Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is urging the Trump administration to ignore a new investigation into possible war crimes in Afghanistan, a move that could implicate U.S. soldiers.
Bolton argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. never signed onto the International Criminal Court. That’s why the Trump administration should ignore ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s initiation of a probe into possible Afghanistan war crimes.
“The Trump administration should not respond to Ms. Bensouda in any way that acknowledges the ICC’s legitimacy,” he wrote. “Even merely contesting its jurisdiction risks drawing the U.S. deeper into the quicksand.”
Bolton noted that while Bill Clinton in 2000 signed the Rome Statute that established the ICC, he never sent it to the Senate.
President George W. Bush “unsigned” the treaty before it took effect.
And while the Obama administration wanted to join, it never did.
“Thus the U.S. has never acknowledged the ICC’s jurisdiction, and it should not start now,” Bolton wrote. “America’s long-term security depends on refusing to recognize an iota of legitimacy in this brazen effort to subordinate democratic nations to the unaccountable melding of executive and judicial authority in the ICC.”
Some have written that the pressure will grow on the United States to acknowledge or work with the ICC as it examines Afghanistan.
But Bolton said Trump should borrow a line from Winston Churchill and “strangle the ICC in its cradle.”
“At most, the White House should reply to Ms. Bensouda with a terse note: ‘Dear Madame Prosecutor: You are dead to us. Sincerely, the United States,'” Bolton wrote. “Other countries wanted the ICC; let them live with it.”
