The International Criminal Court partially vindicated President Trump’s sovereignty-first ideology on Thursday, authorizing a biased investigation of the U.S. military and the CIA’s conduct in Afghanistan.
The first point to note here is that the ICC is a joke, except to terrorists who love it. It takes years to bring anyone to trial, keeps prisoners — some of the worst people on Earth — in hotel-like conditions, then gives them lower-end sentences.
Still, the court’s desire to launch this investigation has been growing for more than two years now, sparked by a left-wing prosecutor who has apparently decided the United States is the source of many of the world’s ills. But now that the investigation is fully authorized, the U.S. government should not sit idle in response to it. The Trump administration should explicitly ban even U.S. government facilitation services to ICC personnel, refuse U.S. visas to its high-ranking officers, and warn that any detention of relevant U.S. persons on ICC warrants will result in outmatched U.S. diplomatic retaliation.
To be clear, this ICC decision perfectly vindicates the Trump administration’s skepticism of international institutions.
This is not to say that all such institutions are bad, of course. NATO is a particularly good example of how positive national interests can be funneled into a common alliance of mutual benefit.
But the ICC isn’t that.
Recognizing as much 20 years ago, President George W. Bush shared Trump’s position. His administration rightly refused to sign up to the Rome Statute providing the ICC with its power. At the time, Bush was ridiculed by his critics for warning of a fictional threat that U.S. military personnel might one day be subjected to an anti-American kangaroo court outside U.S. authority. That would never happen, the critics said.
Well, Bush has now been proven right, and Trump’s skepticism proved righteous.
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it, “This is yet another reminder of what happens when multilateral bodies lack oversight and responsible leadership and become instead a vehicle for political vendettas … The ICC has today stumbled into a sorry affirmation of every denunciation made by its harshest critics over the past three decades.”
Indeed. Let the ICC launch its investigation. And let the U.S. government make it pay for its anti-American idiocy.
