but a set of agreements that don’t have the power of law.
Rule of law is about having a culture of respect for law as a legitimate product of democratic institutions. If law is only real to you because it’s “real” in the sense of boots, batons and assault rifles, the ‘power’ you are interested in is not the power of law.
It sounds like for you the signature of legitimacy is not the soundness of legal judgments as developed within consensus and consent and principle based deliberation, but their enforceability with weapons. And so I think we probably have diametrically opposite ideas of what renders laws legitimate.