What international order?
International law on the brink of collapse.
This week the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it is seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Gallant, and three Hamas leaders. Just days later the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to immediately halt its invasion and bombardment of Rafah. Israel responded to the ICJ by calling the order “outrageous, morally repugnant and disgusting” and continuing to bomb Rafah and other parts of Gaza. Numerous Israeli politicians also responded to the Criminal Court seeking arrest warrants for their Prime Minister and Minister of Defense in similar fashion. In his own retort to an arrest warrant being sought for him, Netanyahu compared the court to the Nazi tribunal at Nuremberg.
He, and everyone else condemning the ICC, all failed to note that the Court was established in the wake of the Holocaust as part of the effort to stop further genocides. And these politicians from Israel, the U.S., and the UK all refuse to acknowledge that the system of international law is trying to do exactly that in this moment. It is a heavily flawed system, established by the West for the West in many ways, but these international courts are nevertheless struggling forward in an effort to make Never Again a meaningful mandate rather than just a slogan. And, of all the forces trying to impede them right now, the United States stands out as the one nation that both has the power to seriously hamper their efforts and is willing to use it to protect Israel.
The U.S. response has been painfully clear. A raft of politicians from Biden to the Speaker of the House to nearly everyone in Congress have released statements condemning the ICC for rightly seeking to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant. Nearly every condemnation of the court pretends that the body is creating an equivalence between Hamas and Israel in saying that both have violated international law, albeit in different ways. As Biden himself said, “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.” And politicians on both sides of the aisle agree. Lawmakers in both parties are now rushing to pass a bipartisan bill to sanction the International Criminal Court.
Notably, members of Congress are also repeatedly emphasizing the point that the ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States. Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson sent the following out to the world after the news of arrest warrants being sought for two of the war criminals leading Israel:
GOP Senator Lindsey Graham took it a step further, saying that if the ICC is allowed to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders then "we're next." He of course meant this as a warning and a denunciation of the court. But his statement revealed the stark reality of international law, and inadvertently exposed the U.S. role in this system rather than effectively critiquing the system itself. To be precise, Graham managed to point to the fact that the U.S. has committed numerous war crimes in our history, and at the same time imply that the court is going outside its jurisdiction by coming after the wrong sort of war criminals.
None of this is a surprise. When the West established the current system of international law, it wasn’t intended to go after the Allied powers. And that is still the approach taken today in some circles. As the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, recently said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a senior U.S. elected official told him that the ICC “was built for Africa” and for “thugs like Putin” but not Western or Western-backed leaders. Now pressure from the U.S. could derail the court’s process, and cause it to stop short of actually issuing warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The sanctions against the international court that Congress is considering could have “real bite” and be an effective deterrent. In other words, the U.S. might use its power to shield Israel’s leaders from consequences for the genocide they’re perpetrating, again.
The international rules-based order and international law have always been aspirational fictions. While these systems served the West, as evidenced by the ICC primarily going after leaders in the Global South, there was still a hope of something more, of a real international community that worked together to hold despots and perpetrators of the world’s great horrors to account. But then these international courts took their most recent steps. The ICJ has started ruling against Israel, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. And the U.S. responded not by adhering to these rulings, but by blowing up the shared fiction, by blowing up the very idea that we can have real and meaningful international law. It is as it ever was. As long as the U.S. is the most powerful entity on Earth there will be no force greater, no entity able to check this country or its allies. No matter the crime, if it aligns with U.S. interests no law can punish it. Or at least that’s the world the United States aims for.
Yet the U.S. is increasingly isolated in this brazen rebuke of the very premise of international law. Israel, the UK, and some other nations might stand alongside America in destroying this framework, but at this point even Germany, typically an alarmingly staunch ally of the fascist Israeli regime, agreed the arrest warrant would be enforced on its soil. France has also expressed support for the ICC and its “fight against impunity.” Other Western nations agree, and the coalition supporting Israel up to the point of dismantling the system of international law has shrunk considerably. Recent UN votes also clearly reflect this shift, with the latest vote on Palestinian statehood coming out at 143 in favor and 9 opposed.
So we find ourselves on the edge of a new world order, a new international system where the interests of the U.S. do not dominate. We’re not quite there, but the insistence on protecting Israel from any consequences for its genocidal actions is accelerating the arrival of that day. In the process we are getting the breakdown of the shared fiction of international law. That fiction was never what it could be, what we should aim for, which is the real ability to hold war criminals to account and stop rogue nations hellbent on slaughter, but the fact that it is now able to deal powerful symbolic blows to U.S. imperial interests has doomed it to having the reality of its weakness exposed before the world, as the U.S. empire accelerates its own downfall rather than halting the genocide of its junior partner. As expert Trita Parsi says, “When the Biden administration is talking about a 'rules-based order', it is talking about an order in which the US rules; not an order based on rules.” In many ways it appears that this is the order which is now coming to an end. And on the gravestone of this era may well be written “Sacrificed it all to defend a genocide.” Or, at the least, the note will be etched on one of the nails in the coffin.
History shows that all empires will fall, but it's kind of wild to be alive at a time when we have a front row seat to the fall of the US empire.
Governments and laws exist to protect the ruling class. When the rulers step out of line, the protesters against them get arrested.