I do not dissent from any of the substance of Prof Hartmann’s article Trump’s Greenland Demands Threaten International Legal Order; but I express my discomfort at the use of the expression “rules-based international order”. That, and similar phrases, have been promoted assiduously by the United States since the end of the Cold War.

On one view, it “may be seen as the United States’ alternative to international law, an order that encapsulates international law as interpreted by the United States to accord with its national interests, a chimera, meaning whatever the US and its followers want it to mean at any given time” (John Dugard SC, “The choice before us: International Law or a rules-based international order?” Leiden Journal of International Law (2023), 36, 223–232). Although the UK government uses the expression regularly it is, I suggest, one which is better avoided – and resisted where it is used.

Yours, with a bee in my bonnet (!)

Alastair N Brown KC (Hon) PhD