Moreover, rules are important for small states because they provide a shared basis and platform to make common cause, and this ability to harness strength in numbers will be increasingly critical to coordinate interests when great powers begin throwing their weight around.
It is for this reason that even in the face of the brazen exercise of power, the importance of rules in the international system must continue to be emphasised: not as a trope or naive expression of lofty moral ideals, but as principle upon which the interests and existence of small states rests.
