In the “rules-based international order” the Biden administration is so fond of invoking, what exactly are the “rules”? Because it’s starting to look more and more like there aren’t any.

Last Friday, police in Ecuador — currently governed by a right-wing, US-backed government — stormed the Mexican embassy in the capital, Quito, to arrest Ecuador’s former vice president Jorge Glas who had been holed up in the building avoiding what he claims are trumped-up charges of corruption. The raid saw police break into the embassy, guns drawn, and repeatedly manhandle and throw to the ground diplomat Roberto Canseco, the highest-ranking official present at the embassy — all in the process of apprehending Glas, who had been formally granted asylum by the Mexican government earlier that day.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) charged that “a government does not do something like that if it doesn’t feel like it has the backing of other governments or powers,” a not-particularly veiled shot at the United States, which has deepened security cooperation with Ecuador since the election of the US-friendly banana fortune heir Daniel Noboa to the presidency last year.