Comment by panarky

I generally agree with your comment except the 'back to the real world' part. This is just the difference between a world with the gains that cooperation give verses a world with just the maximized minimum return that distrust leads to. A trusting world is the real world we have seen for decades. It is a real world we can choose to keep pushing for.

Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.

Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.

> Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief.

> But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.

Many have absorbed and believe the argument of the might-makes-right crowd that their vision is 'real' and their enemies' vision is 'imaginary'. Unless people believe in what they seek, they are lost.

There's nothing imaginary about it; that theory is paper thin and doesn't survive simple examination. Obviously, humans are social animals that live in groups, have powerful intellects, and therefore have tremendous ability to cooperate and work together toward greater good; we've done it many, many times. Freedom and democracy have appealed powerfully to people worldwide, in a tremendously wide variety of cultures. That model was created by people who had experienced WWI and WWII; they knew more of your 'reality' than probably you or I ever will, and with that knowledge and experience they created this order.

And the greater good long predates that; religions and similar ethical codes based on the greater good long predate modern democracy and the rules-based order. Rules-based orders predate it. The Gospels in the New Testament are an easy, very familiar example, from 2,000 years ago (and a significant basis of modern freedom and democracy). Similar is true for abstractions like law, government, justice, etc.

We all are biologically the same, essentially, as the best of humanity and the worst - both are in all of us. It's our choice, our moral choice, what we do. That is also a fundamental that long predates the post-war order, democracy, the Englightenment, etc. Inevitability is a cheap tactic long used by those whose ideas are undesireable and don't withstand scrutiny.

Our choice is easier than those who survived WWII, and their predecessors. Our ancestors gave us the tools, the institutions, etc. They had to build them from nothing for a skeptical world.

The US has played by different rules, might makes right, in the western hemisphere for a long time.

Screwing around with Greenland shit, on the other hand, seems riskier.

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The rules based order is mostly a fabrication of recent history. Perhaps between the fall of the Soviet Union, China becoming more open, and the general peace and prosperity it seemed like it existed.

Politics between countries has always been around interests. Countries have no interest in giving up their sovereignty. They may pretend to respect these "rules" when it suits them and then ignore them when it doesn't. Everyone is focused on how "bad" the US is but a) the US has always more or less done whatever it wants b) Russia and China (and many others) have never even pretended to play or accept these "rules".

Canada's Carney whines about "international order" when just a few years ago China simply abducted Canadians in response to the supposed "orderly" arrest of the Huawei CFO to be extradited to the US. So Canada basically abducts the CFO of a major Chinese company and China abducts Canadians in retaliation and that's a rules based order to who exactly? And we can put together an endless list of an endless number of countries. So when exactly was there ever a rules based order except as a tool for countries to bully each other and for the poorer dictator led countries to try and get a seat at the table because they can vote in the UN general assembly.