U.S. President Donald Trump’s dramatic turn toward unilateralism and aggression, now playing out in the skies over Iran, has fueled an intensifying debate about the nature of the global order. On one side are those who wax nostalgic about the glories of the rules-based or liberal order that Trump is destroying. On the other side, critics have emphasized that the unilateral, U.S.-led order was always and irredeemably shot through with hypocrisy, an idealistic facade meant to conceal the ugly nature of U.S. power.
But there’s a better way to think about the damage that Trump is inflicting. It lies in the distinction that the scholar David Runciman, drawing on the work of George Orwell, articulates between productive and destructive forms of hypocrisy. In the former, which Runciman associates with successful democracies, people genuinely aspire to their stated values, even as they fall short. As a result, the hypocrisy serves an ameliorating function. In the other form of hypocrisy, which Runciman associates with Orwell’s treatment of imperialism, idealistic rhetoric simply serves to mask the brutality of the system, which provides no benefits whatsoever to the oppressed.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s dramatic turn toward unilateralism and aggression, now playing out in the skies over Iran, has fueled an intensifying debate about the nature of the global order. On one side are those who wax nostalgic about the glories of the rules-based or liberal order that Trump is destroying. On the other side, critics have emphasized that the unilateral, U.S.-led order was always and irredeemably shot through with hypocrisy, an idealistic facade meant to conceal the ugly nature of U.S. power.
But there’s a better way to think about the damage that Trump is inflicting. It lies in the distinction that the scholar David Runciman, drawing on the work of George Orwell, articulates between productive and destructive forms of hypocrisy. In the former, which Runciman associates with successful democracies, people genuinely aspire to their stated values, even as they fall short. As a result, the hypocrisy serves an ameliorating function. In the other form of hypocrisy, which Runciman associates with Orwell’s treatment of imperialism, idealistic rhetoric simply serves to mask the brutality of the system, which provides no benefits whatsoever to the oppressed.
Trump’s policies have replaced the productive hypocrisy of the rules-based world order with a naked embrace of power and violence. This, for Orwell, is the logic of fascism, something far worse than hypocrisy. What’s more, this is happening at a time when countries and citizens across the global south are increasingly chafing at hierarchical global dynamics and demanding fair treatment in the international system.
With the injustice of the former order laid bare for all to see, there is now an opportunity to replace it with something better.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (right) and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attend at the Munich Security Conference Germany on Feb. 13. Liesa Johannssen/AFP via Getty Images
This “clash of hypocrisies,” as Runciman characterized it, helps us understand the persistent tension between public justifications—always burdened with some hypocrisy—in domestic and foreign policy. It is difficult for any political system to justify decisions coherently. For Orwell, democratic hypocrisy creates a mask that both disguises the power of the state but also moderates it. This makes coexistence possible without disintegration or descent into fascism. Imperial hypocrisy, by contrast, uses the mask to justify explicit force, attempting to obscure the reality that such force offers only injustice to its victims. In this way, democratic hypocrisy, grounded in ideals of equality, undermines imperial hypocrisy, which depends on an imposed hierarchy.
Consider how this applies to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. Rubio’s invocation of Europe and the United States’ shared history, from colonialism through the Cold War, was welcomed by European leaders after last year’s stunning assault by Vice President J.D. Vance. Rubio’s speech was more subtle than Vance’s, but both made the same point: The trans-Atlantic alliance is defined by shared ethno-political values, unapologetically infused with racism, fascism, and a defense of imperialism. Rubio argued that the West’s territorial expansion is to be celebrated. And European officials applauded, only weeks after President Donald Trump refused to rule out the use of military force to take over Greenland.
The evident hypocrisy—of the speech and especially of its reception—helps to further undermine even the pretense of the rules-based world order. Indeed, Rubio called this order a “foolish idea” and held it responsible for the “West’s managed decline.” As the mask falls, we risk entering a much darker world, one where the U.S. and Israel initiated an illegal war against Iran—in the middle of diplomatic negotiations. World leaders who last month applauded Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney when he spoke of a rupture in the global order are today condemning Iranian retaliation but not the U.S.-Israeli attack in the first place. As Brazilian diplomat Celso Amorim recently warned: We are “edging back towards a Hobbesian state, where military strength is the main determinant of a country’s de facto independence.”
That some would accept such naked appeals to force is perhaps understandable. In applauding Rubio’s celebration of U.S. empire only weeks after acclaiming Carney’s call for an alliance of middle powers, European officials are mirroring their governments’ too-accommodating response to Trump. This hypocrisy was always evident to those outside Munich and Davos. Countries in the Middle East, for example, have long known how great powers used what Carney described as “financial infrastructure as coercion” and applied international law with varying with degrees of vigor “depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” For now, many states in Europe and elsewhere are accepting Washington’s asymmetrical demands and resigning themselves to U.S. tariff threats. But as they are discovering, there are limits to appeasement.
It is unsustainable for hegemonic powers to construct a world based on ultimatums and enforced by military might. Countries that fully subordinate themselves to another—without the justification of mutual prosperity or shared values—eventually lose the ability to uphold the political and economic costs of such agreements. Governments may craft short‑term strategies to accept such transactional asymmetry, but eventually their citizens—motivated by self-interest, sovereignty, and national pride—will pressure them to stand up to it.
India is a powerful example. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had long played up his closeness with Trump. But this rapport was betrayed when Trump imposed some of his highest tariffs on India. Now, the asymmetric nature of the latest U.S.-India trade agreement has been met by farmers’ protests and strikes, while Modi’s opponents accuse him of surrender.
Brazil’s response presents a stark contrast. Trump sanctioned members of the country’s judiciary in an attempt to stop the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro on coup charges. The trial not only continued, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s popularity also increased because he refused to back down. He has since charmed Trump into reducing Washington’s formerly punishing tariffs. Lula has also deftly bolstered elements of the old order while advocating for reform. Most recently, he called on Trump to limit the Board of Peace’s mandate to Gaza (and secure Palestinian representation) so as not displace the United Nations. At the same time, he has also continued advocating for Security Council reform.
Yugoslav President Marshal Josip Broz (right), Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (center), and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser during the Non-Aligned Movement summit in July 1956. AFP via Getty Images
The contradictions between sovereignty and the constraints of the international order are long-standing. They became more complex as suffrage expanded and colonial structures collapsed during the 20th century. Over the ensuing decades, the mask of international cooperation supported a hypocritical system in which powerful nations routinely broke the rules. Yet these same nations needed to justify their violations through moral acrobatics that, paradoxically, reinforced the system’s values and required actions to be framed within a grammar of rights and norms.
Coming out of World War II, countries around the world committed themselves to the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights despite the obvious limitations. Five countries exercised a Security Council veto, human rights went unrealized, and war was not eliminated as a tool of foreign policy. But international cooperation, or at least the aspiration to it, became the bedrock of relations between nations.
The sands beneath this arrangement began shifting during the Cold War. While some global south countries often found themselves enmeshed in unequal relationships with the Soviet Union or the United States, both of these superpowers put forth public justifications grounded in shared values and material benefits. At the same time, other global south nations, particularly new U.N. members emerging from decolonization, formed the Non‑Aligned Movement, creating space for relative independence.
After the Cold War, the new justification for international cooperation came from the promises of free markets and globalization. A structure anchored in the Bretton Woods institutions as well as more recent incarnations in the World Trade Organization and the Financial Action Task Force normalized the idea that domestic policy—in the global south—should follow supposedly technocratic guidelines. This shifted policymaking to the international sphere, empowering technocrats in global institutions to dictate socioeconomic rules, where free‑trade and austerity measures were packaged alongside human rights and environmental norms—but with the former dominating the latter.
This architecture offered public justification for weaker nations to adopt policies that were favorable to stronger ones. It generated prosperity in some ways and inequality in many others. In time, it produced growing resistance to the idea that domestic policy should be dictated internationally. Among other developments that undermined this rationale were the 2008 crisis response, U.S. attacks on the global trade system under the first Trump presidency (which were never reversed by President Joe Biden), the rise of the Chinese state‑led model, and the pandemic‑era reassertion of state power. Industrial policy and national development regained legitimacy in Europe and the United States even as these countries limited the ability of poor ones to do the same.
Protestors in Caracas, Venezuela on June 20, 2019. Christian Hernandez/AFP via Getty Images
The ongoing tension between rejecting the hypocrisy of the global order and strengthening national politics can now be resolved in multiple possible ways. Some are alarming. It could result in authoritarian regimes enforcing externally imposed agreements on unwilling citizens. Other solutions offer hope, such as the rise of national movements opposing a force‑based international order.
Indeed, these movements are already emerging as citizens in Africa and Latin America demand an end to relations based on natural resource extraction. Of particular note are the Belém Declaration on Global Green Industrialization, the global efforts at the G‑20 to tax the super‑rich, and the worldwide mobilization against genocide in Palestine.
States’ efforts to temper the excessive power of Big Tech are another example of this trend. The old order might have struggled to enforce algorithmic transparency on Western companies. But now, coalitions among Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia could plausibly constrain U.S. tech giants. Both regulation and the redistribution of technology’s benefits to the global south were front and center at the February AI Impact Summit in India.
Then there are the increasing alliances among middle powers to rebalance global power. EU-Mercosur and EU-India trade negotiations move in this direction. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility—a Brazil‑led initiative also involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and others—is another example of new multilateralism grounded in shared values and pragmatic interests. And in a world of might makes right, Qatar has made mediation the cornerstone of its foreign policy.
We are living through a clash between the fragile hypocrisies structuring international order and those sustaining national governments—a contemporary version of Orwell’s insight. No one can predict how this tension will resolve. A future based purely on force is possible. But there is also a rupture in the linkage between domestic and international legitimacy—and this crack is where hope resides.
With the unmasking of hypocrisy of the current order, our moment requires renewed commitment to the values underlying the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet those documents alone have never been enough to sustain a form of multilateralism truly benefiting the world’s people. Only the political force of domestic movements can push middle powers and coalitions of small states to resist an order based solely on force and fight for one grounded in cooperation and mutual benefit.
