Flat Earth and Rare Earths The oneiric and the onerous in international relations
#1. The rules-based international order, through which global organizations were conceived for collective problem-solving, for reducing protectionist impulses and for stabilizing the postwar global economy, is a feeble exception to the world’s true “state of nature”: the anarchy of the balance of power. Fetishized by the idealists who naively believe in the vigor of its architecture, this “order” makes, by comparison, the flatness of the Earth seem like a reasonable hypothesis.
#2. Woken from the reverie of this supposed order, the theoreticians, practitioners and final beneficiaries got that its founding rules were not just inegalitarian from the start – in a cold reading of Bretton Woods (1944) and San Francisco (1945), not only of Yalta! –, but also inconstant. Hence, any exalted self-re-evaluation of state power, internal and external, leads not solely to dilemmas in norms’ interpretation, but also to flagrant and remorseless rule breaking.
#3. By way of explanation for the volatility of rules, especially projected over large population, time and territorial scales, we can call in not just the fickle human nature, but also the carrousel of generations. Our grandparents’ world can still resemble the one of our parents, but too little, if at all, ours. Those world orders cannot be preserved in amber or in reverently signed and sealed parchments. Pacta sunt servanda, but what if they are no longer serving their purposes?
#4. Moreover, the democratic “conveyor belt” of public opinion onto foreign attitudes is not mechanical. We are dealing with variations on the chimeric national interest – that “unholy ghost” of modern scientific governance. The privilege of grasping and gearing that national interest belongs to a political class which can (re)(dis)(pro)claim it, but cannot calculate, calibrate or control it with objective rigor. Foreign policy (too) may become simply whimsical.
#5. Foreign affairs discretion skyrockets when the ignorance of the public collides with the arrogance of politicians. Whether we are talking about epigone-czars mentally locked in the “democracy of the soviets” or about former CEOs “privatizing their republics”, foreign policy offers more generous narratives than internal policies. For the “nation” (ethnic or civic) is more easily “touchable”, almost in corpore, either for common benefits or against common enemies.
#6. On the last day of February 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House – seen as a shrine by its occupant –, the aforesaid “rules-based international order”, in its officious and official guise, finally gave up the ghost. What we had already intuited – the inevitable mercantilism of diplomatic negotiations, the weaving of hard power on which lofty principles are embroidered, the personal humors of nation’s saviors – was broadcasted live, with no airbrushing of its flaws.
#7. The titling for this episode can be, resuming a famous French folio, “the disenchantment of the world”. We’ve got it that in intergovernmental relations, behind only apparent sacrificial nobility, lies a hard monetary calculus. We’ve got it that there are no differences, except in the dictionary, between grants, loans, guarantees, donations; these are all debt. We’ve got it that all is payable in this life, and wiping away debt often proves to be more costly than just paying it.
#8. The (in)famous dialogue also showed us that, for excitable and extroverted leaders, personal tastes are axiomatic and it would not be at all excessive to write them in the Constitution, print them on banknotes or carve them on Mount Rushmore. For them, the world is a grocery store of territories and populations that should give themselves up at the first come-on, war criminals are nice guys since they pick up the phone, and peace is a predefined service which gets billed.
#9. But, yes, any kind of peace costs, whether it comes from victory, defeat, or draw. So, it is indecent, even for the political leader of a country that is the victim of aggression, to use any other standard of judgement than then one applied internally for enforcing public law and order: the state will tax you for it; and the US (or the European states, or any others) will tax you for peace facilitating service. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, even at a memorial service.
#10. Last, but not least, we should sincerely ask ourselves whether for the layman, who does not hide in bunkers and maks only ritual visits to the frontline, peace might not be preferable to a brave but implausible victory, celebrated six feet under. The choice between a life in chains and a heroic death is a heart-rending exercise. One of freedom, conscience, responsibility, regardless of order(s). The benefit of peace is life; its cost, untold pain, and… some rare earths.
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