BACK IN 1992, when asked how he would deal with Iraqi aggression, Bill Clinton said he would have voted with the congressional majority to authorize a military response, but he remained personally opposed to military action. A decade later, as he prepared to leave the White House, President Clinton signed the U.N. treaty establishing a permanent, International Criminal Court. In his signing statement, Clinton explained that he did not actually approve of the treaty in its current form and urged that it not be ratified by the Senate.
Like other forms of law, treaties have been Clintonized in the last eight years — reduced to PR gestures, which we can always evade through semantic tap-dancing. The new administration should demonstrate its integrity by formally repudiating Clinton’s signing of the ICC treaty and then doing the same for some of the other treaties that Clinton signed without ever submitting to the Senate.
