After an election, we make nice. The loser congratulates the victor; everybody shakes hands and promises a smooth transition of power. Spicy campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, such courtesies in service to the god of Stability are made possible by the underlying assumption that, while competing candidates and parties offer different ideas of how to achieve a better America, that’s the goal we all want because we all supposedly have similar values.             Conveying a sense of continuity was no doubt paramount on President Biden’s mind when he delivered his post-election invitation to President-Elect Trump to visit the White House. There, the two men exchanged an easy repartee before an Oval Office fire–a tradition Trump did not deign to offer the victorious Biden before slinking off to Mar-e-Lago in mid-January of 2021. Restoring normalcy, with the corollary that Jan. 6th was anomalous, is also why Biden as well as Vice President Kamala Harris will attend Trump’s inaugural ceremony.             Understandable, laudable…

           Mainstream American political leaders regularly argue that the United States adheres to, defends and promotes a “rules-based international order.” What’s that? It’s rarely defined.             The best summary I’ve been able to find was articulated by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, introduced by The Financial Times as “an influential scholar whose former pupils populate the American government,” in 2023. “I think the rules-based order has a history that predates the U.S. and even predates 1945 and the great order-building efforts after World War II,” Ikenberry said. He continues: “But if you were to try to identify what open rules-based order is, it’s a set of commitments by states to operate according to principles, rules and institutions that provide governance that is not simply dictated by who is most powerful. So it’s a set of environmental conditions for doing business—contracts, multilateral institutions—and it comes in many layers. At the deepest level it’s really the system of sovereignty. It’s the belief…