For years now, policymakers, pundits, and professors have repeated the same line: the international rule-based order is under strain.

That phrasing is comforting. It implies repair is possible. That norms are bent, not broken. That with enough summits, statements, and sanctions, the system can be restored.

That framing is wrong.

The rule-based international order is not under strain. It is gone. It has been gone for longer than most people are willing to admit.

What we are living in now is not a malfunctioning rules-based system, but a multipolar world without a referee. Multiple power centers. No universal enforcement. No shared agreement on when rules apply — or to whom.

Law still exists, but it has been demoted. It now functions as language, but not constraint. And power decides when it matters.

This isn’t nostalgia for the post–Cold War moment, nor is it a return to the 19th-century balance of power. It is something colder, more fragmented, and more transactional. And the actors who feel this shift most acutely are not the great powers.

They are the small states.

Multipolarity is often discussed as if it were inherently stabilizing — a diffusion of power that prevents dominance. Historically, that’s only true when multipolarity comes with coordination mechanisms.

Today’s system has none.

What defines the current order is not simply the existence of multiple great powers, but three deeper features:

Rules are invoked when convenient and ignored when costly. Legal arguments are deployed as weapons, not commitments. Institutions still exist, but their authority depends entirely on who is willing to back them, and at what cost.

This creates a world where the most important strategic question is no longer who is right, but who survives.

Small states are the stress tests of any international system.