Joe Biden Is Trashing International Law
This time it’s personal. Netanyahu and Gallant stand accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of last Thursday, neither man can visit any of the 125 nations party to the Rome Statute (including United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany) without serious fear of incarceration and speedy shipping to The Hague. They are marked men, branded as killers for the rest of their lives, confined to countries just as dismissive and offensive to international law as theirs is. These warrants are a monumental event. They prove two things. To lead an alleged democracy does not make you immune from justice. And for the Palestinians, as a people, there is hope yet that their assassins might suffer some punishment.
The warrants also reveal a world tipped sharply on its axis. The Nuremberg precedent, which serves as the foundation of modern international law, has always been thin and precarious—especially after Vietnam, after Iraq. The U.S. acted in the postwar era as if the law was limp, placid, and pliable—a sidearm for the imperial hegemon rather than a gold standard applicable everywhere. But we scoff today to hear Secretary of State Antony Blinken trumpeting a “rules-based international order” precisely because that order has never been so openly insulted. With one side of its face, the U.S. smiles; with the other, it bites. The ICC was praised to high heaven when it indicted Vladimir Putin for his forced transfer of children from Ukraine. “I think,” Blinken said in March last year, “anyone who’s a party to the court and has obligations should fulfill their obligations.” Now, when the ICC applies the same standard toward an “ally,” Joe Biden calls the court “outrageous.”
In one sense, the government of the United States—and its propagandists, like Matthew Miller—doesn’t need to care. It is not a member of the ICC or a signatory to the Rome Treaty. Indeed, the U.S. refused to join the court when it was formed 22 years ago, at the dawn of the “war on terror,” to avoid moments like this. Senator Lindsey Graham admitted as much. The U.S. should, he said, “act forcefully against the ICC.… We cannot let the world believe for a moment that this is a legitimate exercise … because to do so means we could be next” (my emphasis). Meanwhile, the American Service-Members’ Protection Act is still in force, a law that allows the U.S. to use “all means necessary … to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the [ICC].” This law’s nickname is The Hague Invasion Act.
