When precisely did the rules-based order die? Mark Carney’s speech last week at Davos was the first time a western head of state has said outright what has been hanging over political proceedings for some time. The rules-based order is “fading”, in the middle of a “rupture” and there’s no going back. But outside Davos, the G7 and Nato, that is old news – many believed the rules-based order had expired long ago, depending on what moment you take as your watershed.

There were several components to the order, which of course was a layered, complex thing. The first is structural, that is, the agreement between powerful and prosperous countries that there would be certain mechanisms and protocols to maintain political stability, contain the outbreak of wars and promote their mutual economic interests. All the bodies that direct international traffic – the EU, Nato, the UN, the WTO, the IMF – make up that top layer of organisation.

The second was more abstract, the norms that those countries adhered to in action and rhetoric. They would not launch aggressive protectionist economic policies against each other, definitely not have designs on each other’s territory and not pass opinion on each other’s domestic affairs.

The third was the ideological glue that held it all together, one that advanced the impression that these were not simply transactional arrangements in everyone’s interest, but something rooted in liberal ideals: the promotion of universal human rights, rights to self-determination and the sanctity of individual freedoms.

In many ways, the final component was the most important, what Carney called a “pleasant fiction”. This pretence that the whole thing wasn’t fundamentally about American hegemony. The........

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