Online ISSN 2286-0266
Print ISSN 1223-0685
© 2026 Œconomica by ASE & SOREC
 
Octavian-Dragomir JORA
Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti
The international rules-based order has long been narrated as a triumph of institutional reason over raw power, a grammar of restraint meant to civilize the conduct of states. Yet, seen more closely, it resembles a provisional syntax rather than a binding law: unequal at birth, elastic in use, and vulnerable to those empowered to speak in its name. As political authority concentrates in executive hands, rules increasingly function less as limits than as verbs – invoked, suspended, or overwritten according to circumstance. Generational shifts, democratic opacity, and the growing appeal of transactional certainty over normative ambiguity further thin the fabric of commitment. In this setting, order persists mainly as language, while practice drifts elsewhere. Executive decisions proliferate, decisive and unencumbered, even as the order they claim to uphold is quietly undone. What remains is a paradoxical scene in which rules are preserved through constant exception, and an order, once proclaimed universal, is not violated so much as carried out, to the point of its own execution.

ŒCONOMICA nr. 2/2025
THE “SUMMARY EXECUTION” OF THE INTERNATIONAL RULES-BASED ORDER BY “EXECUTIVE ORDERS” [“EXECUŢIA SUMARĂ” A ORDINII INTERNAŢIONALE BAZATE PE REGULI PRIN “ORDINE EXECUTIVE”]