Patrick Lawrence: Biden and the ICC: ‘A New Level of Farce’

There are two magical phrases in the world of Joe Biden and his ilk: Orange Man Bad and Putin Bad. Now the International Criminal Court has pronounced the latter. Give it time and it may pronounce the former as well. From Patrick Lawrence at scheerpost.com:

International Criminal Court building (2016) in The Hague. OSeveno, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many things to say about the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges that the Russian president directed the abduction and deportation of thousands of  children from eastern Ukraine in the early months of the intervention that began a year ago. Let us settle on three of these things. 

Straight off the top, the ICC’s action announced on March 17 is ridiculous in any number of ways. Its  legality is questionable at the very least. Its premise appears to bear no relationship with reality; it will have no appreciable effect. It is a political gesture dressed up as law and, as a political gesture dressed up as law, it is sheer propaganda, nothing more. 

If an institution such as the ICC behaves ridiculously in these ways, it is not doing its credibility a great deal of good. To ask what use the ICC serves, despite its elevated purpose when it was founded 25 years ago, seems to be a good question.  

There is a history behind this kind of conduct. This is the second thing to say about what the ICC has just done. If we study this history even briefly, we are likely to be upset, because this history indicates that the many international institutions to which humanity has looked as a source of impartial order for the past 70–odd years do not work as intended. And they were fated not to work as intended so long as the United States insists, as it has since the 1945 victories, on global dominance. This is a case of either/or: We can have a stable world order on the basis of the U.N. Charter or other such instruments of international law, or we can have the American imperium, but we cannot have both. 

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