Time to re-base the world’s rules upon the alliance of the West, Mr President

The Nato nations won the long war, but they need to win again if we want to keep the global peace

We have what is called “a rulesbased international order”, and it is under threat. The current US Defence Secretary, James Mattis, calls it the “greatest gift of the greatest generation”. What is it? The simplest answer is, “The best means of keeping peace and security in the world.” Why do we have it? The simplest answer is, “Because America and Britain won the Second World War.”

But then there’s a trick question: “When did we win the Second World War?” The not-so-simple answer is, “Not 1945, but 1991.” Unlike after the First World War in 1919, no full peace was agreed in 1945. The behaviour of Stalin’s Soviet Union made that impossible. Only with the reunification of Germany and the break-up of the Soviet Union did the war truly end.

We won because of Nato. Nato represents the commitment of the United States, supported by its European allies (Britain foremost), to guarantee peace in Europe through a defensive alliance with a strong political component. It has maintained that peace for 70 years, so it is the most successful military alliance ever.

Does Donald Trump want the rules-based international order to fall apart? He keeps complaining about Nato’s cost to America and the backsliding of European allies. He is causing trepidation by having a meeting with President Putin around the time of the Nato summit in Brussels next month.

In the New York Times last week, Kori Schake wrote that the first weeks of June 2018 may be looked back on as “a turning-point in world history: the end of the liberal order”, for which Mr Trump should be blamed. She cited his scorning – over trade – of the rules-based international system at the G7 summit in Canada, and his promise to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un – without consulting allies in the region – that he would pull US troops out of the Korean peninsula in return for denuclearisation. She spoke of his “reckless disregard for the security concerns of America’s allies”.

Ms Schake, a leading figure at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is an authority in her own right; but interest is added to what she says because she knows the mind of General Mattis extremely well. It is fair to assume there is growing tension between the world views of the Trump White House and the Mattis Pentagon, with the latter deeply concerned for America’s allies.

President Trump’s behaviour is unsettling. There is little evidence that he understands the history sketched above, which General Mattis does. But what he is doing is testing whether others mean what they say. He is right that few Nato countries spend nearly enough on defence to maintain their obligations. Britain is supposedly one of the good boys, but barely hits the minimum of two per cent of GDP (and 16 of the 29 members, including Germany, don’t manage even that). European members of Nato may be more pious than Mr Trump on the subject, but America pays for nearly three quarters of the whole thing.

At present, Nato has four big battalions as its “enhanced forward presence” in Estonia and Poland. After Brexit, Britain will remain there, but in three of those four Nato battalions, there will be no EU presence at all. Behind European thinking (or lack of it) lies the assumption that the United States will always guarantee our security. It is not an assumption that America – a democracy with a taxpaying electorate – can leave unchallenged.

So far, at least, Mr Trump should not be accused of squandering the greatest gift to the greatest generation. Perhaps he is simply trying to make its recipients more grateful.

This week, he pulled the United States out of the United Nations Human Rights Council. He was quite justifiably angry that this body devotes its chief energies to stigmatising Israel (47 per cent of all the condemnatory resolutions it has ever passed concern Israel) and avoids pursuing countries with far worse human rights records such as Iran, China and Russia. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, says the council is a “cesspool of political bias”. On Britain’s behalf, Boris Johnson describes the US action as “regrettable”, a remark which he should himself regret. The UN Human Rights Council makes a mockery of the values we – and it – purport to uphold.

Similarly, on trade, Mr Trump’s protest is against system malfunction. The Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has now been going 17 years without completion. He can claim to be tackling anti-american abuses rather than burning the rulebook. Ronald Reagan did much the same towards Japan in the 1980s.

Besides, it is not because of Mr Trump that the rules-based order is creaking. The causes predate him and run deeper. Somewhere after victory in the Cold War, most of those in charge of that order lost touch with reality. A separate priesthood of globalists took charge, whose annual general synod met at Davos. Although often anti-american, they exploited the protection of American unipolarity to try to reshape the world. They abused the cause of human rights to undermine the power of elected governments in free countries. People now associate “human rights” with efforts to force nations to accept mass immigration, with rules that prevent us deporting foreign criminals and so on. On Sunday, now-frightened EU member states who sowed the immigration wind are meeting to try to agree who must reap the whirlwind.

The theory of climate change, under UN auspices, allowed enthusiasts to construct a massive global framework of emissions rules. These combine far too much imposition – levies on domestic electricity bills, for example – with not enough enforceability, so that lots of developing countries have never had to fulfil their promises.

In the EU, the false sense that threat had disappeared allowed federalists to try to invent a superpower which would smother the old nations in ever-closer union. Because of the euro, this produced long-term mass unemployment across half the zone. Almost every day, the ever-closer doctrine brings forth preposterous assertions of Brussels’s power.

Yesterday, for example, I read Jean-claude Juncker telling us what Britain must do about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. By what madness did we reach the point at which such a matter lies in the hands of a twerp from Luxembourg? We forgot that representative democracy must legitimise the roots of power.

And in finance, globalists thought they had devised an alchemy that would produce unlimited gold. When, in 2008, it stopped doing so, nations and people suffered, but the alchemists survived.

In short, too many of the elites forgot who won the war, and why. They played around, and while they were doing so, huge new forces arose about which they did almost nothing. In the piece quoted above, Kori Schake has a striking phrase about what we are getting as more of the world comes under the thrall of China – a landscape of “privileges rather than rights, power rather than law, tribute rather than alliance”.

We need a rules-based order as much as ever, but the only proper rules base we ever had was the combined will of free countries practising the rule of law. That means us, especially us in Nato. We must revive that winning formula, or find ourselves starring in an epic film called How the West Was Lost.