The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Anyone who has observed the antics of the “International Criminal Court” over the years will note that its modus operandi is to observe international conflicts from the sidelines, then rush in to drag off the loser to face a “justice” whose outcome was already determined on the battlefield.

That is why most of its convictions have been of sub-Saharan African strongmen, whose real crime has been to lose power in a conflict with either an (equally bad) local rival or a (worse) imperial power. Typically, the imperial power helps to deliver the vanquished “defendant”, while never having to face questions about its own motives in his country.

In other words, it is a purely political tool whose utility resides in maintaining a “rules based order” where western politicians make the rules and yet are exempt from them.

The US government knows this. That is why Congress has actually passed legislation dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act”, authorizing the President to physically destroy the institution if it ever attempts to subject serving US military personnel to a “justice” that is intended only for others.

If that prospect sounds extreme, it is no more so than what is likely in store for any country that takes up the ICC’s recent invitation to detain the President of the (nuclear-armed) Russian Federation on some dubious charges relating to the western-engineered proxy war in Ukraine.

It is interesting (though not surprising) that the ICC takes no such action against the many blatant war criminals now enjoying the lucrative lecture circuits of western countries.

Even the wreckage of Libya (destroyed on an even more absurd and dishonest pretext than Iraq) or the misery of Syria (where western destabilization efforts have produced, in turn, a civil war, an Islamic “caliphate” and the world’s worst refugee crisis) did not lead to “warrants” against the complicit western politicians.

But in Ukraine, rather than merely turning the usual blind eye to the west’s serial wars of aggression, the ICC is upping the ante and actually joining this one.

If the calculus is that this “warrant” against Mr. Putin will somehow distract from the west’s imminent military defeat in Ukraine, then the calculators should go back to the drawing board.

This desperate and silly act will simply hasten the inevitable decline of western global influence, by exposing the real purpose of this and other institutions of ‘soft power’, which were once relied upon to dignify western imperial impulses with at least some semblance of global legitimacy.

More ominously, it suggests that some in the west will never accept the limits of their hegemony or the reality of its decline, even when the only obvious alternative is escalation to the unthinkable.

In this respect, today’s ICC is, like NATO, an otiose and harmful anachronism that urgently needs to be put back in the west’s antique closet of world-domination toys – before it triggers a thermonuclear war.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

June 11, 2023