Russia has repeatedly denounced RUBIS, sneeringly describing it as “some kind of ‘rules-based order’… [as] our creative Western friends call it”
HAD YOU HEARD OF RUBIS? I confess I hadn’t until the accident of a media appearance compelled me to listen to the tripartite Downing Street press conference in which Boris Johnson and Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, appeared as a warm-up act for the gorgeous, pouting, perma-coiffed Canadian premier, Justin Trudeau.
Anyway, it turns out that RUBIS was not one of the lustable Justin’s many former girlfriends, but is an acronym for the Rules-Based System of International Relations.
Justin was huskily enthusiastic about rubis, since it was rubis, he claimed, which, ever since the foundation of the United Nations, 75 years ago, had kept the world safe. Until rubis was
