater concern than it currently does. Europe’s main challenge with the US is not that it has stopped advocating liberalism. The far more dangerous change is that Washington has stopped being a Westphalian power, recanting from its obligations to the state system and instead embracing war as good, wholesome and liberating. If anywhere, this is where Europe needs to draw a firm and clear line with Donald Trump. It is possible to share the planet with illiberal powers. Living with hegemons who do not recognize the sovereign rights of other states is much harder, as Ukraine can attest.

Ironically, the leader who appreciates the importance of Westphalian norms best is the Pope. Not only does he squarely condemn America’s war against Iran but also, and specifically, its continued invocation of divine providence. ‘God does not bless any conflict,’ Leo XIV reminded his US followers. Propagating the will of God through bombs, he knows, produces conflict that is total and uncontainable. ‘The Church does not want any more crusades,’ a close Vatican observer explained. It was precisely this insight that lay at the origins of international law and the rights of sovereign states. If the Pope remembers, surely so can his secular European counterparts.