Favoured countries include China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.

Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria.  

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them.

In Ukraine, Russia has once again used artillery, cruise missiles, and drones, including Iranian drones, to hit an even wider range of civilian targets: houses, apartment buildings, churches, restaurants, ports, grain silos. Just last week, Russian missiles hit a shop and café in the small village of Horza, killing more than 50 people. This kind of strike had no conventional military justification. The point is to create pain, cause civilian deaths, and sow disruption—nothing else. Russian propagandists praise the destruction and call for more: “We should wait for the right moment and cause a migration crisis for Europe with a new influx of Ukrainians,” one of them told a television talk show.

Hamas is not a sovereign state, but it has the full backing of Iran, a sovereign state, and funding from Qatar, a sovereign state. Since 2006, Hamas has also been the de facto ruling party in Gaza, a self-governing territory since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. Nevertheless Hamas does not see itself as part of any kind of order. On Saturday, Hamas launched what appears to have been a well-planned, well-organized attack, designed to spread civilian terror and create chaos. Hamas deployed missiles and drones, including kamikaze drones of the kind used now in Russia and Ukraine, as well as teams of men with guns. Although they hit a few military outposts, they also murdered more than 200 people at a music festival, chased down children and the elderly, and in some towns went from house to house looking for people to murder. They abducted young women, beat them unconscious, and dragged them across the border, a war crime that is as old as Homer’s Iliad.

The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.

To explain why one permanent member of the UN Security Council and one quasi-state have adopted this kind of behavior, it is best to start with the nature of their own totalitarian regimes. But there is plenty more blame to go around, because the rules-based order, always pretty tenuous, has actually been dying for a long time. Autocracies, led by China, have been seeking to undermine or remove language about human rights and the rule of law from international forums for years, replacing it with the language of “sovereignty.” Not that this is just a matter of language: The Chinese have carried out atrocities against their Uyghur minority for years, so far with impunity, and openly conducted a successful assault on the rights of the population of Hong Kong. They, and others, have also indulged in deliberately provocative behavior, designed to mock the rule of law outside their own borders. Belarus got away with forcing an Irish-owned airplane to land in Minsk and then kidnapping one of its citizens who was onboard. Russia has organized murders of its citizens in London, Washington, and Berlin.

Democracies, led by the United States, bear a lot of the blame too, either for refusing to enforce anything resembling order when they could, or for violating the rules themselves. George W. Bush condoned interrogation black sites and torture during the War on Terror. Barack Obama accused the Syrians of using chemical weapons, then failed to do anything to stop them. Donald Trump went out of his way to pardon American war criminals and continues to advocate extrajudicial murders, among other things implying that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has notably indulged the most extreme voices in Israeli politics, including political figures who explicitly seek to undermine Israel’s independent judiciary and Israeli rule of law, and parties whose members openly advocate for the mass expulsion of Arabs from the country. One member of his own party, Likud, repeated that same call on Sunday.

By pointing this out, or by noting that the Israelis have also killed Palestinian civilians with impunity and will now do so again, I am not excusing what happened on Saturday, just describing Israel’s contribution to the deterioration of whatever norms remain. Add to that a United Nations that now seems preprogrammed to appoint weak leaders and a European Union that still doesn’t have a clear security policy, and you begin to see the bigger picture: We are heading into an era when there is no order, rules-based or otherwise, at all.  

During its lifetime, the aspirational rules-based world order and the international community that supported it were frequently mocked, and rightly so. The crocodile tears of the statesmen who expressed “profound concern” when their unenforced rules were broken were often unbearable. Their hypocrisy, as they opined on distant conflicts, was intolerable. On Saturday, Russia’s deputy defense minister parodied this kind of talk when he called for “peace” between Israel and Hamas based on “recognized agreements,” as if Russia accepted any “recognized agreements” as a basis for “peace” in Ukraine.

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.  

The weekend of September 30 marked an ominous turning point in international support for Ukraine—not just in Washington, D.C., but in two of the beleaguered country’s once-staunch supporters in Eastern Europe.

On the 30th, the now former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made an eleventh-hour budget deal to avoid a government shutdown, conditional on zeroing out U.S. support for Ukraine. The same day, halfway around the world, voters in Slovakia handed a major electoral victory to the party of the corrupt, pro-Russian conspiracy theorist Robert Fico, who campaigned on the rousing slogan “Not a single round”—meaning, no more ammunition from Slovakia for Ukraine.

[Tom Nichols: Why the GOP extremists oppose Ukraine]

Slovakia, though small, was one of the first NATO countries to provide armed assistance to Ukraine and has been a bulwark of logistical support. And yet, as the European Commission’s digital-affairs czar explained at a press conference in late September, “Slovakia has been chosen [by Russia] as the country where there is fertile soil for success of the Russian pro-Kremlin, pro-war narratives.” Fico—known for resigning as prime minister in disgrace in 2018, after the assassination of a journalist who was investigating his associates—has repeatedly blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion, parroting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists.” The weekend’s vote was deeply divided: Fico’s party won just 23 percent. But Slovakia’s president has tapped him to lead the country’s coalition government, which will likely seek to divest from Ukraine and push Slovakia into Putin’s waiting embrace.

Across Slovakia’s northern border, Poland, led by the right-wing Law and Justice party, has been Ukraine’s most important, strategically placed backer in the European Union these past 18 months. The government pledged its support to Ukraine in high-minded terms last year. But this year has been defined instead by populist electioneering, in which the ruling party has made fear of migrants a central theme. Middle Eastern refugees are the primary targets of this campaign, but Polish solidarity with Ukraine, too, has been dying a slow death, and preexisting xenophobia and historical memory of past ethnic violence have made ready fodder for Law and Justice propaganda.

In a radio interview this past summer, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński called the Ukrainian killings of Poles during World War II “even worse than the German genocides.” Local officials from the ruling party have published anti-Ukrainian screeds on their social-media accounts, and the far-right Confederation, with which Law and Justice sometimes cooperates, has openly called for sending Ukrainians back to Ukraine. But perhaps most troubling is the across-the-board ebbing of grassroots solidarity with Ukrainians as anti-migrant rhetoric grows in electoral appeal.

That Poland’s xenophobia is gathering momentum and, with it, an ever-expanding circle of targets is one of the messages of The Green Border, a new film by Agnieszka Holland that has been critically acclaimed but publicly condemned by Poland’s president and a host of government ministers. On its surface, the film is about the Polish mistreatment of Syrian refugees crossing over from Belarus in 2021, but the director explained in a September interview that she understands Ukrainians to be part of the same story: “From the beginning I knew that, as soon as helping Ukraine ceased to pay off for this government, it would start playing a different game. I do not believe that they are guided by humanitarian or Christian considerations. This is the most cynical politics there is. It ends and begins with electoral efficacy.”

A pair of influential Polish sociologists noted a year ago that Polish support for Ukraine did not mean Polish support for Ukrainians: In other words, a pro-Ukrainian foreign policy could go hand in hand with anti-Ukrainian feeling at home, and carry an expiration date to boot. We are now arriving at this expiration date. In July, Poland led a regional coalition of EU member states seeking an indefinite embargo on Ukrainian grain; most of the neighbors have since negotiated separate deals with Ukraine, but Law and Justice has stubbornly held out, nominally to protect the interests of grain-producing Polish farmers who fear Ukrainian competition. In his September speech before the United Nations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called out neighboring states for making a show of solidarity while essentially playing into Moscow’s hands. Law and Justice government ministers hit back; their social-media accounts exploded with tirades against perceived Ukrainian ingratitude.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]

Law and Justice will likely win reelection, but even if it doesn’t, the rift between Poland and Ukraine is deepening—and the trend for Ukraine is worrying. Stalwarts on whom the embattled country has relied for the past year and a half seem to be falling away. Zelensky’s travels to the UN, the United States, and Canada were meant to shore up flagging transatlantic support for Ukraine after the lackluster summer counteroffensive. But little went as planned. In the Canadian Parliament, Zelensky unwittingly became part of a standing ovation for a 98-year-old Ukrainian-born Canadian invited as a guest of the House speaker. The man was later unmasked as a former Waffen SS fighter—terrible optics for Zelensky, given Putin’s persistent attempts to tarnish Ukraine as a Nazi successor. In the U.S. Congress, Zelensky met with McCarthy and Mitch McConnell mere weeks before McCarthy caved to the House Republicans demanding an end to U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Support for Ukraine is drying up both in the country’s own backyard and across the Atlantic, at a time when Kyiv still desperately needs the world’s backing. Whether the initiative now comes from anti-migrant Poland, pro-Putin Slovakia, or perhaps the EU’s long-standing Eastern European laboratory of illiberalism—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—matters less than the bottom line: Ukraine’s days of international solidarity are numbered.

A Belarusian is released despite giving a detailed account of disappearing opposition members.