The world has grown so desensitized to the offenses of Vladimir Putin's Russia that the visible signs of torture on Islamic State terrorist suspects in court for the recent attack in Moscow sparked little reaction. After all, why be surprised?
The Russian government is no stranger to accusations of torturing people in custody, and it has violated international law in many other ways, both before and since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It has struck civilian targets with reckless abandon following an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state. It has stolen more than 19,000 children from their Ukrainian families and relocated them against their will to Russia or Russian-occupied territory. It likely assassinated Putin's biggest political opponent in prison recently.
The sheer number of offenses is staggering, but even so, Russia has previously sought to hide its crimes, deny them or defend them within the parameters of international law.
The behavior of the Russian government has worsened because Putin has no fear that he will suffer consequences.
More worrying, though, is that it isn't just Russia. Impunity is contagious. Russia led the charge in assassinating opponents on foreign soil, but today, there are credible allegations against India, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Rwanda for lethal attacks against perceived adversaries overseas. These aren't all pariah states. Three remain close partners of the United States and have incurred no real consequences for these offenses against human rights and national sovereignty.
When the United States has chosen to call out offenders of international law and norms, it's been met with credible cries of hypocrisy and double standards. America does the international order no favors when it lambastes countries of the global south for not condemning Russia's crimes while blocking meaningful action by the United Nations Security Council against Israel's collective punishment of Gaza's civilians.
If America is unwilling or unable to cajole its friends to abide by a set of international standards, what hope do we have of reining in the bad acts of others?
Call it the rules-based order, the liberal international order or a system of international law. It's been with us in some form since the end of World War II, and, although deeply flawed, it has had notable successes. Greater predictability and engagement facilitated an explosion in global trade. Poverty rates around the world declined dramatically. Democracy spread for decades. It sought to prevent interstate wars, and it succeeded in diminishing them significantly, for a while.
This system was always applied on a curve. It was never powerful enough to rein in an unwilling superpower, but it did help shape state behavior and kept the bulk of it within certain parameters or risk the consequences. States that wholly bucked the system, such as North Korea, merely remained exiles, outside the constraints or benefits of the world order.
A bit like Santa Claus, the system's efficacy only ever extended as far as global belief in it did. During the Cold War, that global belief was grounded in the fragile cooperation of two competing superpowers. They allowed and fostered conflict where it suited them, but they still managed to prevent war between two nuclear powers.
It can be easy to ignore the signs that our system of order is fraying, given how nebulous that order already was. But if that system continues to retreat, we will be left with only chaos — the kind that agents of chaos, such as Putin's Russia, thrive on.
If the global community of states, such as it is, cannot manage to resuscitate the order we had, we ought to start looking hard for a better system to replace it.
Elizabeth Shackelford, the Magro Family Distinguished Visitor in International Affairs at Dartmouth College, was previously a U.S. diplomat.