ONE overlooked impact of the wild and dangerous first few months of the second Trump administration is how it has quickened the already terrible brain rot evident in many liberals.
 
I’m thinking, in particular, about the numerous articles and news reports panicked by the threat President Trump (and President Putin) pose to the “international rules-based order in existence since the war,” as the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont warned last month.
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Those looking for a definition can find it in the new article written by members of the House of Commons International Affairs Unit, including Dr Jonathan Leader Maynard, a senior lecturer in international politics at King’s College London.

“Since the end of the second world war, Britain and its allies have supported a ‘rules-based international order,’ defined as an interconnected set of international organisations, laws, regulations and shared norms,” the authors note.

Beaumont cites one such norm enshrined in the UN charter: “All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
 
While there has been a surge in usage over the last few weeks, in 2020 Declassified UK’s Mark Curtis noted “the term is mentioned in 339 press articles in the last five years” with Britain “invariably seen as a supporter of this order while those seen by the British government as opponents, such as Russia and Iran, are conveyed in the press as the challengers.”
 
When, you might wonder, has the Western-supported “rules-based international order” been in operation?
 
Has it been since October 2023, when the US and Britain have armed and supported Israel as it carries out what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both called a “genocide” in Gaza?
 
Was it in 2003 when the US and Britain illegally and aggressively invaded Iraq, leading to the deaths of approximately 500,000 Iraqi men, women and children, according to a 2013 PLOS Medicine journal study, and over 4.2 million people displaced by 2007, according to the UN Refugee Agency?
 
Was it in the 1980s and 1990s when US-armed Nato member Turkey waged war on the Kurds, leading to 3,000 villages being “virtually wiped from the map” and approximately 380,000 Kurds being displaced, as a 2005 Human Rights Watch report noted?
 
Was it in the 1970s and 1980s when the US backed Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of South America? According to US journalist John Dinges, the US was in an “intimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums.”

By the end of the cold war, Professor Greg Grandin from Yale University notes “Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror — hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile.”

The human rights abuses were so great that Professor John Coatsworth, writing in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, explained that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the USSR and its East European satellites.”
 
Was it in the 1960s when the US and Britain facilitated the mass killing carried out by the Indonesian army, led by General Suharto, of perhaps 500,000 Indonesians?
 
Was it in the 1950s, when the US overthrew democratically elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran, while in Kenya Britain imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Kenyans in detention camps and “barbed wire villages” where they endured forced labour, starvation, torture and disease that left tens of thousands dead, according to Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins?
 
More broadly, summarising peer-reviewed research published last year, Dr Jason Hickel notes on his Substack, “the US intervened in foreign elections at least 128 times between 1946 and 2014, usually to prevent left-wing parties from forming a government or retaining power.”
 
While the good intentions of the West are taken for granted by starry-eyed members of the intellectual class in the US and Britain, over the years, some US officials have been more honest.
 
“We have about 60 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population,” George Kennan, the then director of policy planning at the US State Department, noted in 1948. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
 
Similarly, CIA whistleblower Philip Agee has noted: “In the CIA, we didn’t give a hoot about democracy. I mean, it was fine if a government was elected and would co-operate with us. But if it didn’t, then democracy didn’t mean a thing to us.”
 
What’s going on here? If, as the Morning Star recently correctly noted, “the rules-based order” has “never really existed,” why do so many journalists, commentators and academics believe in it? How can supposedly highly respected people be not just a little wrong but so wrong their understanding of the world is the complete opposite of reality?
 
Is it simply racism? As the examples above show, deadly Western covert and military power has been largely directed at powerless non-white people living in the global South — what Curtis has termed “unpeople” — “those deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain … the modern equivalent of the ‘savages’ of colonial days.”
 
Or is it an outcome of the elite’s educational background? For example, three of the four authors of the House of Commons article are University of Oxford graduates. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, it is often the most educated who are the most indoctrinated with the dominant ideology.

“There’s a filtering system, that starts in kindergarten, and goes all the way through, and it’s not going to work 100 per cent but it’s pretty effective,” Chomsky has argued. “It selects for obedience, and subordination.” The outcome? “Through recorded history the respected intellectuals in virtually every society are those who are distinguished by their conformist subservience to those in power.”
 
No doubt the blinkered, herd-like behaviour of the intellectual class has many overlapping causes. But what we can say for sure is that if a public figure uncritically repeats the idea that the West has played a key role in maintaining a “rules-based international order” since the second world war, then either they are completely ignorant of history, or they are trying to deceive you. Both are deeply worrying prospects.
 
Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.