Rules based order?

There is something telling about the slow unravelling of the so-called “rules-based order.” Not just geopolitically, but spiritually.

For most of human history, war has been normal. Thucydides did not write about an exception but about the pattern. Empires rise, borders shift, power consolidates, fractures, and re-forms. The twentieth century’s two world wars were not an aberration in the long sweep of history — they were tragically typical. What was unusual was what followed.

The post-1945 settlement — the United Nations, NATO, Bretton Woods institutions, Geneva conventions — assumed something remarkable: that nations would restrain themselves. That agreements would matter. That sovereignty had limits. That civilians possessed dignity. That power should be checked.

Those assumptions did not arise from nowhere. They were downstream of a moral inheritance shaped by centuries of Western Christendom — truth is objective, all human beings bear dignity, the weak deserve protection, promises bind. Even where explicit faith had thinned, the moral architecture remained. A season of relative stability followed because enough nations broadly agreed on those underlying goods.

But rules-based orders only function when most players internalise the rules.

When rising powers do not share the same moral vision — or no longer believe the referee is impartial — the structure weakens. We are watching that shift now. Asia ascendant. Europe ageing and uncertain. The American moment less assured. Competing civilisational narratives stepping forward with confidence.

This is not merely a political recalibration. It is the fading of Christendom as the dominant plausibility structure of the West, and thus much of the globe. 

That may make some nervous. It need not make the church fearful.

Christ’s reign was never secured by NATO or the IMF. The gospel did not expand because the Mediterranean was stable; it expanded because the risen Jesus is Lord. As Revelation reminds us: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

We may be moving from a world of assumed Christian moral capital to one of open contest. That is unsettling. It is also clarifying. The church has often been spiritually sharper at the margins than at the centre.

Empires shift. The Lion and the Lamb remains standing.