That’s why, long after the shock has worn off, the enduring lesson for China will be a sense of vindication. Operation Absolute Resolve is a confirmation of what the CCP has always believed — that there is no such thing as a rules-based international order; that it’s a jungle out there.

Now Beijing will feel vindicated that America has shed the pretence. Whether Trump’s actions are the death knell of the rules-based world order, or merely reveal that it never existed, doesn’t truly matter. What matters is that the US and China, as the two most powerful nations on Earth, the two countries with the most capability to uphold the rules for everyone else, share a disdain for them. Like the fairies of Neverland, these laws only ever existed if they were believed in.

One such study, conducted by Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis and Mitu Gulati of the University of Virginia, concluded that over the century ending in 2021 the court ruled for businesses an average of 41 percent of the time. But the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. since 2005 decided for businesses 63 percent of the time.

The study showed a growing partisan divide between the justices. In 1953, the study’s authors wrote, “Democratic and Republican appointees are statistically indistinguishable, deciding on average about 45 percent of the cases in favor of the rich.” By 2022, they wrote, “that share is about 70 percent for the average Republican justice and 35 percent for the average Democratic justice.”

America’s greatest successes after the second world war came not from extracting resources from Europe or Japan, but from providing public goods: security, institutional rebuilding and a rules-based order that allowed societies to prosper.

No fewer than 717 companies filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy between January and November, according to S&P data reviewed by The Washington Post. This marks a 14 percent increase from the same period in 2024 and the highest rate since 2010, when the country was recovering from the Great Recession

The world order as we knew it has been overturned.

By seizing a sitting head of state and announcing direct American administration over a sovereign country – without international authorisation, coalition partners or even the language of temporariness – he crossed a boundary the post-1945 international system was meant to keep intact.

Last year, before capturing President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration designated a Venezuelan slang term for drug corruption in the military as a terrorist organization and said he led it

Minnesota child care centers at the center of widespread fraud allegations fueled by a viral video were operating as expected when visited by investigators, the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families said in a news release Friday.