Harry Gillow: The global rules some thought were set in stone, are gone. Conservatives need to find a new way as Labour can’t

Harry Gillow is a public and EU law barrister. He previously worked for Sir Bill Cash MP on the Brexit campaign.

There’s something surreal about watching the snowball of the US-driven disintegration of the rules-based international order gather pace at the hands of its creator and greatest beneficiary.

After the warm-up act of throwing Ukraine under the bus and dismantling NATO, it’s on to the main event – the demolishing of the system of global free trade that has underpinned the world economy for decades. 10 per cent tariffs as a baseline, 20 per cent on the EU, all the way up to 54 per cent on Chinese goods.

For all the claims that these tariffs are merely “reciprocal” to trade restrictions imposed on US goods, there’s nothing scientific about the US approach. So far as any logic can be glimpsed from the murky assertions of the Trump team, it appears that the ‘calculations’ are based not on any assessment of the actual value of trade restrictions, but rather on the size of the US trade deficit with any given country. Nor is the effect on the institutionalist system that has dominated post-war world politics accidental – its destruction is (and long has been) central to Trump’s political agenda.

What’s next?

Abandonment of global shipping routes to piracy and terrorism, as we’ve seen flashes of in the Signal discussion over strikes on Yemen? The end of the dollar as the global reserve currency? Tolerance of – or even connivance in – attempts to destabilise European democracies? Wherever we go from here – and whatever happens to the MAGA movement after the next US election – the security blanket of the rules-based international order is gone; the trust that allowed that fragile system to survive stripped away in favour of brutal great power politics.

In this new world, there will be no room for the luxury of superfluous constraints on our ability to act on raw interests. As we move into an era where national protection and even survival are once again central to policymaking, what happens to the accumulated debris of the decades of peace – those international commitments that increasingly seem to demand that we sacrifice fundamental interests to the latest whim of some arcane international body?

It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that – much as we may need a wholesale re-examination of our domestic statute book – we need the same at the international level.

Can we really afford the Aarhus Convention’s open invitation to every vexatious environmental litigant to challenge the latest vital national infrastructure project without consequence?

Can the ECHR, the Refugee Convention, survive Russia’s weaponisation of the asylum system? Is it really sensible to remain a member of an international court that demands that, in the most egregious expansion of its remit and wilful ignorance of national sovereignty, we shatter our relationship with a key Middle Eastern ally as the region dissolves into chaos?

What about the ICJ, so determined to sacrifice our national security in blatant defiance of the principle of state consent to its jurisdiction?

Is the WTO really fit for purpose in an age of protectionism and gangster mercantilism? Don’t we need the freedom to acquire and – if necessary – use landmines or cluster munitions in the face of land war in Europe? Is the law of the sea fit for purpose in an age where the global hegemon is considering abandoning our shipping lanes to terrorism?

We might decide, of course, that we want to remain part of any or all of these. We might decide that the principles underpinning some are good, but better replaced by bilateral or multilateral treaties among select allies. We might even decide that we need to tolerate a degree of tension, and simply legislate contrary to certain international law obligations, as we’re perfectly entitled to.

But there’s no room for a blithe assumption, without scrutiny or reassessment, that our international obligations are simply a good in and of themselves. If they don’t serve our interests – all the more if they harm them – we need to ask ourselves why we tolerate them. If international courts can’t bring themselves to compromise with the new world, to prioritise the right of nations to defend themselves, their time may be up.

There’s little prospect that our government will recognise this.

Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer are too wedded, emotionally and philosophically, to the old world that shaped their entire careers.

It will be wrenching for the UK’s liberal establishment to come to terms that cherished ideals will have to take second place to reality. But there’s hope yet if the right can commit itself to a clear-eyed reassessment of what our self-interest really requires.

In an age of change and collapse, there’s no point to going down – however nobly – with the Titanic of a sinking system.