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On 12 June 2025, the White House Website posted a short Statement of Secretary Marco Rubio. It read in full as follows:
“Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
There was a time when it was fashionable to criticize globalization as producing a state of anarchy distasteful to those who argued from this perspective (see, e.g. here "If anarchy constitutes the absence of government, this aspect of globalization might seem to be a move toward a special kind of anarchy ‑‑ what may be called anarchism for the rich and powerful"). The critique was sound within the first principles from out of which it proceeded.
I have suggested that this approach, while compatible with the ruling ideology challenged by globalization's phenomenology through the emergence of COVID in 2020, may miss in part both the nature of anarchy and its presence in constructing the post-global from out of its various critiques and contradictions (The Structural Characteristics of Global Law for the 21st Century: Fracture, Fluidity, Permeability, and Polycentricity). I then noted that emerging structures power/governance could be better understood "as the systematization of anarchy [order without hierarchies of control]. . . [rather than] chaos [the absence of ordering structures/principles and] of the converse of archê [a unifying first principle around which convergence may be ordered], . . . Global law posits a system uncomfortable with first causes and without singular objective, a system grounded in an-‐archê of dispersion and of purpose; “Nothing has any meaning”, the essence of the market." (Ibid., pp. 180-181). It is in this sense that one can now understand anarchy in the way that one understands the internal workings of markets, and the win-win strategies of the U.S. and China--"Here also is rejection of the utility of traditional anarchism that speaks to anarchy as order without power. See. Rather I am suggesting order and power without a controlling superstructure in the state system."
Secretary Rubio's Statement quite nicely provides an illustration of these structuring ideas in action. Its brevity belies the complexities of the description of the essence of the new global ordering grounded, as appropriate for merchant thinking--of a markets driven politics. The United States was aware of the Israeli action; it might have even tacitly indicated that the action did not affect U.S. interests adversely. But it also indicated that the United States saw this as a local matter, one that would have collateral effects--in this case on the U.S. negotiations with Iran on nuclear weapons. In this case two merchants with two distinct market objectives--one regional and national security, and the other more broadly concerned with constellations of weapons arsenals that could, eventually to used to harm their own interests--found a convergence of interests that opened a space for individual action. Partners are not principles; and partnerships do not necessarily suggest control relations. This is a quite distinct approach to that of prior administrations, in which partnership also suggested the sort of closer control of a patron and their clients. Whether or not this can be elaborated to a framework for a working style remains to be seen, but at least its skeleton is now visible in action.
That skeleton is essentially a manifestation of systemic anarchy--but it does not suggest chaos. It is rooted in order but one that emerges upward rather than drips downward. This is precisely the sort of phenomenology of America First that, whether or not the rhetoric of America First survives this Administration, may stay with the Republic for some time to come. States have, indeed, and finally, realized their alignment with markets and market behaviors--in this case the markets for sovereign authority and advantage grounded in the nature of the benefits that each market actor can deliver to its consumers. What has become objectified, and commodified, is the value that a State can deliver--to other States (traditionally), but into and to the masses that consume and internalize the products on offer.
This illustrates, again, the phenomenology of the merchant philosophizing with a hammer (pithy Cf here):
Now, the next test--can these principles be applied to the more troublesome relations between the United States and Ukraine--there the Trump Administration does not practice what its actions elsewhere preach.
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