Global order is dead, claims retired UK general

The old international global order is dead and isn’t coming back anytime soon. If this sounds like it came from a left-wing academic, you’d be wrong. Those are the words of former senior British general Richard Barrons. For some, what he is saying is obvious. But it’s rare to hear a British general — even a retired one — speak so candidly.

Barron’s government biography suggests he would know something about international affairs, having:

served extensively in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan in UN, UK and NATO appointments.

And to be fair his comments are more frank than anything the UK government has produced lately. PM Keir Starmer has flip-flopped around on everything from the 3 January US attack on Venezuela, to Donald Trump’s threat to annex Greenland.

Not so with Barrons. For him the US will now do whatever the US likes under Donald Trump — as long as it has the military capacity it do it. And hand-wringing about the new global order wouldn’t do anybody any good.

It’s not complicated

Barron was on a panel about Venezuela, oil and global order at the establishment thinktank Chatham House. It’s sometimes good to know what the other side is thinking — you can watch the whole event here:

Barrons was asked what he made of US behaviour in the chaotic early weeks of January. He said:

We’ve been wondering for a while what sort of world we were now living in because we understood we were not in the comfortable world of the post-cold war era and what we used to call the rules-based international order.

Barrons said the Trump administration had been consistent from the start. They’d stated their international goals at the Munich conference in 2025 and in their recent National Security Strategy (NSS). On both occasions the US was fiercely dismissive of European allies and the global order.

Barron noted:

they have said and acted in accordance with that. So it seems to me wiser to proceed from the presumption that we now operate in a world where the US is dominated by its own definition of its national self-interest

This US government, he added, would “do what it thinks it can” on the basis that it has “the power to do it”:

And there really aren’t too many other complications around that.

Considering British generals are in the business of imperialism in one way or another, they’d rarely utter the word.

But Barrons didn’t shy away…

Hemispheric imperialism is back

The US is becoming more aggressive in the Americas and the arctic. Barrons said:

we can begin to talk about an era of US hemispheric imperialism where it intends to dominate its hemisphere on terms that it sets, dominated by being by far the greatest military force in this world.

Again this might seem glaringly obvious to lefty politics nerds, but it is not usually what you hear out loud from senior military officers. Barron continued:

that will have profound consequences for the other inhabitants of the hemisphere, not least the population of Venezuela today and maybe elsewhere.

The new US stance will have:

profound implications for other powers that think they may have a hemisphere, China for example, and for Europeans like me…

He said there must be “a recognition”:

that the two lifetimes spent benefiting from security subsidized by the US taxpayer and feeling an important but junior player in some liberal democratic world order… it’s all gone now.

And so we’re going to have to act differently. What I think would be the wrong thing to do would be to think this is an aberration or a blip and we’re going to go back to how we were.

There you have it. Barrons made a career out of wars. But at least he is frank about what we face now. The truth is that being legalistic about Trump, or lamenting the decline of the ‘liberal’ old order, won’t do anyone a damned bit of good now. The question for the rest of us is how do we assert our own power against a US that has unshackled itself from the old rules.

Featured image via the Canary