The original term was “liberal international order” (LIO) used by John Ikenberry in the 1990s, the LIO came in the wake of the apparently US-led victory in the Cold War. The LIO was about supposedly free international trade in the “new world order” that followed the fall of communism. American governments sought to initiate international free-market capitalism and liberal democracy within an uncontested American world empire.

The term RBIO grew out of this LIO in just in the last decade, applied not just to trade now, but to international relations and it was never about the rules themselves. It was about America setting out the rules by which it required other nations to operate. As American President Obama said in 2016, “America should write the rules. America should call the shots . Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around.” The rules-based order was therefore never meant to be a set of consistent and binding or researchable international rules.

This was unabashed, out-in-the-open Americanisation of as much of the world as they thought they could control.

But let’s go back a little. There have been whole reams of paper devoted to theories about the currect state of western society. Most of them focussing on the purely materialistic political-societal state in which we live and all of them unconcerned about where it is leading or its consequences. They assign various starting points, but post WW II seems most popular. Well it just isn’t so.

The modern western world started its long march in the 1600s with the Renaissance, a European cultural movement, based on the conscious dream of reviving the supposedly superior thinking of classical antiquity.

Associated with great and fairly rapid socital evolution in art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and science, the Renaissance first arose in Florence, then spread to the rest of the Italian states and later throughout Europe.

The Renaissance’s intellectual basis was founded in its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and classical Greek philosophy, taking as its standard Protagoras’ statement that “man is the measure of all things”. And that became the basis of western moral thinking and the standard of western society, and remains so today.

This was seen by intellectuals of the day as the liberation from the hated Christian world as they misunderstood it. That mediaeval western Christian world owed its problems to the papacy and its stranglehold on society and governments which stopped at the borders of the east.

As the Renaissance spread, the powerful western countries: Spain, Britain and France became engulfed in it and all of its associated ideas. The long moral creep away from the Christian based society began and slowly inched forward.

The wars with the Spanish, Napoleonic and German empires and their aftermaths spurred the gathering speed of changes as the memory of a moral based order receded. It became a full scale gallop in the wake of the Second World War through the five decades from 1960.

And so we arrive at today as the post WWII American dictated World Order collapses in not-so slow motion before our eyes and the way forward is far from clear.

The rise of Christian Russia is a nightmare to modern western elites as they well perceive Russia’s open revulsion at the moral turpitude of western society. The oddity (in their eyes) of the relationship between Christian-led Russia and apparently-communist China bewilders them as they scream “evil empire” to each other.

China could be described as a Communist country with a veneer of market economics or is it a capitalist country with a nominally Communist government? Perhaps it is both: ‘state capitalism’ with a framework of Communist party rule. The CPC rules over an economy with very large capitalist companies and billionaires making the country a world leading single-party power. It appears to have no military expansionist ambitions beyond Taiwan, preferring economic expansionist policies. So what do the people of China believe? National surveys conducted during the early 21st century estimated that an estimated 80% of the China’s 1.5 billion population practice some form of religion. Within that, 13–16% of the population are Buddhists, 10% are Taoists; 2.53% are Christians, and 0.83% are Muslims.

Perhaps, with its religions, capitalist companies and individual billionaires and wide property ownership, it is best described as just a well-governed single-party state.

So perhaps the relationship between Christian Russia and Capitalist China is not so odd after all.

Russia has welded together the BRICS alternative order for international trade and relationships, and this too is bewildering for westerners as it undermines the American dollar and their world dominating power.

Russia had around 140 million people and 11% of the world’s land area, America has some 320 million people and a little over half of Russia’s land area. Russia has enormous mineral wealth, largely unexploited, and it has rising exceptional industrial strength made stronger in very recent years.

The new state of the world is going to be multipolar, regardless of American wishes and the transition is going to be painful for American and European elites as they see their immoral and corrupt society challenged by other more moral and less corrupt societies.

There is nothing whatsoever that requires Britain and British society to go down with America. A declaration of independence would be a good starting point right now.