https://thehill.com/opinion/international/502688-international-court-v-trump-a-case-
While he is in a pitched battle with the memoir John Bolton plans to publish next week, President Trump is fully on board with his former national security adviser’s hostility toward the International Criminal Court (ICC).
On Thursday, the president followed through on the longstanding threats by his foreign policy team, issuing new sanctions against the ICC over its provocative effort to investigate and prosecute American military, intelligence, and perhaps even former political officials for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
Bolton was right, during his Trump administration days, to admonish the ICC when it was threatening to conduct this probe. With the tribunal now having pressed ahead, the president is right to both clobber ICC operatives with punitive measures and undermine the court’s dubious legitimacy.
The United States is not a member of the ICC, a creation of the 1998 Rome Treaty. In this, we are no outlier. The court’s universalist pretensions notwithstanding, some 70 countries have declined membership. The non-members, for better or worse, are among the world’s most consequential nations — e.g., China, Russia, India and Israel. Moreover, as Bolton observed in a 2018 speech, non-members represent two-thirds of the world’s population and 70 percent of its national armed forces.
In essence, the ICC is the plaything of the European left, post-sovereign technocrats, and progressive legal elites — one-worlders who won’t provide for their own security and dream up schemes to delegitimize actions that sovereign states, especially the United States, take in their national interests. The ICC is targeting the U.S. during Trump’s presidency in the expectation of support from “woke” America — you don’t find the tribunal tripping over itself to address, say, China’s persecution of the Uyghurs.
