"rules-based order" is one of those phrases like "rogue state" and "international community" that is usually though not always used by mouthpieces and fellow travelers of the American hegemony for propaganda purposes. There is a certain social group of bureaucrats, journalists, think-tankers, and various other sorts of nomenklatura who swirl around Washington D.C. and seem to suck these loaded terms into themselves along with their mothers' milk. They do not necessarily intend to use these phrases as propaganda - often they use these terms because they genuinely buy into the ideology behind them - but the ideology itself makes those terms propaganda nonetheless.
This sounds like a valid critique but the speaker disqualifies themself from me taking them seriously.
To be clear, I totally engage in such gratification myself, both as speaker and reader, but I don't expect anyone who doesn't already agree to be part of the exchange. If I call some one or some class a name, I'm just masturbating with other people who already feel the same. It's gratifying but it's not informative or persuasive or valid argument. I don't expect anyone else to take it as anything but the emotional attack it is.
> The term emerged from a New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s foreign policy amanuensis. According to Rhodes’s account in the story, “the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”
> The term soon became omnipresent in foreign policy discussions as its definition expanded in scope. It came to mean the foreign policy “establishment” that included those working in government, think tanks, and academia. Four years later, the term, like “globalization” or “neoliberalism” or “populist” or “elite,” tends to obscure as much as it reveals.
