Why has the rule of law become fragile around the world?

The article seeks to understand and explain why the Rule of Law that is seen as the pillar of civilisation is being increasingly circumvented, ignored, and broken, all over the world. It is occurring in the international realm, between sovereign states and within countries, even in Western-style “liberal social” democracies which frequently induce or force other, more authoritarian governments, to abide by what they (the said liberal democracies) define as the global legal order. A difference is made by the author between the classical notions of the international Westphalian system supported by “universal moral values” inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and enshrined in the charter of the United Nations Organization, and the neoliberal supranational “rules-based order”, proclaimed and promoted by the United States and its mostly American and European allies. It is alleged that the rules-based order is used by the Western Alliance as an institutional and ideological mechanism to maintain its predominance over the rest of the world by invoking moral superiority.