Ukraine: A War to Save the Rules-Based International Order? By Ted Galen Carpenter

Washington’s Fraudulent, Rules-Based International Order: Among the many deceptive arguments that Joe Biden’s administration has made about the Ukraine war is that Russia’s invasion is an attack of unprecedented severity on the liberal, “rules-based international order” established at the end of World War II. That allegation has been a constant theme of administration officials and their allies in the news media and the foreign policy blob.  Proponents argue that the war is a global existential struggle between order and chaos, free societies and unprincipled aggressors.  Biden has stated the thesis succinctly that the Ukraine war is nothing less than “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules‐​based order and one governed by brute force.”

The argument is shockingly disingenuous. Russia’s aggression, ugly as it might be, is hardly unprecedented in the post-World War II period. Indeed, there have been numerous violations just during the 3 decades since the end of the Cold War, and the lion’s share of them have come from the United States and its allies.

U.S. officials sanctimoniously condemning the use of force against another country may elevate chutzpah to record heights. The United States and its NATO partners bombed secessionist Bosnian Serbs in 1995 to impose a political settlement on Bosnia. Four years later, The United States not only led a NATO air war against Serbia (a fellow member of the United Nations), but proceeded to dismember that country. In 2003, Washington and its allies invaded and occupied Iraq—with NATO members providing well over 90 percent of the combat forces. In 2011, the U.S. and NATO waged an air war to depose Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. U.S. troops currently occupy portions of northeastern Syria against the explicit wishes of the Syrian government.